it’s wednesday. can you believe this shit.
we’re a day “late” this week because once again i was spending my weekend goofing off and having fun in the vast expanses of eastern oregon rather than thinking about, preparing for, composing, or otherwise engaging with this little newsletter project.
there were hot springs to sit in, mountains to look at, playlists to compare, conversations to have, dust to kick up. stars to marvel at and constellations to discover. little pyramids of empty beer cans to shoot with a slingshot.
i was busy.
but now here we are again, and since i have already made a trek out to the desert this year and written about it, we can engage in some fun parallelism between this edition and that previous trip. parallelism? is that a word? there are no red squiggles underneath it. what if you had those little red squiggles for your life? that’s kind of interesting to think about, in kind of a boring way. conversation veers into dicey territory, red squiggle. looking out across a crowded bar on a weekend night at a sea of potential romantic partners and making note of the red squiggles. checking in on your vegetable drawer and making note of which bundles of greens were squiggle free. and so forth and so on.
let’s get into it.
1. painting
you come down onto the alvord desert from the west or northwest: up over one last saddle then down a gravel road, then down a smaller dirt road, through the last of the scrub brush and then out onto the flats. the back side of the steens are rearing up behind you. ahead of you, out on the eastern side, way across, maybe five or six miles away, there’s another line of ridges. i don’t know what they’re called and i don’t know how to get that information either. but as the sun falls away west behind the steens they light up red and orange and purple and you can stand there with your bare feet holding you up off the powdery parched flat of the desert and take it in.
there is an actual notch there, in more or less this shape. there are roads over there somewhere, i know, and i wonder if any of them make use of this dip in the topography. i don’t yet know.
laying in the base colors. the desert is actually a much darker tone than you might guess, at this time of night.
blocking in the ridge shapes, and the farther ridge beyond, through the gap
now we’re getting somewhere. some very subtle tonal and value changes on those ridges start to suggest rock shapes. out there, the rimrock edges of those plateaus drop near straight down for twenty, thirty feet before easing into more of a sloping base.
there were more people out there this time around than i have ever seen out there before. still maybe only six or eight other vehicles out there on the playa (that’s what it’s called, it’s not a burning man thing) but the vibes of some of them and the proliferation of the camper van in that part of the state does have me feeling a little nervous that the playa may begin to resemble burning man in more ways than just the name. oh well. tech comes for us all.
the tracks add a sense of scale and perspective to the big flat desert racing away in front of us toward those distant ridges. as usual, the last step is to do some glazing with various tones. scroll up to check that out.
2. poem
“boat poem” - fall 2021
down at the dock again
waving out across the water with my hat in my hand like a flag,
so you can see it longer, if you’re looking
we left half a picnic lunch in the back seat of my car
i know the roads go there too but for me
there’s something about notching the timbers together
on this little boat;sanding and staining and maybe one day putting down my paintbrush for the last time and dragging it down to the water and pushing it out
and rowing across —
maybe you’ll still be there by then
3. a nice sandwich II
looking back at the original nice sandwich (it’s the same link as before, if you still have it open) i have to say this one does not really measure up quite the same. i guess i don’t have to say that but, i am saying it. the mustard is worse. the cheese, also worse. did they stop making the miyokos pepper jack cheese in the intervening 5 months? i can’t find it anywhere. the crown jewel of the miyokos, uh, treasury. gone, just like that.
but when you’re going on a bit of a road trip and you can bring a cooler with you in which to put some sandwich components that would prefer to stay cool or slightly cold during the journey, it’s nice to be able to stop somewhere and make a sandwich while glancing up occasionally at a stunning vista. and then putting your components back in the cooler and wiping off your camping knife and wrapping your bread back up and turning around to sit on your bumper and fully drinking the vista in while you enjoy eating the sandwich.
like last time, we have bread (rolls are easier in my opinion), vegan cheese (worse), vegan mayo, mustard (also worse), vegan deli slices, lettuce, and red onion.
it didn’t hit me until right this very moment how funny it is to tell you all how to make a sandwich
were you surprised that this is the next step? where do your onions go in the hierarchy?
if you do the meat in little rolls it’s more fun
this cheese is so boring. it sucks. i wish i could have found the miyoko’s pepper jack. i looked in two different grocery stores.
lettuce goes on last and then you fold ‘er up. and boom. you have a nice sandwich.
on both of the trips this year the place i stopped to eat this sandwich was right where the south end of the steens mountain loop joins up with the main road again. there’s a little covered informational sign there letting you know what kind of animals you can expect to see, and asking you to be respectful of various segments of private property up there. there shouldn’t be private property up there, in my opinion. doesn’t seem right having a mountain range be sectioned off like that. what do they need those slopes for.
but that’s how it is.
4. a four day weekend
i just want to go places in my car. i want to take friday off and tell people i might be back monday afternoon but have us all understand, everyone involved in the conversation, that they will not be seeing me until nine thirty AM on tuesday morning. i want to come in on tuesday morning and answer a few questions about work and a few questions about my weekend, and then get some lunch, and then answer a few more questions about work, and then think about where i will be going on friday.
i want to get in my little car and hit the road bright and early on friday morning, or at eight AM, or at eight thirty AM, and i want to stop after three blocks and park and get an iced coffee at the neighborhood coffee shop and look in the pastry case and get a little brick of zucchini bread.
i want to hit the road, as they say; i want to light out for the territories, as they say. i want to get in my car and plug in my phone and put on my podcast, or i want to get in my car and sit next to a cute girl in the passenger seat and plug in my phone and put on my music and make a little joke about men and their podcasts. i want to see her head turn a little towards me out of the corner of my eye and hear her snort a reluctant laugh into the lid of her coffee cup just as she was bringing it up to sip on.
i just want to go sixty, seventy, seventy five miles per hour out into the morning, up over a hill, around a big corner, and out over across. i want to stop at a little store and throw away my first cup of coffee and get a second, worse cup of coffee and take a picture of a funny sign and save it on my phone and remember to post it onto twitter when the little indicator on my phone flips from “No Service” in helvetica to “LTE” in uppercase helvetica. and when it’s lunch time i want to stop at burger king and get the number three meal large with a diet coke which is an impossible whopper and a cardboard pocket of french fries and a thing of diet coke that varies in size so often i think they just choose it randomly even if i say “large” every time.
on friday night i just want to pull off of something onto a gravel road. on saturday morning i just want to hear another camper puttering around somewhere through the trees, somewhere close but not too close. my friend has a tent on the roof of her car that pops up and is more comfortable than any other tent i’ve ever stayed in and now i think about it a lot too. and on monday morning all i want is to spread a little layer of peanut butter onto a cold crumbly english muffin and chomp into it and brush the crumbs off onto the picnic table for the raccoons to eat, politely, after i’ve finished rolling up my tent, and to look at the time on my airplane mode phone and realize comfortably that i am not willing to drive back to town at the speeds that would be required in order to make it back to work before the day is over. to have confirmed what we all suspected, in that conversation on probably a wednesday or thursday: that i am not willing to hurry back at speeds that would preclude me from pulling off the road to take a picture of something beautiful or funny, or to get one more iced americano, or to sit and read one chapter of a book while eating a sandwich.
i just want to show up to work on tuesday wednesday thursday and answer emails and answer the phone three times and solve some problems and put some other problems in my pile for problems to be solved later, and i want to send a little note to my favorite co workers via the company messaging platform on thursday at five pm saying “alright see you all tuesday, i’m out for the weekend” and leave the company messaging platform app open long enough for one or two or three of them to say “see ya” or add a thumbs up emoji reaction to my message. and then i want to shut down my work computer and head home and make sure all my things are enough in bags that i can finish rounding them up at eight or eight thirty on friday morning and hit the road.
and every month i want my bank account to update with the monetary equivalent of a little letter saying “we appreciate all your hard work on tuesdays wednesdays and thursdays and we are delighted to support all your friday through monday activities.”
i do like to be in my shower, in my bed, on my couch, in my little coffee shops, in my grocery stores. i like drawing houses and answering questions about houses and seeing houses i’ve drawn grow up out of the ground slowly then very fast. and i like riding my bike around and pointing at things and drinking one too many cups of coffee and one too many cocktails.
but mostly i just want to be in my car.
well, that’s it for this week. i would say i’m sorry for the delay but i’m not. in fact i think you all handled it very well. have a good rest of your week. see ya next tuesday. bye.