contents and discontents

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Saturday
May 10, 2003

patience is a vulture
sarah and i laid over in portland to participate in the Village Building Convergence--an experiment in changing the direction of cities towards human scale design and development. this included laying down paint with City Repair at a couple of intersections (33rd & Yamhill and 19th & Washington). The first was a repaint of a sprawling sunflower, the second a fresh labyrinth where a young girl barked "Watch out!" even though I wasn't close to stepping on the still-wet "bricks". She also bossed her brother around. Then their mother came by and bossed both of them around, saying "Watch how you bend so you don't hurt your back!" I got away quickly. Sarah pointed out a cat on a leash at a corner house. Poor thing. It tried to jump the fence, its only dream a dream of escape. Then its owner came around. Guess who--the same bossy mom. She said the grey cat's name was Smoky. We would have visited the other three intersection improvements but we had to bug out on our borrowed bikes to catch the southbound train to Palm Springs to hook up with Greg & Iris & Tamra & Arne. Amtrak is great. I plug in on the observation car, Alice buys me a drink and gives me half a sandwich. Sarah comes along and we go downstairs, meet Ed who feeds us Schnapps under the table and talks 'bout shrimp farms in brazil, slips us a kind sample. Night falls as we go over the pass, mountain peaks above cloud banks, all is grey

smoky.