The Apostrophe Blog
I took this photo a few days after the terrible, shameful outcome of the November 2024 Presidential election here in the U.S. Those were the days when it felt like I was walking around in a world I finally had to (again) admit existed, one that I do not feel I belong to, a land of cruelty and anger, a population of the aggrieved and the violently inflamed. No longer was there even the pretense of the stable and reliable world I would prefer to inhabit; everything once again felt flung apart, flung down, and beyond comprehension with so many of us isolated and far, far apart.
It was a beautiful autumn here in Portland, Oregon. Many days were sunny often verging into warmth, a phenomenon worth celebrating in this region at that time of the year. I walked around our lovely corner of peace and predictability a few miles from the Columbia River and tried to locate even the merest of joys. Day after day, I failed. I am not proud of that fact; wallowing seems like a spoiled trait. Still the reeling from the electoral outcome was an impossible reality to shake. Like the oak whose auburn leaves shadowed the new sidewalk near the University of Oregon/Portland campus blocks from home, I felt a sense of so much of the good, the moral, the decent and empathetic being (daily) cast aside, cast off, cast down. What was voted in, what ascended to somehow be the majority, the winning ticket, the dominant narrative that we will all too soon now have to live with in this deeply unwell, un-serious country—well, that way of being in and believing in the world is heretical to me. I have been shaken to my core, scattering and shadowed. Silenced and, for the moment, utterly spent.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
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- Tangling Up in Blue - January 3, 2025
- The Scattering and the Shadows - December 31, 2024
