Changes... in Everyday Ramblings

This shot is from our beautiful Japanese Garden in July 2005. The Portland skyline has changed some since then and will be changing again as they are building a 35 story fancy hotel downtown in line of sight here. It will also house condos, office space, and a food hall on the ground floor. This is replacing a very popular food court in a parking lot right on the bus mall.

As this is a space I walk by fairly often I wonder where the mentally ill, homeless and drug addled population that crowd the streets of this area because there are a number of services offered for them here are going to go.

There is this historic wooden church, a lovely close to falling apart building downtown near the Portland State campus that was a Korean Christian Church for a long time and is now empty where a lot of drug activity occurs. I walked by yesterday about 4PM on my way to the library and there were about 10 people either sleeping or talking or hanging out and right there in broad daylight was a man sitting on the steps with a syringe in his hand getting ready to shoot up.

Do we really need a Ritz Carlton? Seriously?

The Japanese Garden has gotten too crowded for a sane person to go to on a weekend. There is no parking available anywhere near it these days and all the parking there is, is metered. Mrs. Sherlock has a membership but I am never available at a good time to go. Next year!

Mr. Finch and I had a membership for maybe 5 years and would often go up once a week and walk and talk. We did that at the zoo too.

So this disparity of income and class with no middle is obvious in our town. When I was planning my trip to our state capital on the 4th for the holiday to hang out with Kes and Most Honorable I was looking at the transportation options and thinking about how much alcohol consumption and drug use happens on a warm summer holiday. This is the kind of travel for me that is almost always a precursor for a migraine and I need to schedule that into the mix.

Getting down there I had no options really, I took the chartered bus that services the area via Amtrak because no trains were running except the super early one. It was packed. The inconsiderate woman in front of me ate a bag of chips very slowly and if you wear hearing aids you know what kind of torture that is… she was also competing with me to be the first person on the bus…bleh…and then the very affable substitute driver talked to a woman in the front seat the whole way down but otherwise it was clean and comfortable and I scored a window seat to myself.

It was coming home in the evening I was more concerned about, and based on the behavior of certain individuals on the train platform as Most Honorable waited with me, my concern was well founded, I splurged and bought a business class ticket thinking that would at least be quieter and a bit less crowded.

The car was empty! I had it all to myself!

It was heavenly. Seriously. This route goes right by Willamette Falls the most amazing natural wonder that no one knows about.

Mightily obscured by this entire decrepit abandoned mill infrastructure, it is sad and magnificent and I need to write a poem about it. Because it so clearly represents the rapacious exploitation of the natural world that killed off the majority of the salmon population and therefore the bears and all the other wildlife (not to mention the tribes and tribes of First People’s who revered this spot) that coexisted here for a long long time.

While our President sings the praises of our military might.

Anyway I had a lovely day, we spent most of it eating fresh healthy food and playing with electronic devices. We got all my pictures copied off the laptop onto an external drive (about 11,000 of them are of flowers) (huge relief to have them finally backed up) and tried to figure out how to take the text box that is created by converting writing done with an Apple Pencil and get it formatted like a normal text document so it can be posted say like here…

Mrs. Sherlock and I are walking tomorrow. It is overcast and misty and she has something else going on today. So I get to chill!

An empty train car and an unstructured day, it doesn’t take much to make me happy…and even better…I haven’t had a migraine in weeks. It is like a miracle.

Last updated July 06, 2019