On Rain (poem)

ON RAIN

Bill Deemer

All morning I study rain:
solemn on the shingled roof,
bubbly in the puddle!

Preliminary finding:
many kinds of rain to hear,
many shades of gray to see.

The yin & yang of rain:
filling up the sparrows' basin,
knocking down the apple blossoms.

What patriotism is not

“Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” - Samuel Johnson, 1775

Juneteenth

Our lying President

Many don't give a shit.

Round one

I've seen all 32 teams in the World Cup with this morning's conclusion of first games, round one. Who stands out? Iceland's defense, but do they have an offense? I like Senegal's speed and recklessness. I like Mexico's heart. Argentina and Brazil look superior but didn't win. I think it's a pretty open competition.

At this point I'll most closely follow Iceland, Senegal and Mexico, I suppose.

A Trump Symphony of voices

Peter Handke

The World Cup reminds me of a favorite novel title, THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY KICK by Peter Handke. His first novel translated into English. First rate.

His play OFFENDING THE AUDIENCE, a production of which I saw at the Univ of Oregon in grad school, does exactly that. A writer who takes many risks. I dig him.

Supporting the arts: the argument for a lottery

Prizes, fellowships and awards in the arts have become a cottage industry. In literature, I've received prizes, fellowships and awards. I've not received them after applying. Note that word. Applying! Most require an application from the writer or artist, and therein is the rub.

Many of these are money-making affairs for the organization giving them out. For example, in the early days of the Internet, when I hosted the first comprehensive website for screenwriters and playwrights on the World Wide Web, I could have made a few bucks by sponsoring a contest. Say I held an online screenwriting contest, which were growing in popularity, charge a twenty dollar entry fee (undercutting the rate to assure lots of entries), say I only got 100 entries (500 would be more like it), and gave a thousand dollar prize. I'd make a grand profit.

In other words, more than support of the arts is at work here. And a business consultant once told me, the quickest way for a new arts organization to gain credibility is to give an award or have a contest.

Of course, the pitch is that awards and such move your career forward. Well, yes, it does give you something to brag about, to put in your resume or pitch letter. For example, I won an international play contest with several thousand entries. Hot stuff! However, I did not get a single production from this prize. Not one. However, I must say, grants and awards let me get through much of the 1980s without traditional employment, a godsend for a serious writer. I got lucky.

Yes, winning also helps one's ego, giving a certain validity to one's work. But many of these affairs are hyped to high heaven, defining an arts landscape that is false. To begin, the arts are not competitive. It is always, always, comparing apples and oranges when you begin judging works of art and literature. And it always boils down to opinion, to the values of a judge or panel of judges.

An example. I was one of three judges hired by the Illinois Arts Commission to award ten fellowships to scriptwriters, among 73 finalists selected beforehand. Okay. Each of us read them and selected our own top ten, then compared notes. We did not agree on a single top ten writer. Think about that! NO AGREEMENT WHATEVER. We were all "qualified" judges. But we were very different: myself, a practicing playwright and screenwriter; a black woman theater professor; and a gay man artistic director of a theater company. A politically correct panel! And we couldn't agree on anything.

What does this say about the intrinsic value of a script or work of art?

If you get the idea that these awards are crapshoots, you are right. So let's own up to it. Make awards a crapshoot literally.

So I propose this.

Get rid of all prizes and awards that requires application from the writer or artist. If organizations want to give awards, fine, but no one applies for them.

Instead, hold art and literature lotteries. Invite entrants and pick a winner from a hat. Do this at every level, from local to state to nationwide. Let arts lotteries support the arts.

I think the result would be a more dynamic, more risk taking, more vibrant arts scene because "winners" would be divorced from arts politics and fads, from academia, from bureaucracy.

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL ARTS LOTTERY.

Mexico upsets Germany

Love it!

From CBS Sports:

The 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia has its first absolute stunner. Mexico, behind a first-half goal from Hirving Lozano, upset reigning champs Germany in the group stage opener, 1-0. In a tense, hectic match that would make anybody shake from the nerves, El Tri bent but did not break in the second half, withstanding chance after chance from the European giants for arguably its greatest World Cup victory ever. 

Hyperdrama

Trump as Frankenstein

From The Atlantic:

Trump is a Frankenstein’s monster of past presidents’ worst attributes: Andrew Jackson’s rage; Millard Fillmore’s bigotry; James Buchanan’s incompetence and spite; Theodore Roosevelt’s self-aggrandizement; Richard Nixon’s paranoia, insecurity, and indifference to law; and Bill Clinton’s lack of self-control and reflexive dishonesty.

Milwaukie

I really like Milwaukie. Like the neighborhood, like the location, especially like Main Street downtown, which reminds me of another town I like, Lewiston, Idaho. Like the Farmers Market, which isn't too big.

I barely have explored various opportunities here, including the nearby Milwaukie Center, where there is live jazz every Friday noon. I did read poetry at a First Friday event, but was not impressed with the readings, only several really with the voice to read and only one other beside myself writing with attention to traditional poetic values like rhythm and rhyme. I kept being reminded of Gertrude Stein's comment to Hemingway, "Remarks, Ernest, are not literature."

In other words, all things considered (like having to remain in Portland area, which I'd leave in a  heartbeat if I was alone), this is a great place to be.

Crossing Kellogg Creek into downtown Milwaukie

Main Street

Willamette River, a block from downtown

First Friday

Farmers Market

Audience

As a writer, my relationship to my audience has covered the wide spectrum of possibilities. In the beginning, writing literary short stories, I sought the literary audience who reads literary journals, small and specialized, to be sure, what today would be called elitist. It took a while but in time I began publishing in the literary journals I admired -- Prism International, The Literary Review, others -- and received the unexpected (but wished for) honor of having three Roll of Honor stories in the Best American Short Stories anthology in four consecutive years. Agents wrote if I had a novel, and I was working on one. But for a variety of reasons I changed my focus to theater before I finished it.

Although I had immediate success as a playwright at the national level, most of my first decade as an MFA Playwright was in learning theater language and dynamics, primarily as an actor. I was fortunate to have a mentor and director to guide me. Then I ended up in Portland in the late 1970s, in the right place at the right time, and became a resident playwright, the best of worlds. This was the most popular decade of my career, as traditionally defined. I was a regional star.

Ironically, it was a commission in this period that changed my direction, driven by an obsession for what now is called hyperdrama. I even produced my own, and COCKTAIL SUITE was an artistic and commercial success from which I should have built a permanent company but I hadn't yet figured out how to root hyperdrama in a static, permanent location.  It was still too "space" driven. At the same time, it was clear that a greater audience for the new form was across the ocean, and I ended up focusing my efforts, via the internet, overseas. This resulted in considerable artistic success but not much financial reward. A one act hyperdrama commissioned from a company in Chile, and never performed in English to this day, is now considered to be "in the canon" of early hypertext literary work.

I had no sense, however, that I was this successful overseas. The book Canonizing Hypertext that devotes considerable discussion to my work and puts me in the canon was published in London years before I discovered its existence. In other words, my esoteric fame was completely unknown to me. My esoteric overseas audience was unknown to me. I did hear from several foreign graduate students who were writing dissertations on my work, no small pleasure, but otherwise I was writing in a vacuum, or so it seemed.

So audiences can exist without knowing about them. The important thing is to have work available, and the internet makes this much more possible than earlier. But even publication in obscure places can pay later dividends, such as the discovery of my essay on teaching writing decades later by someone who ran with the controversial themes I proposed.

This, perhaps, is why my favorite historian, Morris Berman, says that the only way to be a serious American writer is to write for posterity. The culture has no place for us. I wouldn't go this far but he does have a point. I have no sense of an audience today, really, but I keep writing and keep putting it out there. I remain excited about a novel I am working on, though my energy in old age is a fraction of my past writing energy. I want to finish it before I pass! I think I will.

So I've had a visible audience, a time of popularity, and a time of overseas fame without knowing about it, and a constant sense of writing for invisible literary folks who may or may not exist. I don't think my situation is different from many others not interested in pop culture.

The secret is to keep the faith. For me, in old age, this sometimes is a struggle.

Iceland's defense

Most impressive thing I've seen so far, holding Argentina to 1-1. Argentina had possession 90% of the time, it seemed, taking shot after shot that was blocked. Iceland goalie spectacular, blocking two penalty kicks as well from great Messi, one so close it should have been automatic. Not sure if Iceland has an offense, they never had the ball long enough to develop anything. A great victory for their defense.

A professional regret

I wish, in the late 1980s when I was writing, directing and producing my own hyperdramas, like COCKTAIL SUITE and TURKEYS, I had the later insight about designing a theater space specifically for the form. I wish I had founded a company on the insight and produced a season of hyperdramas. I feel confident audiences would have responded positively. Alas, the insight came to me as an old man when I have no energy to do it.

You can learn about the design in the NUTS AND BOLTS video here.

World Cup

Halftime, Iceland hanging in against a superior Argentina team, 1-1.

Man, I am really into it. Recording all the games, watching most live. With Russia the host, I can watch live games at 5 in the morning, a morning person's heaven. Despite FIFA's corruption, I like almost everything about this event and sport, from the opening ritual to the relentless action, which can be exhausting to watch.

I wish I had seen the engagement of this sport earlier. My first memory of the World Cup is driving into a small southwest college town late morning in early 1970s, camping all summer while in grad school, looking for beer and a burger, and finding a tavern with a large loud crowd of international students. The World Cup was on. I was amazed at the enthusiasm for a sporting event I had barely heard of.

Half a century later, I get it. 

Orwellian

A veteran editorial cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was fired Thursday after  

he and the newspaper’s management clashed over some sketches critical of President 

Donald Trump.

Rob Rogers, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who had been with the Post-Gazette for 25 years,

announced his own ouster on Twitter. (Huffington Post)

World Cup

Wearing American blinders, I came slowly to the realization that the rest of the planet is correct and the WORLD CUP is the greatest sporting event on Earth. Oops, next to the Olympics!

I am watching with great interest this year, despite no U.S. team. I'll be rooting for Iceland, Denmark, Australia, England. I know of no sport where a zero to zero score can be so exciting.

Dick Crooks

My best friend from 1960 onward. Inspired Hooker in my novel KEROUAC'S SCROLL. 20 years since passing!

Found online his.obituary.

Plaque in White Bird, Idaho, cemetery, his ashes scattered at top of hill overlooking town, scene of famous Indian battle.

Nature wins

Amateurs but worth doing:

Clawhammer ukulele

With arthritis in hands, playing days are over. Nice to have a record of once upon a time ...

Our delusional President

From Jack Holmes column, re parents of Korean vets coming to Trump:

This is truly a vintage Trumpian lie. As many have pointed out already, assuming the parents of a Korean War veteran were 18 when they were born, those parents would be a minimum of 101 years old today. More likely, they'd be at least 110. The idea that multiple 110-year-old people came up to Donald Trump on the campaign trail to ask him to bring home the remains of their son killed on North Korean soil 63 years prior is just absurd. It's a stirring story, a noble enough sentiment, and, in this case, completely nuts. The president is just saying things again.

In that way, this is a quintessential Trumpian lie: totally shameless, easily verifiable as false, and rooted in the notion that "many people"—who are never defined further, and who you'll never be able to find—are telling the president something that he just happens to agree with himself. How many times in this troubled period in our nation's history have we heard how "many people are saying" something about Donald Trump?

Reference 

Oh really?

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

But the reality is ...

Want your heart broken?

Check out this series of tweets by journalist Jacob Soboroff that begins, "I’m a part of the first group of journalists to go into the shelter for detained child migrants in Brownsville Texas since the zero tolerance separation policy was announced. 1000+ boys here."

All this happening to make America great again!? What's it say about the character of the man who permits it?

At the entrance:

Mariners sweep Angels

Damn, they are fun to follow this year! Always coming from behind ...

CNN headline: Trump calls press America's 'biggest enemy'

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech. Benjamin Franklin

Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy. Walter Cronkite

The only security of all is in a free press. Thomas Jefferson

Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose George Orwell

A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. John F. Kennedy

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind. Jim Morrison

As unbalanced parties of every description can never tolerate a free inquiry of any kind, when employed against themselves, the license, and even the most temperate freedom of the press, soon excite resentment and revenge. John Adams

Our Country’s biggest enemy is the Fake News so easily promulgated by fools!  Donald Trump 

Instant buddies

SKAM Austin

SKAM Austin is an American teen drama web television series, based on the Norwegian web series Skam, created by Julie Andem. It premiered with its first full episode on April 27, 2018 on Facebook Watch.

The series uses the same basic setup as the original Norwegian production, releasing a short clip on a daily basis on Facebook Watch, supplemented with screenshots of text messages between the characters and real social media accounts allowing insights into the lives of the fictional characters. The first of these short clips was released on April 24, 2018. (Wikipedia)

This is a remarkable new narrative form, perhaps related to hyperdrama. I find this exciting but a traditionalist might find double-meaning in the title.

SKAM on Facebook.

SKAM article in The New Yorker.

Chomsky on climate change

Hollywood diplomacy

Old school

Mule Skinner Blues

Noses and elephants

“As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much mon- ey will it bring in?     —Alexis de Tocqueville, letter to Ernest de Chabrol, June 9, 1831       

 “An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you” ― Morris Berman

 “We live in a collective adrenaline rush, a world of endless promotional/commercial bullshit, that masks a deep systemic emptiness, the spiritual equivalent of asthma.” ― Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture

“If you doubt for a moment that there is a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” in this country, you must be living on another planet.” 
― Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

 “Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it is doing seems to be making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.” ― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

 “For two thousand years or more man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal. He remains a pleasure-seeking animal.” ― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

 Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. John Maynard Keynes

In reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that's going on every single day. Bill McKibben

Human spirit

What a time

I can't recall a time in history when something like this could have happened. At the Tony Awards last night, Robert DeNiro shouts "Fuck Trump!"-- and gets a standing ovation! Twice! Has the theater arts community (with a Prez who says Streep is over-rated) ever disliked a standing President so much and so universally?

Of course, Trump supporters are just as energetic. Maybe we are headed for a second Civil War. 

Oops

Fox News just called Trump a "dictator". "Regardless of what happens in this meeting between two dictators..."

(Twitter, Brian Krassenstein) 

Photo of the week

Who looks like a pouting five-year-old?

Ahead of her time

Wasn't familiar with this composer until yesterday. Impressive.

They didn't listen

Oregon Gov. Tom McCall once said:

McCall is well known for a comment he made in a January 12, 1971, interview with CBS News' Terry Drinkwater, in which he said:

“

Come visit us again and again. This is a state of excitement. But for heaven's sake, don't come here to live.[12]

”

Ah, famous last words.

McCall also is known for the Governor's Rock Concert,Vortex, his strategy for avoiding a confrontation during the Vietnam era between protesters and American Legion members attending their annual convention in Portland. McCall sponsored a rock concert in a distant park, let the kids swim naked and smoke pot, and in town kept the peace.

I spent a week with McCall, researching a profile I wrote for Oregon Business Magazine. Loved the guy. He was a Republican when the label wasn't a disgrace. He appointed a chief of staff he disagreed with: "I thought he was a fascist and he thought I was a communist," McCall told me. This assured debate on every issue. He hated yes men. HE HATED YES MEN. Imagine.

Playing Trump's game

Al Sharpton hit the nail on the head in The Guardian recently:

Donald Trump is on course to be re-elected in 2020 because those in the current crop of potential Democratic presidential candidates are “too tame to deal with an untamed opponent,” one of the party’s key power-brokers has said.

Speaking to a group of Guardian journalists following a visit to 10 Downing Street and a session with black MPs, the Rev Al Sharpton warned that the likely challengers to Trump are failing to galvanise opposition to the president. “They’ve lost the ability to dramatise. He [Trump] understands spectacle and drama and they don’t.”

This is why PUSSY RIOT is such a powerful strategy in the Trump era. Spectacle and drama! Let Pussy Riot groups form in every state. Pussy Riot Oregon! Pussy Riot DC! Pussy Riot California! Pussy Riot New York. Even Pussy Riot Mississippi and Pussy Riot North Dakota!

The time is now.

LATER. To make the group sound more "American" maybe it should be called PUSSY PANTHER, making sure women of color get involved. That would really drive a certain thin-skinned autocrat up the wall.

Pussy Riot

Wanted & needed: an American Pussy Riot

We need an equivalent of the Russian feminist street theater protest group. Learn about Pussy Riot.

Half a dozen  or so women with theatrical and musical energy, a sense of outrage, a sense of humor, considerable courage, could do wonders in the Trump era. Imagine the Tweet Storm! Come on, activist women, let's get it going.

Attitude adjustment

Grits + scrapple + eggs = aaahhh

Glory days

Willamette Week in 1999, on its 25th anniversary: "We've haven't always agreed with them, but these folks have made Portland Portland." and they list 100 folks.

.On the list: 

CHARLES DEEMER: DRAMATIC LICENSE

PAUL DELAY:
THE REAL THING

Well, whatever Portland I contributed to making surely is long gone ha ha!

Too bad? Maybe not. A bohemian Portland couldn't survive growth and gentrification. Demise was inevitable.

Critics

Stumbled upon something I said in 2009, published in Art Scatter:

“At their best, critics are mediators between the artist and the society that doesn’t quite get it yet. At their worst, critics themselves don’t get it and go on to say it’s therefore not worth trying to figure out.”

I couldn't have said it better myself. 

Sad Laughter

Sad Laughter

a play in two acts

by Charles Deemer

First performed at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, on April 2, 1999. Directed by Charles Deemer. A different, three-act version under the title The Comedian In Spite of Himself was first performed at the New Rose Theatre on May 10, 1984. Directed by Gary O'Brien.

THE CAST:

Moliere, the great French playwright

Armande, his young wife, an actress

Madeleine, his former mistress, an actress

La Grange, Moliere's friend and an actor, the narrator, who plays many roles

THE SET:

A unit set, for quick changes of place.

THE TIME AND PLACE:

Paris and elsewhere, 1658-1673

(Excerpts from Moliere's work in verse translations by Richard Wilbur. Used with permission. Adaptations from Moliere's work in prose by Charles Deemer.)

(ACTOR'S NOTE: Moliere has a slight stutter when he is upset. This is only occasionally noted in the text but the actor should be aware of this and use it to effect.)

ACT ONE

prologue/

(A DARK STAGE: and we hear the voice of LA GRANGE in the darkness:)

LA GRANGE (V.O.): In darkness is the proper place to start

Our play, for darkness holds the human heart

In profound mystery. Who can look

Into the heart of man and find the hook

On which to hang a life? —Naked, stark:

A piece of meat called man. But the mark

Of man is not so easily drawn.

(And a SPOT comes up on LA GRANGE on stage, as narrator.)

LA GRANGE: —Moliere:

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, my friend: but where

To start? He suffered, yes; so do we all.

He laughed. He . . . laughed. I think he'd be appalled

To hear me say he cried. I saw him once

And, catching him, I saw him play the dunce

He knew so well on stage. It was as if

No pain, no grief, no agony or rift

Was worth a tear except to shed on stage

For all to see, in this way to assuage

What, privately, he could not share. This man

I loved, who taught me all I understand

About the stage, I hardly knew. Begin

In darkness, then:

(And the LIGHTS begin a SLOW FADE:)

LA GRANGE: What clarity we win

Will rise between the darkness we see now

And the certain night that gets us anyhow.

(It is DARK.)

LA GRANGE (V.O.): Begin in darkness:

sixteen sixty-three:

In Paris, two players rehearse a scene.

Read the play. 

*

This play has a complex history. Originally commissioned by the New Rose Theatre during my time as resident playwright, the play came with specific requirements: I was to tell the story of the relationship between Moliere and the king using only four actors (and I knew who they were). Since I had an epic story to tell, this restriction led to the narrator who plays many roles.

I began the play while house sitting in Bend. However, this was during the Rajneesh years and the Bend papers were full of news. I got side-tracked and quickly wrote CHRISTMAS AT THE JUNIPER TAVERN, which upset my artistic director. He didn't want me distracted. However, he ended up loving Xmas and also loving the Moliere play, which originally had the title, from the director, THE COMEDIAN IN SPITE OF HIMSELF.

There was a problem. I wasn't happy with my epic 3-act play, even though director and company loved it. Since playwrights, unlike screenwriters, have POWER, we made a deal. I could keep rewriting during the run! Consequently six different versions played on six consecutive weeks, as I kept cutting the play.

The run was very successful. A NY actress saw it, got the script, passed it on to her buddy Harold Prince, who wrote me a fan letter but was too busy (on P of Opera, it turns out), to get involved. But I shelved the play for years afterwards.

Taking it out again, I rewrote it as the two act SAD LAUGHTER that is here. I also adapted it to screen, and my agent thought the screenplay version was the best screenplay he'd ever read, though he couldn't sell it. Shades of Dead Poets Society, without Robin Williams. Yet another near miss in my career.

It is definitely one of my better plays and probably the best in terms of technical matters. Very theatrical. I learned theatrics from Dean Regenos, my MFA mentor, and later from a retired Yale Drama professor, who directed me in several plays.

This play deserves a first rate production, by a company with a budget.

Check out the book.

Portland has become a nightmare

Had to drive to Vancouver on business. No big deal, I thought. Mid morning on a Tuesday. Not bad last time I did that. A few years ago.

Wrong. Traffic a total nightmare. Normal mid morn weekday traffic, no accidents or construction. Portland traffic! Who the hell would want to put up with this on a daily basis?

Golden age of Pdx was 1980s. Completely downhill since then. So happy Portland is no longer my address. Alas, Milwaukie's days are numbered ...

RFK

Leonard Pitts, Miami Herald:

There was in that last ragged campaign of his, this sense of the possible, of the new, of fundamental, systemic change. There was this sense of a more compassionate America waiting just below the horizon. There was, in a word, hope. Or as Rep. John Lewis, then a campaign aide, consoled himself in the grim weeks after Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis: "At least we still have Bobby."

Then Bobby was gone.

Fifty years later, as immigrant children are taken from their parents at the U.S. border, as the rich get richer while the poor work full-time jobs for part-time pay, as hatred flows from the top of our government, hope feels like a bygone relic of an outmoded age, like blood from a wound that never healed.

That night, Mom cried for a loss greater than she could have known. She mourned a good and decent man.

We mourn a nation that might have been.

Flour

The Italian 00 flour I've been testing is great. Seems to offer increased spring rise. A keeper. Now experimenting with ratios with artisan flour, since it is more expensive.

Plato and Trump

Plato abhorred democracy and Trump, and more so his followers, are the reason why. The late Sen. Wayne Morse of Oregon called himself the Education Senator because he believed that the most important element in a functioning democracy is an enlightened citizenry. Well, clearly we have lost one. Plato's argument against democracy, despite the myth of American greatness, is not easily dismissed.

And yet the political landscape would look better if Congress found its balls and restored a balance of power with the executive branch. Political affiliation should not drive this but the Constitution itself. We have an executive now who already is musing about pardoning himself! Is there a clearer indication of an authoritarian mindset?

Yep

By the Staff of The Buffalo News:

When I have a discussion with a “Trumper,” here are two things that become quite apparent.

First, Trumpers cannot separate fact from fiction. They firmly believe that 2 plus 2 equals 5. No matter how much proof is provided, how much verifiable factual evidence is presented, they simply do not understand the truth. This observation supports the Trump theory that if you tell a lie enough times, a majority will believe the fallacy to be true.

Secondly, during the discussion you will discover that they are shameless. Their support of a leader who is a liar, narcissist, womanizer, boorish and unqualified is without qualms. Trump supporters have allowed themselves to be conned and see no problem.

Trump has said things about veterans, POWs, women and minorities that have brought shame and embarrassment to our country, but he has the support of his base.

Rather than have a discussion with a Trump supporter, it is better to just say that they can have their opinions but not their own facts. No matter what they believe, truth is truth.

Choke. Choke.

Bruins and Ducks are out of the WCWS. UCLA had a clear path to finals unless they lost two in a row today, which they did to Florida State. Alumni blame coach not preparing for two games. But I think it's their lack of depth at pitcher, which bothered me from the start. I don't know how they could have prepared, unless saving their ace for the second game, giving game one away. Ducks only played one game, the one they won, like the Ducks we saw all season.

The good news is Washington, which plays FSU in the finals. They beat the best offensive team in the nation, Oklahoma, twice, and both were shutouts. Amazing.

Go Huskies.

WCWS

The finals are UCLA's and Washington's to lose, both undefeated. Wash easily beat Oregon, which surprised me. Ducks have a hard road to reach finals, including beating Huskies twice.

Bread making

I make good bread pretty consistently but I still experiment. In the beginning, I experimented a lot but have more or less reduced my baking to a few favorite loaves -- white, olive, Italian herbs, cheese, rye. Lately I baked a cilantro bread, which was terrific.Now I am experimenting with European flours. Much fun! Keeps me occupied.

LATER. Haven't tasted this yet (Euro flour loaf) but the oven spring rise was great.

Rare appearance

Going to read a couple poems at open mic at First Friday in downtown Milwaukie this evening. Mainly to check the local scene. 

Old age (poem)

I've been thinking
about my old age
for some time

and have concluded
that my old age
is best described
by a single word

Pathetic