Astoria ... Priceless

It's now been almost a year since I quit working at a regular old 9-5 bullshit job. The last one being 7:15 AM to 5:45 PM, 4 days a week, commuting 25 miles each way, in L.A. On the freeway. Which means your life is run by road rage and sitting in the air-sewage blithely called smog. As an underpaid drone for an international corporation. The 1 year anniversary of my liberation is coming up on December 3.

So here I am in Astoria, having chosen to move here to be a "starving artist." Not that I could get gainfully employed in this town, anyway. I'm way too overqualified, which is the local polite way of saying, "I don't know you, my mother doesn't know you, my neighbors don't know you, we only hire friends and relatives, and you're too damn old, anyway."

Now I don't mean to sound bitter, because I'm not. I knew I probably wouldn't be able to get a job before I got here, and actually experienced the Astoria Employment Debacle personally. I figured that would force me to get creative and start my own business. Which I did.

However, now it's almost winter. The tourists are gone. There is no more Sunday Market. There are no more cruise ships. And there's nobody to peddle my photos to. It's going to be a long, hard, winter.

As much as I dread it financially, it's also liberating. This old Yankee is finally free to enjoy my first fall in 22 years. I am almost giddy from seeing leaves changing, and feeling the nip in the air again after 22 years of arid L.A. no-season desert.

Every time I get worried about money, I just walk out the front door and smell the air. It doesn't smell! I can actually see the sky! It's crisp and invigorating. I look south up the hill and see the colorful leaves, clouds sidling by, and all those incredible Victorian houses outlined so precisely against Astoria's own special light.

I go back inside to the kitchen, and look out the window north, and the rolling vista of Washington across the river. To the west, the Astoria bridge, and perhaps a passing ship. Another hillside, the changing trees there, and more enchanting fairy-tale houses. A view so amazing it still makes me wide-eyed with delight.

Like they (whoever "they" are) say, "Money ain't everything." And living in a place like this is beyond priceless.

Astoria Photografpix

Astoria, autumn, fall, seasons

Lewis & Clark Buffs Get Monsooned

The town is in a tizzy for the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial Events, which are happening all over town, and the whole area, even over to Washington, from today till Sunday. Veteran's Day got lost in the shuffle, but a creative vet had an idea of how to celebrate.

Down at the bottom of 14th Street, there is a little docking area that I wasn't aware of, tucked between some buildings on piers. In this little area I was directed to a rather large fishing-boat tender, which was bustling with activity yesterday morning. The local vets were decorating the boat with red, white, and blue bunting, and signs, and flags. The plan was to take the boat down the river, close to shore, and the vets would be on board waving like mad at anyone on shore.

Thanks to my pal, Bobby Wilson, who spoke to the captain, I got a tour of the boat. What a wonderful rig! It was a challenge to get on board, since it was a good jump down and across, even with a ladder. Being an older vessel, to move from one level to another required vertical ladder-climbing. I have discovered that I am not as limber as I used to be.

I have to comment on the bathroom, which was at the stern of the boat. It looked like it should have been in a little Victorian Bed and Breakfast. One of the men came out and said, "I can't figure out how to flush it!" Since I was next, of course I had to check it out. It's an old wooden gravity tank, above head-level. I am short, and I could just reach the flush lever. It never occurred to him to look up.

One of the vets wanted to bring his dog aboard for the jaunt, and when the dog saw the distance between the dock and the boat, his eyes got luminous and bulged like one of those toys you squeeze to make the eyes pop. The dog was grabbed at the boat end by his master, and the dock end by his mistress, and made a clean, but terrified, landing.

Of course, as soon as the boat was about to get under way, the skies over Astoria provided the required fall drizzle, and the fog dropped like a curtain. Nevertheless, the cruise was off and running, and they had a grand time. It's just too bad they didn't have any publicity, so there weren't many people around to wave at them. Oh, the local newspaper showed up, all right, but only on the morning the boat was going out, so the article and photos were after the fact.

Veterans Cruising Photos

Meanwhile, my partner, B, was over in Hammond with our pal Teresa, helping to set up sound equipment for a big Lewis & Clark event today involving the governors of OR and WA and local Indian tribes. The rain poured by the barrel for the set-up. The organizers of the event apparently thought the people attending today should experience Lewis & Clark weather. No tent. Chairs out in the open. In monsoon season. Interesting concept.

I went out to Hammond and retrieved them in their sogginess, delivered Teresa to her place, and B to ours, and went out to deliver flyers. In the rain. The event I was vending at last weekend clearly didn't have enough publicity, and I didn't trust them to deliver on publicity this Saturday, either, so I took matters into my own hands, made up flyers for tomorrow's bazaar, and schlepped to all the hotels on the west end of town.

While schlepping, on my very last stop, as I headed back to the car, I heard fife and drum music. I really thought my brain had gotten too damp. Fife and drum corps music is a very Yankee thing, and it cuts to the heart. I got into my car, and opened the windows. Yup, I was still hearing it. I whipped around the corner, and followed the sound. Surer than hell, there was a little fife & drum corps smack in the middle of 12th Street in front of the Hotel Elliott.

I parked the car, and ran like hell back to 12th street to see them. It was a group of about 8 kids, decked out in what looked like British 19th Century military uniforms, and they were fifing and drumming their hearts out ... with all the correct moves and miltary bearing. What a sight!

When they did their beautifully executed about-face and marched off around the corner, I followed them, lurking till they disbanded. I approached the oldest of the group, and asked them where they were from. St. Charles, Missouri! They've been playing so much in the last few weeks as part of the Lewis & Clark event, he had to think about where they were at the moment. It was a pleasure to hear them. i just wish Astoria had its very own fife & drum corps, but seeing and hearing them made me damn near giddy with nostalgia.

I trundled home to pick up a now de-sogged B, and we retired to the Golden Star for much-needed beer and sympathy from the outrageous Jennifer, bartender to the monsoon'ed. Life is good.

Astoria Photografpix

Astoria, Astoria weather, Lewis & Clark, bicentennial, veterans

Of Mud and Mops

What to do? What to do? It was suddenly and inexplicably sunny outside today, and this is Astoria, and hell, it's supposed to be raining cats, dogs, teaspoons and muffins 24/7 sideways, upways, and anyway it can, with the occasional accompanying bellowing winds that shake your house and rattle your teeth.

I kept looking out the window and thinking I was imagining things ... it's not really sunny, is it? ... and searching out over the grand Astoria Bridge for clouds coming in off the Pacific. Which is a ridiculous theory on my part, since storms here can come from anywhere, sometimes seeming to materialize from merely a thought or a whisper, in the flick of a whisker.

I was so paranoid about the nice weather, in fact, I couldn't make myself take the doggies for a walk. Took them for a nice cavort yesterday, and everything was just delightful, then on the way home it started raining out of nowhere. Magical rain someone summoned up, it seemed.

So today, I kept going outside, eyeing the sky in every direction thinkable for clouds or imminent monsoons, and could see nothing but blue skies, so I literally didn't believe my eyes. The restless doggies didn't get their sniff-and-piss stroll, and were confined to mincing on the now-slippery dog-run perched on the mudslide, slogging through the area within the posts and piers under the house, and rat-patrol in the basement.

It's not like I am afraid of the rain or anything silly like that, it's just that bringing home wet, muddy, soggy dogs is not one of the finer experiences in life. I don't have a mud room, where we could drop off all the soggies and towel down. Oh hell no. I open the front door, and they gallop in, shaking off water and splattering mud, until the entire first floor of the house is wet and mud-soaked, and smelling like a doggie salt marsh at low tide.

My pal Margot, when she was visiting, commented that I may well have the cleanest floors in this galaxy or any other, since she rarely saw me without a mop in my hands. Personally, I have come to believe that carrying a mop is an Astoria fashion statement.

Astoria Photografpix

Astoria, Astoria weather, mud, mop

Pier 11

Now begins the Christmas bazaar vending season. On the good side ... no enormous tent to lug around and set up, as all of the events are now indoors. On the bad side ... nobody wants to come out and buy because the weather is verging on atrocious.

One of the local restaurants, Pier 11, that also has a little mini-mall attached, decided to try a holiday bazaar vending event. Bravery kudos to them for trying it, and it was a bold move, as there is a total dearth of that sort of event for vendors in Astoria during the off-season.

The Pier 11 mall is a small, but lovely place. It was an old feed-store at one time, and it really is out on a pier. There is a restaurant/bar on the river side, and both have lots of big windows overlooking the river. On the shore side, there is the little mall, all wonderful wood, with some shops along one side. Down the center of the mall is a nice walkway, with the original wide wooden planking, and that's where we vendors set up shop.

It was so gray outside it was like dusk at 10 AM. And it was raining sideways, as usual for this time of year. The weather service had issued warnings for floods and high winds, and told people to not drive if they didn't have to. Just what we needed to coax people out of their houses, right? So there we vendors were, in a very nice and cozy little venue, with customers who were hiding in their houses.

Eventually, the call of nicotine drove me outside. I walked up and down the covered (fortunately) deck that runs along the west side of the building while I smoked. Gannetts were flying out of the water, their long necks straining against the wind. Some of my ashes flew into some poor hapless spider's web, and I hope for the spider's sake that's not the only snack in there. The sea lions were barking and grunting under the pilings of a fish processing plant two piers over, and the wind-driven echoes produced the acoustical effect of a sea lion opera house.

The mist and the fog were so thick that the WA mountains across the river were totally invisible, and the huge Astoria bridge disappeared in a wisp somewhere in the middle of the river. The river itself had swells running on it, like the sea, and the gulls were dancing on the gusts.

Wound up not making much money, especially after I bought a wild elk-antler thing from another vendor, but hell, it was fun anyway.

Astoria Photografpix

Astoria, Pier 11, Craft Show, Christmas

Stuart Not-So-Little

Back to the weather. The weather is amazing in Astoria. In New England, where I was brought up, weather is a very big deal. In L.A., there is no weather. Weathermen/ladies are just news-fillers when there aren't enough brutal murders to keep the general population quivering in their boots ... vacuous talking heads declaring doom in shrill voices because there's a 10% chance of rain. It's good to be back in real weather again.

In my email this morning there were about five weather alerts for high winds and flood watches. I looked out the kitchen window, and it must have been between monsoons, because nothing was happening.

This afternoon, while matting a truck-load of prints in front of the kitchen window, it was a weather side-show. It got black, and it poured sideways. Then the wind kicked up, and the huge tree in the neighbor's yard was doing the mambo. Everything stopped. The sun came out, and I could see all the way across the river. Clouds started rolling down the river, and you could actually see the rain-line obscure the hills across the way as the storm moved east. Then, inexplicably, it started to hail pea-sized pellets for about five minutes. The sun came out again, another monsoon with wind blew in and shook the back of the house, then more hail. All in a period of about 2 1/2 hours.

Fabulous show, but unfortunately, the area rats decided that my basement was a good place to wait it all out. One side of the house is still old cardboardy stuff that the Victorians put up when the house was built, which I haven't had the chance to replace yet. Of course, it is full of holes, so the rats come scampering in. They won't come upstairs because I have cats, and I don't hear them in the walls, but they are paryting hearty in the basement.

They are truly brazen little buggers. When I went down to get some canned goods this afternoon, three of them were having a tea party on the bottom cellar stair. They scooted off when I started down, and the coast seemed clear when I got to the shelves that hold the canned goods. I reached in for a can, and could see a slight movement just to the left of my hand. It was a rat, hanging his head over from the shelf above, looking at me upside down, twitching his whiskers at me. Actually, he was rather cute for a rat, a rather larger version of Stuart Little. I know, I know Stuart Little was a mouse. So a rat could be Stuart-Not-So-Little, perhaps.

So I read up on how to get rid of rats without leaving a wake of furry mangled bodies, and the old cure is apparently cotton balls soaked in peppermint oil placed strategically everywhere they come in, and everywhere they like to hang out. Now the trick is to find some peppermint oil out here at the edge of the earth. And it has to be the oil, not the extract, because apparently the extract makes them drunk. Just what I need, a basement full of drunken rats, cavorting in the canned goods.

My large dog is having a grand time with the rats, and he would be very disappointed if I actually manage to send them on their way. He loves to go lunging down into the basement and be a fearless rat-hunter, leaving a trail of squeaks behind him. He would not know what to do with a rat if he actually caught one, but to him, the fun is all in the chase. This is the same dog who is terrified of wind, hail, or any weather (he was brought up in L.A.). So when he gets anxious, I just send him to the cellar to go on rat-patrol.

The weather is quiet at the moment, and so is the dog, who is snoozing between anxiety attacks and rat-chases. So I will take this opportunity to sneak off to bed early before the weather changes again.

Astoria Photografpix

Astoria, Astoria weather, rats, rats in basement, peppermint oil

Slippery Slopes

This is the story of Slopes (as in Slippery), a shining beacon to the artisty of con. Slopes is also appropriate because it rhymes with Snopes, the family of Faulkner novel/short story name, who were infamous for their greed and lack of scruples.

I was visiting the house before moving up this last January, and hired him on a referral to fix my back yard, which is a mass of mud that is sloped at a 45 degree angle. He had all sorts of grand plans to shore it up, make it terraced, add little waterfalls to divert the underground streams that flow through it, and build a dog run for the doggies. It all sounded just lovely, and there were little diagrams, and official-looking estimates, etc. I gave him a deposit and went back to L.A. trying to be hopeful.

Then the bills started rolling in. Crashing in, actually. Exorbitant bills for labor, and sweat-inducing bills from local hardware and supply stores. I asked for photos of the progress, and got lovely emails back showing photos of parts and pipes. I asked him to be a little more forthcoming with the photos, and oh, no, he couldn't do that, it's a surprise. It was a surprise, all right, one of many. And by the time I arrived after the moving-drive up from L.A., I was in no mood for surprises.

The day we were leaving L.A., at noon, the guys who were helping us move told me that the trucks were full. By 1 PM I said, "I don't care what's left, we are LEAVING." There were expletives in that sentence, and I will leave them to your imagination. Be creative, there were a lot of them.

My pal, whom I'll call Mimi, drove the 15' truck. B, my partner, drove the 25' truck, with 1 cat in the cab. I drove my SUV with 5 cats and anything else that could fit into it. I had a cell phone and a walkie talkie. B had a walkie talkie, and Mimi had a cell phone. So I was at the end of the caravan, and the designated communications director.

The first day was fairly uneventful. The cats stopped squawling after a couple of hours, B went off onto a wrong freeway and we had to wait for him to discover he was lost and come back, and I handled the squabbling between Mimi and B fairly well. One would call me to complain about the other, and expect me to relay the message. By the end of the trip, I had both the cell phone and the walkie talkie turned off except when I had something to say, but that's another story.

We made it north of Sacramento on the first day, but on the morning of the second day, got turned back at the Siskiyou Pass. We had to backtrack 2 1/2 hours, cut over to the 101, and go the rest of the way north on the 101. In the winter. Rain, sleet, snow, ice, fog, mist, slush, 6 pissed off cats, and B and Mimi screaming at me to scream at each other.

By the time we reached Astoria at 9 PM on the third day of the drive, we were all homicidal. And there was Slippery Slopes, out in front to greet us. The front yard looked great, even at night. It was the only thing that looked great.

He was supposed to paint the floors an umber sort of color. I opened the door, and the floors were flourescent salmon. Salmon??? I am so glad it was dark so I couldn't see the back yard that night.

In the morning, I really almost had an old-fashioned dropsy attack. Break out the smelling salts, Bertha, she's going to hit the deck. The back yard was full of garbage! I mean real garbage ... rotting hay, bags of festering fast food, rotting trees, twisted wire, loose pipes, bottles, cans, discarded scraps of wood, and many completely unidentifiable objects in varying states of decomposition. The so-called dog run was a maze of rotten plywood of assorted sizes, and simply boggled the imagination. THIS was where all that money for labor and materials went? A 45 degree angle VERY EXPENSIVE garbage dump?

Meanwhile, Slippery Slopes was backing and filling, and spewing forth enough absolute bullshit to overcome even the mighty pipes of the Manhattan sewer system. He would fix it! He would complete the work! He would make it right!

Well, the man with a mission got caught on a mission, and off to jail he went before he could get anything done. Not that he was really going to do anything other than talk a lot more, anyway. Then he got out. More promises. Then he went into rehab. Then he got arrested again. There were even more serious charges, involving minors. Oh well, the upshot of it all is that he is in prison. Society, and my back yard, are safe in the interim, I trust.

Ah, the first letters from prison were replete with pleas for forgiveness, and exclamations on how he found God, and he is saved. I often wonder if prisons have boiler-plate letters available to the inmates so they can fill in the blanks and send, since they all sound so alike. The second letter, after all the nicey-nicey stuff contained a plea for some papers related to the job he did in my back yard. He wants to impress the prison officials that he was truly a gainfully employed member of society with the invoices he wrote out for me.

Well, I didn't answer the first two missives, after all, he swindles me and I should help him con the prison board by sending him the very invoices he swindled me with? Oh please, grow a brain. Then along came the third letter. No more pleas for forgiveness, no calling on God to save his scrawny ass, nope none of that. This one was a demand for the paperwork, threatening me with a subpoena if I don't comply. Interesting.

No, I'm not complying. And I've written my comments all over the originals of the invoices so if they do subpoena them, they will do him more harm than good. It's hard to imagine the wreckage he has caused in the lives of those around him throughout his life, as he has no conscience whatsoever.

And that's the end of the story of Slippery Slopes, the Snopsian sociopath. For now, anyway.

Astoria Photografpix

Astoria, con artist, fraud

Halloween Ain't Happening Here

Halloween is a total bust in Astoria. I had enough candy to feed a squadron of rug-rats, and I will become diabetic once I finish it all off.

I was napping around 5:30 when the doorbell rang for the first time. I had been up all night the night before with my large oaf of a dog, who has decided he is afraid of high winds. 120 lbs. of quivering cowardice. After I went upstairs to bed the night before Halloween, he jumped the gate at the bottom of the stairs, and charged upstairs several times to pant and scratch at the bedroom door. I finally had to go downstairs and sleep on the couch to keep him company. But despite all my efforts, he paced frantically around the couch, which sounded like a buffalo stampede on the wood floors, and slurped me every third turn around the couch to make sure I was really there. I dosed him with doggie tranquilizers around 2 AM, which reduced him from pacing, to walking, in circles, and a slobbering every 5th tour around the couch. I had to get up at 6 AM to give my partner a ride, so by afternoon, I was semi-conscious.

Anyway, when the doorbell rang at 5:30, I suddenly realized that I didn't have the candy ready. I yelled, "Hold on!" and frantically ran to the kitchen to pour some candy into a bowl, tripping over the waddling cocker spaniel, who couldn't decide if he should be barking at the front door or seeing if I was heading for food, and was all over the place under my feet. Couldn't find the damn scissors, so I ripped open the candy bag with my teeth, and galloped to the front door ... only to find my partner there, who had forgotten his keys, and needed an umbrella more than candy.

Once he got inside, I went back to my "collapse chair" and left him to handle the trick-or-treaters. All three of them.

In L.A., Halloween is a very big deal. I decorated my windows with all sorts of nauseating and grisly little tableaus weeks beforehand, packed in the goodies, and waited for the onslaught. A slow Halloween would produce about 100 trick-or-treaters, but last year I had close to 200.

Last year was strange, anyway. My grandbaby was born at 5AM last Halloween morning, so by the time dusk arrived, I was somewhere between giddy and demented. A few of my pals came over, and we sat out on the porch with our drinks and mammoth piles of candy to greet the little buggers. The festivities actually went fairly well except when my girlfriend's boyfriend mixed her drink with lamp oil instead of water. We won't get into how that happened, because even I don't really understand it, but it made for an interesting evening.

Anyway, Halloween in Astoria is not very exciting. To my total dismay.

Astoria Photografpix

Astoria, Halloween, trick or treat