All Things Profane and Sacred

Well, somehow a few months have slipped by me again. Life just keeps rolling along, dogs, J, money problems, work, home. We bought a kiddy pool this weekend, so I'm looking forward to filling it up and sitting in it in the not too distant future. Meanwhile it's Monday morning, it's overcast and I have a busy goddamn week. 4 days, oh lord.

Man, oh man, I'm not sure where February has gone. January neither for that matter. Our woodpile is looking pretty depleted, but it hasn't been too chilly mostly. The sun is starting to feel warm again and is actually out once and a while.

J is officially a green collar worker, having spent the last couple of months working in a fab shop on a large organic/sustainable farming operation over in the valley. They're also paying for some of his schooling, so he's pretty happy.

The cars are up and down, mostly down. The big old green beast had a steady stream of problems, which cumulated in the turbo charger pooping out. Of course this happened just outside of Eugene, about an hour's drive from our house. We took the backroads home, since we couldn't get it up over 35 mph. It was on a dark windy mountain road that a car started trailing us. We didn't have room to pull over for a few miles. When we finally were able to pull off the road to let them by, the bastard hit his lights and we realized it was the fuzz at our bumper.

I realized as soon as the lights flashed just how suspicious we looked. While we were dinking with the car in Eugene, I got a raging headache, so I had the seat cranked down. We were passing a bottle of OJ back and forth. We didn't think to turn off NPR, so Dead Air was playing when he walked up to our window. He let us go and we limped the car the rest of the way home.

So I spent a few weeks piloting a borrowed 5 speed truck, which drives just a little differently than the VW. I suppose now I really know how to drive stick. Now J has resurrected the beast that we bought last summer, which mostly starts. On days when it doesn't start, I drive him in to Corvallis and pick him up after work. Long days, oh lord.

Well, the only good thing about having the political season upon us is knowing that GWB's days in office are numbered. Of course, we'll all be living with his legacy (debt, bad/dumb unending warS, larger government, less civil rights, a sunken economy, etc. etc. etc) for years to come. In Oregon I don't get a vote in either party's primary, which doesn't make sense to me-wouldn't you think that major parties would want to know which candidate non-affiliated voters want to vote for? Isn't the purpose of a primary or caucus to figure out which candidate has the most support and is most likely to win? And doesn't winnability have more to do with how much support from the nation as whole, rather than just the support of party hacks. I mean, I understand the risks of open primaries, but closed primaries are just dumb. Anyway, I guess it'll just suck to be me if we had a Clinton/Huckabee choice in the upcoming election, but then again, it would also really suck for everyone else.

Well, my resolution to blog more has really taken a tumble. I think it would be a different story if I had access to the internets at home, but alas, the prices for middle of nowhere mountain top internet far exceed what we are ready, willing and able to pay.

One big change-a few nights ago, J told me that he really did not want to be called J on my blog anymore. He does not like it when people meet him and say, "Oh, you're J!" or when people who know his name call him J. He has told me that he prefers the pseudonym Jackass. So, Jackass it is. Feel free to call him that whenever you see him, I guess.

This has been another hard month, in a series of hard months. Jackass lost his job for refusing to work off the clock. Our cars have been hit and miss (I'm blogging because it is 7 pm and I'm still at work because my car won't start and Jackass isn't answering the phone). Our reserves are low and we need more firewood. My clients are driving me crazy. It makes me feel bad to so badly want to strangle people who have serious disabilities, but there you have it.

It was a skinny Xmas, but we had warm flannel sheets from my mom and his, as well as cozy blankets. We slept until noon, smoked up (those Walmart gift cards are at least good for trade purposes) and continued sleeping intermittantly while watching movies. I hope New Years will be the same, but Jackass badly needs to get out and shake his ass and pound some drinks. I don't much think that'll happen in Blodgett, but maybe the Grange Hall in Summit will have something festive.

Well, I made it to Wisconsin. A friend who was heading up to Portland kindly gave me a ride up to my Friday meeting. On Saturday, I took a cab out to the airport. The cabbie, a rockabilly kid with a fedora, told me that I was flying out just ahead of the storm-SuperSweet! I landed in Minneapolis to make my connection to Milwaukee. We got on our plane. The captain assured us that we'd be taking off, though running late for de-icing. We de-iced. We got in line on the runway. Then he told us, "Folks, I got some bad news."

So, I answered the burning question, "Who the fuck takes their vacation in Wisconsin in December during the first major snowstorm of the year?" But luckily, I have family just over the boarder from Minneapolis, so I was able to take a shuttle over by them, have a shower, fresh clothes, food, weed, sleep in a bed and generally freshen up overnight before flying on to Milwaukee the next morning.

The point of my whole unplanned winter vacation was to visit my great-grandma. Nana hasn't been doing too well, and I wanted to make sure I got at least one last visit. Plus she's just been taken out of her home of many years to get assessed and see what she needs are and she hasn't been happy about it. I was given a huge blessing-she was in fine form and we had a great time visiting and talking. I hope this isn't the last peak before the big decline, but a permanent improvement. Only time will tell.

Between weather and cars, I am going insane. It seems like if one of our cars is working, the other isn't. Or if both the cars are working, the wash machine or hot water heater is exploding or freezing or some such.

We've also got some nasty weather out here. A lot of practice sessions with the car and the stick and the rolling backwards downhill got canceled over the holiday weekend due to freezing fucking rain. Last night I couldn't see my headlights heading home and the car behind me kept turning his lights off and on. When I could finally pull over to make sure my lights were actually working, 30 stressful minutes later, I could see front and back lights, but back on the black mountain road with rain screaming down I couldn't see 5 feet in front of the car. On the last hill I was sure my lights had gone because I couldn't see a damn thing and kept praying that no one would rear end me or try to turn into me. When I limped into the driveway, I could see my lights, so they were actually on, but doing me no friggen good.

This morning was my first day driving the bug in to work. I made it and parked it without stalling out or whatever, so that is good. We'll see how the trip home goes. I'm terribly nervous, because I have a meeting in PDX on Friday. I can't drive the old green gal because she has a short in her system and the battery goes dead. So, a shiftin' I will go into the morning rush hour traffic downtown and then out of the evening rush hour traffic. Hope I survive.

Then on Saturday I have to fly out really friggen early in the morning to frozen old Wisconsin. I'm not sure how all this traveling will work out. I'm still trying to figure out if I can keep from stopping on an uphill slope between here and there. Fingers crossed.

I'm back to the house after a week long work thing in Portland. Work put me up at a hotel downtown, so I was within walking distance to just about everything. It was really nice, after these many months of driving 40 minutes in to work or the grocery store, or anywhere else you want/need to be, to be able to walk 5 minutes and buy stumptown coffee and then walk another 5 minutes and be at work. I also got to ride the Max a couple of times, which is awesome. You can actually go wizzing by all the cars that are frozen on the highway while you laugh manically. I really love Portland. If I do decide to move back to a city, Portland is where I want to be.

Still, it was good to get back to the animals and home and J. While things are hard and shitty and difficult right now, and not just for the usual financial reasons, I'm still hanging on the mountain.

Yea-I'm blogging from my laptop. My poor laptop was out of commission for about a year without a cord. With no internet, there wasn't much point in getting the cord. But today I'm blogging from Portland and the sweet internet is flowing like butter.



It's been a hard month of ups and downs-lots of downs. October is usually my favorite month and the mountains are full of smokey crisp blazing glory-cool snappy mornings and warm brandy afternoons. But this month I've been sickly and worried. Our bank account has bottomed out. What to do?



But J is working again this last week, and although the wages are shit, it sounds like he will be getting a raise soon, and we don't really need lots of money, just some time where we both have a job, goddammit.



We had J's grand-nephew out at the mountain last weekend. We picked him up in Eugene and took him rambling on the coast. He was a blur of swinging arms and legs and sand and waves. All in all, a beautiful day at the beach.



Yesterday was J's birthday. Thanks to some help from my mom, I was able to take him to Portland Center Stage for Cabaret. It was a great show, lots of fun and nearly nekkid folks running around for our pleasure.

Shit. Just as I was finishing this post, my screen went black. Computer would not come on as long as the power cord was plugged in. It would come on if cord was unplugged, but it went black almost as soon as it came on. Before shutting down, I was able to confirm that the battery is low. What the fuck?

So, J is trying to teach me how to drive stick. He tells me not to worry too much about the clutch-he expects to have to put a new one in after I've mangled this one. Still, I'm having problems with the car either pooping out or charging forward all out of control and crazy like. I also forget which gear I'm in, and have to look down at the gearshift and try to figure out where to go from there, which means I'm not looking at the road. Oh, and yesterday, as I tried to shift from second to third, I accidently shifted into first, which the car did not like at all. The whole thing just makes me really nervous-I don't want the transmission to drop out of the car onto the road, but it sounded really close yesterday. If anyone sees an Orange VW Super Beetle driving up and down Old Blodgett Road making a hidous noise and smelling like burning clutch, give me a wide berth, would you?

It's been a shitty couple of weeks. I had this horrible cold that I just couldn't shake that is still draining the life out of me. We've had problems with our water heater, problems with bill collectors and problems with insurance companies. I want to nap out for about a week or so and then completely reorganize my life into something saner and more manageable. I know we'll pull through, but I'm feeling down and blue.

I'm a lonely girl up on the mountain again. J is picking up some stage crew work on a variety of shows (the bastard is doing the Smashing Pumpkins show tonight at the Clark County Ampitheater), which means I've been fending for myself this week. It's actually nice to have some alone time-we've both been getting a bit of cabin fever stuck on the mountain together. Still, I can't wait to have him back tommorrow, if only to get some hot sweet lovin'.

We're battening down the hatches for winter, even though the September weather has been pretty fine. Luckily, we are less in the red this year than we were last year, so we have the time and money to get in a couple of cords of wood this weekend. We'll probably get another cord or two before it gets really cold out here. Get our lamps cleaned out and ready to go with fresh oil and wicks. Plastic over a few of our six (six!) crookedly hung doors and chink the rest of the cracks. Store away 20-40 gallons of fresh water and enough no bake food to get through the inevitable power outs. Can some blackberry jam and a shit load of apple jelly, apple sauce and apple butter. Paint the awful walls a nice warm color so it isn't as gray and grim as last year.

I think this winter we will be in better shape than last winter, although I'm hearing predictions that this winter will much longer and colder. Last winter, we got into the house in the last week of September, way too friggen broke to prepare for it. This winter, we can at least winterize and prepare for being without electric.

I was doing some legal research today to drop the SJ bomb and ran accross an interesting concurrance by Justice Black in a case that fought back against the hysterical Commie witch hunts. It sounds like he just wrote it yesterday.

MR. JUSTICE BLACK, concurring.

Without notice or hearing and under color of the President's Executive Order No. 9835, the Attorney General found petitioners guilty of harboring treasonable opinions and designs, officially branded them as Communists, and promulgated his findings and conclusions for particular use as evidence against government employees suspected of disloyalty. In the present climate of public opinion it appears certain that the Attorney General's much publicized findings, regardless of their truth or falsity, are the practical equivalents of confiscation and death sentences for any blacklisted organization not possessing extraordinary financial, political or religious prestige and influence. The Government not only defends the power of the Attorney General to pronounce such deadly edicts but also argues that individuals or groups so condemned have no standing to seek redress in the courts, even though a fair judicial hearing might conclusively demonstrate their loyalty. My basic reasons for rejecting these and other contentions of the Government are in summary the following: [341 U.S. 123, 143]

(1) I agree with MR. JUSTICE BURTON that petitioners have standing to sue for the reason among others that they have a right to conduct their admittedly legitimate political, charitable and business operations free from unjustified governmental defamation. Otherwise, executive officers could act lawlessly with impunity. And, assuming that the President may constitutionally authorize the promulgation of the Attorney General's list, I further agree with MR. JUSTICE BURTON that this Court should not attribute to the President a purpose to vest in a cabinet officer the power to destroy political, social, religious or business organizations by "arbitrary fiat," and thus the methods employed by the Attorney General exceed his authority under Executive Order No. 9835.

(2) Assuming, though I deny, that the Constitution permits the executive officially to determine, list and publicize individuals and groups as traitors and public enemies, I agree with MR. JUSTICE FRANKFURTER that the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment would bar such condemnation without notice and a fair hearing. My views previously expressed under similar circumstances are relevant here. E. g., dissenting opinion in Ludecke v. Watkins, 335 U.S. 160, 173 ; and see In re Oliver, 333 U.S. 257 .

(3) More fundamentally, however, in my judgment the executive has no constitutional authority, with or without a hearing, officially to prepare and publish the lists challenged by petitioners. In the first place, the system adopted effectively punishes many organizations and their members merely because of their political beliefs and utterances, and to this extent smacks of a most evil type of censorship. This cannot be reconciled with the First Amendment as I interpret it. See my dissent in American Communications Assn. v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 445 . Moreover, officially prepared and proclaimed governmental [341 U.S. 123, 144] blacklists possess almost every quality of bills of attainder, the use of which was from the beginning forbidden to both national and state governments. U.S. Const., Art. I, 9, 10. It is true that the classic bill of attainder was a condemnation by the legislature following investigation by that body, see United States v. Lovett, 328 U.S. 303 , while in the present case the Attorney General performed the official tasks. But I cannot believe that the authors of the Constitution, who outlawed the bill of attainder, inadvertently endowed the executive with power to engage in the same tyrannical practices that had made the bill such an odious institution. 1
There is argument that executive power to issue these pseudo-bills of attainder can be implied from the undoubted power of the Government to hire and discharge employees and to protect itself against treasonable individuals or organizations. 2 Our basic law, however, wisely [341 U.S. 123, 145] withheld authority for resort to executive investigations, condemnations and blacklists as a substitute for imposition of legal types of penalties by courts following trial and conviction in accordance with procedural safeguards of the Bill of Rights. 3
In this day when prejudice, hate and fear are constantly invoked to justify irresponsible smears and persecution of persons even faintly suspected of entertaining unpopular views, it may be futile to suggest that the cause of internal security would be fostered, not hurt, by faithful adherence to our constitutional guarantees of individual liberty. Nevertheless, since prejudice manifests itself in much the same way in every age and country and since what has happened before can happen again, it surely should not be amiss to call attention to what has occurred when dominant governmental groups have been left free to give uncontrolled rein to their prejudices against unorthodox minorities. As specific illustration, I am adding as an appendix Macaulay's account of a parliamentary proscription which took place when popular prejudice was high; this is only one out of many similar [341 U.S. 123, 146] instances that readily can be found. 4 Memories of such events were fresh in the minds of the founders when they forbade the use of the bill of attainder.

Last week I was thinking that this week would be busy and hellish, but several of my more time consuming cases settled or got otherwise resolved without a lot of effort on my end (joy for me, joy for my clients). So, it's been quiet around here for a change, which gives me a nice chance to clean out my paperwork strewn office, catch up on my reading and get my files organized.


I'm ready to be done at 10 am, but I can't leave the poverty stricken people of the world over the weekend, so here I am.

Our struggle with the cars continues. We have J's 30 year old Mercedes, which needs shocks quite badly and probably won't start come winter, our new (to us) $500 Mercedes, which sucks gas and just needs some rust management work before we sell it, our Toyota, which needs, among other things, an exhaust manifold before winter.

We're hoping to finish up work on the new to us Mercedes by the end of next month. We have someone who will trade us some cash and another Toyota for the gas guzzling Mercedes. That way we would have two reliable winter cars and the ability to pull the old green gal off the road until we can give her some TLC.

And we finally got rid of J's stupid Nissa Stanza. It is a long tale, the finishment of that old money sucking whore. It was broke down in our driveway for the last 6 months. We finally got it running when a desparate friend needed to buy a piece of shit car. We were set to drive it up to Salem and to collect our $ when the damn thing blew a gasket. We babied it back to a parking lot, and moved it every few days while we tried to figure out whether to fix it and sell it (Js desire) or to junk it (mine). NPR refused it as a 'donation' and the junk yard refused to come out and pick it up, so we wearily decided to take it in, fix it and then sell it. Of course, upon deciding this, another part exploded in the sun, so we had to cajole, then threaten the junk yard. And faced with the possibility of losing our copious business, they relented and hauled the hose beast to its final resting place.