I got a late start yesterday. Up here in the Puget sound region, it’s pretty much night time at 5pm this time of year, so I left at night. I had spent the day running around like a chicken with its head cut off, packing and taking care of last-minute things like putting a stop on the mail delivery (which you can do online, by the way).

The sky was clear, the traffic thick. I sat patiently through it, took a few back ways I know about, and generally fought and shoved my way past metropolitan Seattle, with one stop in Kirkland at the PCC there. PCC is an upscale granola-eque chain of organic and politically-correct grocery stores, and I wholeheartedly approve of them. I got a sandwich from the deli and some snack type stuff for the road.

I stopped for fuel in North Bend, which is famous for being the town where they shot lots of externals for ‘Twin Peaks.’ Remember the diner? It’s in North Bend. The next town west is Snoqualmie, near Snoqualmie falls, and at the top of the falls is Salish Lodge, better known to Twin Peaks fans as The Great Northern.

Anyway. I stopped for fuel, and pondered whether I should take a picture of the gas pump. I did a road trip a while back and blogged all the gas stops with just a picture of the pump. I decided that since I would have to dig my camera out of the car, I was going to find some other way to commemorate my trip across the continent.

Going east from North Bend, it’s a long uphill through a lovely mountain valley that was probably much lovlier when there was no interstate running through it. As I went higher up into the mountains, my ear started telling its own story. By the time I was almost over the summit, it felt like someone had inflated a balloon inside there, and it was aching, with occasional stabbing pain. I thought to myself: Time to… uh.. GO BACK. There’s no way I’m going through this every time I go over one of the many mountain passes I’ll cross.

So I came back home, and here I am, frustrated. And pissed at that freakin’ doctor whose advice basically amounted to nothing. I’m glad I didn’t take the picture of the gas station.

Brand Democrat.

In the past few days, I’ve made an important discovery: If you snort the Flonase just before you go to bed, you won’t wake up with an ear canal full of goo. This is important because, well, you can guess.

I’m a little antsy about setting out to travel tomorrow, since my ear isn’t at 100%. It’s more like 75-80%. The plan is to wake up Sunday morning in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon, which means… being in the mountains with an ear infection. The meds don’t really keep me from driving, and I’ll have extra Meclizine around if I start showing signs of vertigo, so I don’t think it’ll be a problem, but it’s still obviously very important to have something to worry about. Wouldn’t you say?

The Blue Mountains, by the way, were one of the last big physical barriers for travelers on the Oregon trail. After following the Snake river through it’s plain in Idaho, you got to the mountains and their evergreen forests and high passes.

If you look at a map of Oregon, you’ll see a town called LaGrande, which always makes me think of that ZZTop song, ‘LaGrange.’ I’ve been to both places, and it’s really a toss-up which is better. I hear they gotta lotta nice girls both places. Or something.

But between LaGrande and Pendleton is the real mountain pass, and that’s where I intend to wake up Sunday morning, going backwards against the flow of long-ago immigrants along the trail. Near Meacham, my near-namesake town.

I turns out that Mitchell and Meacham and my last name are all permutations of the same clan name. I’ve been listening to a lot of Joni Mitchell lately, and I think it’d be really cool to find out that mutual ancestors of mine and hers fought with Duke William at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (as this dubious web site says). Once upon a time, some feudal lord sent some young men to die for William, and then later, Joni writes a song about a river so long it teaches your feet to fly, and later, I write a ‘blog entry about the Blue Mountains in Oregon.

A journey across Oregon in 1940, published as part of an Oregon WPA program: LaGrande to Umatilla

MEACHAM, 156.9 m. (3,681 alt., 70 pop.), was named for Col. A. B. Meacham, a member of the Modoc Peace Commission, who established the Blue Mountain Tavern at this point in 1863, just Outside the borders of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. In the early 1800s the site of Meacham was platted and given the Biblical appellation of Jerusalem with a pretentious plaza in the center known as Solomon Square. But the dreams of the new Jerusalem soon abated and the little mountain village reverted to the old name of Meacham.

“They took all the trees, and put ‘em in a tree museum/And they charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see ‘em:”

Nancy Langston’s extensive Epilogue draws on her work on the Blue Mountains of Oregon. After discussing the typicality of the Blue Mountains to further the historical understanding of pine forests throughout the West, Langston concentrates on the Forest Service’s activities in the “Blues.” The departure point is the Forest Service’s “unusual admission of guilt and confusion” in 1991 that placed the blame for the environmental crisis in the Blue Mountains squarely at its doorstep (p. 248). Attempts to manage the forest since the 1920s resulted in its near destruction. Although the early foresters failed to realize it, the timber land of the Blue Mountains fundamentally differed from forests in the Midwest and east. “Water and Fire” characterized the Blue Mountains. Once dominated by pine, few pine stands now remain. Despite the best intentions of foresters to scientifically manage the area to reduce old growth stands and replace them with manageable, even-aged, forests nothing of the sort happened. Instead, logging and wildfires resulted in a tremendous change in tree type. Just as William Robbins identified the collapse of the Coos Bay region being set in motion in the 1940s, Langston argues that the collapse of the Blue Mountains in the 1990s began seventy years earlier in the 1920s.

Really good ‘mad pride’-ish article in this week’s Seattle Weekly. It’s called ‘Psyched Out,’ and tells two stories of schizophrenia diagnosis and treatment, and with an emphasis on the social pressures which surround trying to stabilize and re-enter society.

In the same issue, Geov Parrish argues thusly:

The phrase “moral values” in its current political guise might be nothing more than a polite way of categorizing people opposed to gay marriage. But its use is an opportunity, for progressives and liberals, to make the case that ours is a sensibility deeply grounded in a moral vision shared by a majority of Americans. Using the platform of moral values in coming years will allow progressives to be something more than a loyal, if relatively powerless, opposition.

We can become America’s conscience.

The problem with this is that liberals have always been America’s conscience, but America doesn’t want to have a conscience, as evidenced by the fact that ‘moral values’ is a code phrase for ‘opposed to gay marriage.’ Conservatives have, for the past few decades at least, dismissed liberals’ moral arguments as hand-wringing and whining and bed-wetting. America truly doesn’t care about the moral arguments made by liberals, when they come from liberals. If Pat Buchanan made the exact same moral argument as Noam Chomsky, a conservative would praise Buchanan’s insight while calling Chomsky a traitor.

What’s needed is a vision of forward motion. It needs to be rooted in a solid moral argument, with bonus Judo points if it leverages conservative moral rhetoric against itself.

Update:

Femme: I’m not saying that conservatives lack a conscience. What I’m saying is that, historically, liberals have acted as the conscience of the nation. Kerry’s Winter Soldier testimony is an example of this. Since Nixon, especially, the left has been in the role of truth-telling against the right’s power grabs and monumental excesses. And what happens is what happens all over the place when a bully gets confronted: The confronter is marginalized as a goody-two-shoes or a bed-wetter, or whatever.

In the past (especially, as I say, since Nixon), lefty liberal progressives have stopped there, because it should be obvious to everyone what’s going on, and there’s no easy way to respond to name-calling without being an ass. The liberal idea that everyone should be included in the solution applies also to political enemies, who exploit that fact.

That’s the real task here, and it has been for a really long time, and I’m glad Democrats are finally wising up. The task is to quit being naive, but to do it in a way that doesn’t betray the notions of fair play and consensus.

Just as I’m getting into all the mash-ups floating around on the internet, WorldChanging does an entry about it. They missed the undeniably ineffable DJ Riko, whose ‘Come Together‘ mix CD is getting heavy hard disk platter rotation on my iTunes. (You can click to download, but it’s 58 megs big.) Breeders fans will want to go somewhere around minute 25. Jim.

I just figured it out! I’m really Brian Eno!

Actually, I’ve known I was Brian Eno-flavored since I heard ‘Possible Musics,’ and my short-lived musical career was inspired in no small part by Eno And His Pals. But I hadn’t seen that cartoon before.

And speaking of otherworldly androgynous musicians, here’s a very detailed list of everything (and nothing) David Sylvian has done.

I’m diggin’ on this Worldchanging article about palm nut and quinoa beers.

I would like to take a moment to completely and wholeheartedly endorse…

Data Rescue.

And the reason for this? It managed to pull all the important data off that hard drive that died a while back, taking all my photography with it.

This is me, doing a happy dance.

I also want to point out that it wasn’t just a matter of running Data Rescue to get these files back. It seems that what’s broken about the hard drive is that sometimes powering it on turns it schizophrenic, making horrible whirring and clicking sounds, while other times, very rarely it should be added, it will power up and act civilized. Kind of a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde type thing, except the emphasis is on Mr. Hyde.

So basically, in addition to the hours it took for the software to extract the files, I had to go through about a hundred permutations of: power on hard drive, insert FireWire cable, click ‘Rescan for drives…’, and so forth. Sometimes I could hear the read/write head banging around inside the mechanism like Ginger Baker, and other times it would scurry back and forth across the platter in increasingly tight movements until the drive would make a loud click, reset itself, and go through initialization again.

Basically, it was like a living thing, going about living in all the wrong ways.

I updated the software that drives my photo gallery over at mile23.com, and added and subtracted a few things.

The software is Gallery, which had a recent security update, so if you use it, you should update, too.

My gallery is here. The software update has a new RSS feature, which doesn’t seem all that useful once you subscribe to it. Maybe I just have it misconfigured. Then again, even as it is, it’s nice to have a bone to throw to the RSS hounds. Assuming anyone would subscribe.

New at the gallery is some stuff I’ve been taking with this tiny crappy camera I got, called a Philips Key 007. James Bond would require better, but the point here is not to get excellent pictures, but just to have a piece of gear that’s roughly equivalent to a phone-cam, without the phone.