Grossly Misinterpreted the Most Sanctified Rules

Sun 6-29 3:05 PM
My bullshit quota is maxed out. Shirelle and I are cruising south on I-5 to a BBQ at my mom's. My mom said to bring a fruit salad and some beer. We don't have any beer, but there are three cases worth of cucumber and spinach salad in the trunk. We were at Bob's. I bought Shirelle breakfast. She at almost half. I was reading about the Tyson/Holyfield ear-biting incident. She was pissing to leave. I gave her the keys, said there was money on my desk, and I would walk home. Four hours later she still wasn't ready. Had to feed her goldfish. I tried to help her speed up the proceedings; she was peeling the cucumbers so that they had stripes down the sides. I started doing it for her. "You're doing it wrong," she bitched. "The stripes are too wide."
"Who's gonna give a fuck?" I asked.
"It's a DISH!" she exclaimed, as if I had just grossly misinterpreted the most sanctified of Martha Stewart's rules for peeling cucumber.
I'm not mean.

Alaska Airlines

June 27 3:10 PM F
Alaska Airlines flight 512. Bound for Portland, then Los Angeles, but still on the ground in Spokane. The plane is full of beautiful young women, and I'm trapped between fifty-year-old, management-level insurance geeks who just discovered they already know each other over the phone. My daddy showed me around Spokane. Pretty town. We took some pictures of Spokane Falls with the Washington Power building above. We're taxiing up the runway now. Shirelle's going to pick me up. I'm looking forward to seeing her. Insurance guys are talking about go-getters and guys they wanted to get rid of during the cutbacks in the eighties. I feel like I've done this before, flown out of a pine-tree-lined runway--I remember: Bangor, Maine, when I was fifteen, customs, coming back from a sulky Europe trip. We're picking up speed now. Pulls the stomach. The nose is up. We're off! God bless us all. Hot wheels on the ground. Model train valley. Shadows of the clouds. Green as far as the eye can see. Clouds below. Puddles abound. Defies God. Nuns aboard--stern young lady. Flight! Still going up. Patchwork crop quilt. No cocktails until after we take off from Portland. My fingers hurt. Twenty-eight thousand feet. The Columbia River. The wrinkled flood plain. Far-away shriek of child over airplane noise. Mt. St. Helens shoulders snow above the clouds. Diving back down through the clouds, white-blind beside Mt. Hood. Wish I had film. We're on the ground. Landed alongside the Columbia. The insurance man is a deerhunter/fisherman--"thins herds". What else? He won't shut up. Nothing to think about but every story the insurance man has got. Ugh. Shall I shroom tonight? I've got to call G-ma and G-pa, Chronos, buy Ball gift. Grand Cyn to pack for. Got to crap in the lavatory. Thank God the insurance geeks are bailing out in Portland. Seat a honey here.

Gunfights to Decide

6-26 11:10 PM Th
We drove in the red Jeep out Highway 90 to Montana this afternoon. We passed a lot of old mines and mining towns. My father had me get out of the car in Wallace so my step mother could take my picture in front of the bordello that the FBI closed down in 1987. We passed Catalon Mission on the Couer d'Alene River which is polluted a supernatural blue by the heavy metal residue of a hundred years of silver mining. We passed the Sunshine Mine where eighty-nine men died in 1981. We drove up a road where there were seven or eight towns within the same mile or two: Gem, Yellow Dog, Bearclaw, etc.. They used to have gunfights to decide who ran which town. In some places, it's one town on one side of the street and another town tother side. Some towns were just six houses. They were mostly crumbling.
We saw my grandparents for a few minutes. They're going to come to Spokane to see me off. We ate at Doc and Crockett's. We watched the Dodgers and the Padres. My dad badmouthed my grandpa. He badmouthed everything but White America. Northern White America. We watched "Grumpier Old Men". The sores on my hands are oozing pus. You can see Mars and Venus and Jupiter tonight. Tomorrow I can see Shirelle! I hope she doesn't have any trouble picking me up at the LAX.
We'e going to fish a few hours in the morning. Then we'll refund my Amtrak ticket. We'll lunch in Spokane and check out Spokane Falls. I haven't done my fifteen minutes or one page since I've been here. Everything--EVERYTHING--is on his terms and his terms only. What else? Jan made cream puffs. Steve's band, Ol' Peculier, plays the Roxy tomorrow night. There's a plush toy raccoon on a little rocking chair in the corner of this room. There's a stuffed man laying the bed writing. My and and grandfather have diabetes. I'll go downstairs and put some hydrogen peroxide on my wounds. Then it'll be lights out.

Then I Did It Again for a Picture

6-25- 10:40 PM W
I fucked up my hands today. We were fishing at Hayden Lake. I wasn't getting any bites. I saw a tree with a rope hanging off a branch over the lake. I stripped to my undershorts and climbed the tree. I grabbed the rope and yelled out to my dad who was fishing a hundred yards away, and I leapt from the tree expecting to swing like Tarzan over the lake and dive in from mid-air, but all I did was slide down the rope and peel all the skin off my hands. Then I did it again for a picture. Both hands are bloodied and blistered. We also didn't catch any fish. Nor at Fernan Lake. I did catch a blue gill at Kelso lake. We shared the dock with a woman and her daughter who talked incessantly. The woman said, "You can put Southern California in a jar and throw it away." We ate lunch at a place called The Sand Trap. For dinner, my dad BBQed a tri-tip steak, and we ate in the backyard and watched the golfers. We went for a walk around the golf course and picked up lost balls. We watched the Dodgers and the Rockies on TV. Then I went to bed. I was too tired to write more than a couple lines. Now, my dad is mowing the lawn. My stepmother is doing the laundry. Tomorrow we'll go to Spokane around lunch, and I'll fly home. Maybe I'll go to that microbrewery my dad was talking about tonight. I'll call Shirelle today. I read the Spokane/Couer d'Alene Spokesman Review. Jacques Cousteau died. The Mir space station was damaged in an accident. A group calling themselves the Constitution Rangers has bowed to bring justice to federal agents who exceed their authority. They're based right here in Hayden. What else? Variable cloudiness today. We may go an a car tour, or we may golf. My dad complains about my grandfather all the time: My grandpa answers the door with a gun behind his back. He won't go anywhere. Blah blah. I would be in Portland today walking around, having breakfast somewhere if I'd stayed with my train ticket. Instead, I fly home Alaska Airlines tomorrow at 3:30.

The Houses Are Covered in Vinyl

June 24 Tu 10 PM
Sitting on my grandparents' couch. We're watching TV. I should be out absorbing the Idaho nightlife. It could be the most boring place in the country. We drove around to look at houses on Avondale Lake, Hayden Lake, Fernal Lake, and Couer d'Alene Lake. Not because anyone wants to buy a house; just to drive by and look at them. I think they must be hoping I would see one I wanted to live in and move up. My grandparents have nodded off. My gramma was tap dancing in the kitchen while she made dinner. Dateline is on now. Mind numbing. Tomorrow we'll go to breakfast. Then my dad and I will try fishing somewhere. Ho-hum. I want to call Shirelle. I'm tired. I'm bored. How will I ever write three pages? Not to mention fifteen minutes and one big page to make up for the typing I can't do here. Ho-hum.
We started to watch "The Cruel Sea", but I fell asleep. What else? My dad was trimming some kind of juniper hedge on his front yard when we drove up. We ate peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. I cancelled my Amtrak passage to instead fly home on Friday. I'm a little bummed I won't go back to Portland through the Columbia River Gorge, especially now that I see how little there is to do around here. I wish I had some bud to sneak out and smoke.
Brian Keith died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Pat Nixon died of cancer. Fergie and Prince Andrew separated. My grandfather first laid eyes on my grandmother when she was on the Broadway stage. Broadway was the name of the theatre in Haverstraw. She figures she was about nine. She had to dance in place of a girl who was sick. When my grandfather saw her, he looked up her name in the playbill, but it wasn't her name; it was the sick girl's. The first time she noticed him, her class was at Grampa's school, which was a church because the regular school burned down. They were getting inoculations, and there was this big red-headed boy who got sent to the corner for horsing around. A few years later they had a Spanish class together. Gramma sez Grampa was a big football star and that made her open her eyes wider.
Ann Bagnaschi wrote on my shirt for the bike race, "If you can catch me, you can eat me." She was the hottest girl in eighth grade.