Today my current first husband and I can legally drink. We’ve been married 21 years.
We can’t legally drink and celebrate together because I’m spending our special day with my mom. But it’s not the special days that make a marriage special. It’s the everyday little things. Like laughing and teasing. Like coffee together in the [...]
What makes your head so red?
Tell me, what makes your head so red?
I been workin’ so long in the hot hot sun,
it’s a wonder that I ain’t dead.
My father used to sing that sometimes, sleeves rolled up, shirt open at the collar, head tilted back for the high notes. Just a snatch of a song, [...]
Here in the Art Scatter sauna we wouldn’t stoop to wearing a muu muu, but we have fantasized about it.
Are we the only ones to pitch all decorum in this stifling heat? One of the large smelly boys* walks around in boxer shorts and the cat sleeps on the dining table.
I know. Gross. But I [...]
The temperature on the surface of old Sol, often referred to as “the sun,” is 5,510 degrees Celsius.
The temperature in Portland, Oregon, United States of America, western and northern hemispheres, planet Earth, is 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
Close enough.
Art Scatter gives up.
If something eventually gives, we will emerge from the basement.
Until then, we are OUT OF ORDER.
Our [...]
One day in 1978 a shadow fell over my desk at the old Oregon Journal in downtown Portland. I looked up and there stood a giant of a mountain man, beard down to his chest, big grin peeking though from the bramble of hair, hand outstretched in greeting.
Joe Meek, maybe. Jedediah Smith. Liver-Eating Johnson. Jim [...]
The worst thing about Writer Brain is that it’s silent but deadly.
It wildly carries on in my head without anyone knowing it and then embarrassingly erupts at odd moments when I least expect it. The real problem? It’s not always quiet.
“I’m sorry,” I’ll murmur. But it’s too late. It’s out. And everyone heard it.
This happened [...]
TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLET GAME: Remember the flap over Memorial Coliseum? Tear it down? Fix it up? Turn it into the doorway to a suburban-style, cookie-cutter entertainment and shopping complex? Build a minor-league baseball park in its place, with a concession stand serving grilled architects on a bun?
Niel DePonte has another idea, and [...]
First, on a day like today, there’s the walk. Just four breezy blocks beneath a cat-stretch sun and here’s our neighborhood coffee shop — Caffe Destino, where Ralph the Owner has been known to laugh and accuse Mrs. Scatter and me, as we’ve sat facing each other tapping away on dueling laptops, of playing Battleship.
No [...]
Funny how inspiration can be found in the form of dead crabs.
While walking along the beach I found one crab shell after another and imagined stacking them up in a glass jar. I imagined crab shells all the same size stacked one atop the other, up up up, and enclosed in clear glass. So many. [...]
I’m reluctant to write this.
But I’ve been fingered by Mighty Toy Cannon, one of my favorite blogforthers (sorry, I have others, too, though I don’t have so many that on ethical grounds I would be obligated to disclose them to my primary care doctor). The jig’s up. MTC said in a recent comment that he [...]