Intentional Communities and Good Neighbors

Sometimes it’s time to change

A major revelation occurred while sick with the flu recently. First time ill with influenza in many, many years, and I was vaccinated, too. During my illness and recovery, however, insights emerged for me to understand and now share. Have struggled in recent years with the idea of living in an intentional community. Struggled with the pros and cons of people choosing cooperative living. Grew up in a conventional nuclear family. Much of my adult life, however, was spent living in intentional communities of one kind or another, and also with others in quasi-or-semi-intentional communities. I’d placed high value on sharing resources, minimizing individual space, minimizing expenses, supporting each other in living the lives we chose, and all the joys and life lessons from living cooperatively with other people. ICs made economic, environmental, and ecological sense. One learned and improved skills in effective communication and conflict resolution. Such communities were a great cure for loneliness and a wonderful place both to raise children and to age in grace. People had the freedom to explore and practice living alternative lifestyles such as polyamory. They provided a network for spontaneous social interaction of a kind rapidly disappearing from our fractured, mobile, technologically-focused civilization.  Continue reading

Text to a Young Friend for Thanksgiving

While hanging out with a friend and his son, a young adult, watching football, debated and wondered if he should reconnect with his family of origin on his mother’s side, especially his grandparents. Should he go over there alone on Thanksgiving? He felt they were estranged. His father had looked forward to spending Thanksgiving with his son, but also encouraged his son to reconnect with his ex-wife’s family. Either way, he would not be alone. Family is community, especially among these particular folks. After giving the topic some thought, I picked up my smartfone after I’d returned home to text the lad. The following is what I wrote: Continue reading

Kate Z & Moose Dog & Baby Whales & the Lone Ranger & Moose on the AT

A text from a father to his adult daughter morphs into creative chaos

Dylan, my oldest child, moved to New York from Seattle just in time for the Covid Pandemic. Somehow Dylan managed to graduate Summa cum laude (tho too shy to openly admit it) from the New School in Manhattan in 2021 with a Masters in Creative Writing (Nonfiction). They gifted me with a copy of this book from one of their favorite authors. Ms. Zambreno’s writing moved and inspired me as well during those uncertain times. Damn, we still live in uncertain times.

Good Morning over there in New York, dear Elder Daughter, it’s Midnight here in Seattle…

Hey, I still wanna hear more about Moosie Moose Dog^^^ and it dawned on me as I read a little more of Kate Zambreno’s weird, yummiliciously quirky Screen Tests from 2019 and went back to gaze upon its pinkishly pale crimson book color the image there was a horse on the cover. A frickin’ horse! Was so cool to have Kate Z’s black ’n’ white foto of her jamming on a piano peeking thru a jagged, torn fake hole in the book. Cool in a discordian kinda way. Tonight close to midnight an idea dawned on me, damn, that ragged rip in the spacetime of a 2-dimensional image is really a cutout of a flat horse. 

How many times have I peered at this cover? And not realized this? LOL! Perhaps looking hard past her cleavage as if it was merely what it was, a black gown, strapped, dressed for zany Zambreno performances. At least there weren’t any pictures of her baby rolling off the piano bench and falling to the floor to burst out with startled wails. Because her kids were human babies and not baby whales. Baby whales with tails to tell tales in cetacean code? So all these things flashed thru my pretzel brain supercharged with neurodivergence and strong black coffee before wondering if the cowboy on the horse was some weird ode to the Lone Ranger, to those iconic cowboys of old black ’n’ white cinema, or just a Mormon man who smoked cigarettes and drank Pepsi when not inside a church for Latter-Day Saints. But I always got LDS mixed up with LSD. So, was cute little Moose Dog really kidnapped in Seattle?

Continue reading

Why I left the Radical Left

This is not about the many serious issues we face, but about my experiences and the general mindset of the many groups reacting to these issues from the Far Left side of the spectrum

For what reason did I leave the Far Extremes? Why did I leave the Radical Left? Who cares? Well, I care, and so do the people close to me. When you’re deep in the haze of revolutionary fervor blinded by righteous struggle, Far Extremist groups don’t seem far out at all but quite normal. Go too damn far to the Right or too far to the Left, however, and it’s a buncha damn crazy people. They’re obsessed with ideology. They worship symbols as icons. Their ego is inflated with self-righteousness and a distorted sense of history. Their self-confidence is poisoned by a wild, cerebral mix of low self-esteem buttressed by delusions. They focus on what should be, what could have been, what would come to pass, and what ought to be, not on what is actually true and factual.

So many people I encountered among the Far Extremes are paranoid, revel in feeling oppressed, and live in constant, never-ending “struggle.” And the struggle never ever ends. There’s always the next revolution, another group to demonize, another cause to get enraged and bitter over, and even deaths of “those against us” to celebrate. Acceptance is alien. Forgiveness is mocked. Compassion and empathy are absent. Love is conditional, prosperity scorned unless either shared or aggregated, and we’re all expected to march, fight, and struggle. Fight! Fight! Fight! Struggle! Struggle! Struggle! The big, evil “System” is to be overthrown or infiltrated and demolished. Reform is just a mask. The complexity and range of human nature is reduced to a simple “us versus them” mentality. Science becomes religion. Religion becomes science. Economics becomes politics. Imagine what happens when the race up the Tower becomes a race to the bottom…and one breaks on thru the bottom to the other side?

Economics is held up as some kind of holy religion, but few within these cults bother to check the math. Or even apply the math. Instead most just parrot, and they parrot nonsense. If one keeps hearing 2+2=5 long enough, and hearing it spoken as true by so-called credible authorities, and echoed often by one’s peers, then guess what one assumes is true? Why bother to check the charismatic demagogue’s math? Why have the demaguru and all your new cult friends mad at you and angry enough to revile and ostracize you? Hello? History, the interpretations as well as records of people and events, is instead gazed upon as a mess of tea leaves and goat intestines in search of arrows pointing to utopian futures. Go be the future now! Yeah, right.

Radical used to be a cool word. It means to return to one’s roots. We radicals would return to our roots and rebuild the foundations of civilization. We would destroy and wipe clean the earth to rebuild a better world for all. The problem with this thinking is believing the masses, the common folk, the working classes, whatever, regardless of how difficult their lives may be, would prefer instead to live amidst carnage, destruction, and annihilation. Few of those who have endured revolutions and civil wars have any desire to keep reliving such violence, bloodshed, and hatred in the pursuit of justice. 

A major reason I left radical activism is I grew tired of ideological rigidity and cultish groupthink. History and actual economics were ignored if they did not fit group ideology. Pragmatism and practicality were scoffed at. Any serious attempt to question and challenge ideological authorities led to demonization, ridicule, and ostracism. Group ideology became group idiocy, altho those within the group failed to recognize it as such. So many so-called radical intelligentsia confused critical thinking with harsh criticism of the Other and the Other’s minions. Critical thinking skills had atrophied inside the groups I experienced. Critical thinking was instead replaced by circular thinking and the babble of confirmation biases.  Continue reading

Loose Screw Guy

~ Stories from the streets & buses of Seattle, America ~

The time’s about 8 in the morning on Veteran’s Day 2023 in the Pacific Northwest, I’m the son and grandson of United States Navy men from Virginia, and was deemed too deaf to serve when I tried to enlist way back in college. Now I jounce along on the local metro bus as it barreled down Aurora Avenue South from Shoreline into Seattle on my way to work Downtown. The bus is one of those newer red-and-yellow express lane coaches, and already it bounces like some old sad hag tossed up on a trampoline by mean kids at some stupid Animal House frat party. Gosh, I’m losing it already.

My beloved, troubled country is a wreck even tho there’s many promising things going on, too. The wrecks, however, make the evening news. So, like many sick of neverending chaos and political paralysis, I am sick of conservatives and their rigid narrowmindedness. And I’m deathly sick of liberals and their rigid, ideological delusions. I’m sick of them all. Aren’t you? Are are you still yelling at your “brothers and sisters” on the other side? Where the Hell are all the normal folks in the center? The moderates? The so-called Radical Middle? Gone, baby, gone. Gone with the flood. They’ve fled, or have themselves been radicalized by extremists.

We’re long, long gone from the 1970s and 80s when my father used to joke he was a Republican who kept voting Democrat. The centerfolks are so far gone as to be beyond desperation and resignation. Instead they burn with whatever mob comes along as beacons of rage, hate, and stupidity. I know. Aye, I know, dammit, because I used to be one of them. Used to be on the Far Left on most issues and on the Right on others. For years! Liberating myself from these political-economic cults, however, has not made life any easier. Such freedom has allowed me the liberty to see everything with absolute clarity.

Homeless young White man gets on the bus in Shoreline wearing only a white T-shirt and new, too-long blue jeans. He’s tiny, lean, bushy headed, and his jeans are bunched up over dirty sneakers. He’s babbling and gesturing to invisible people. His arms and fingers jerk in jagged jumps like bolts of lightning. He’s not at all smooth in his movements. Even his head turns in rough jerk-and-stops like a robot’s with bent gears. He scares me. Definitely would not want to end up in a fight with someone who reminds me of a rabid raccoon. Temps outside are now in the 40s. Got down into the 30s overnight. It’s wet outside. Damp and misty. He’s cold. Exhibits what seem to be signs of schizophrenia, but I don’t know for certain. He sits down hard in the seat across the aisle from where I sit, so hard its almost as if he plunged down from Outer Space.

The man seems oblivious to the cold other than pulling his t-shirt up over his face for a moment or two, then he stares around seeing thru everyone on the bus as if we’re all invisible to him, but he can see all those people invisible to us. Or entities. His speech is intelligent gibberish, and he jabs his finger around the bus as those invisible creatures up in the air. I feel if he actually saw me, and if had an axe in his hands, he would immediately render open my skull out of some mix of unrestrained curiosity and evil duty to some prehistoric old god whose call he is unable to resist. Continue reading

Drunks in the Parking Lot

~ an urban vignette ~

Old Black man sat bundled up in the sun with a ragged, cardboard sign propped up on his knees begging for help. He sat on the sidewalk with his back to the brick building of the Walgreens drugstore. The sidewalk was stained with gum. Torn candy wrappers and cigarette packs and bottle tops and wadded up tissues littered the area next to the store and out in the parking lot next to a line of trees and bushes. A dusty Subaru Crosstrek with a mud-encrusted mountain bike locked on top sat in the back of the lot. Some traveler looking for a place to pull over and nap before pushing on to the next adventure. The old gentleman sitting on the sidewalk wore a large, helmet-like hat with big, fuzzy earflaps. The outside of the hat was a dark-grey, and the fuzzy fur on the inside was an orangey yellow. He never spoke. Nor did I. All kinds of humans ambled by, either lost in their own worlds or staring all around on the look out for crazed, desperate folks lacking emotional self-control but possessing guns, knives, syringes, and drugs. 

My prescriptions were ready for pick-up. As I walked across the parking lot to enter the store, the Walgreens in Shoreline immediately north of the Seattle border, a car almost ran over the sidewalk and into the old guy sitting silently with his big, Elmer Fudd hat on. A sedan with WA plates lurched in from Aurora Avenue, slammed into the high curb of the Walgreens sidewalk, bounced with a jolt, and stop. Was a hard park. The beggar man on the sidewalk didn’t even seem to flinch. Maybe he wasn’t all aware. Or maybe he was astutely aware. Continue reading

Fone Guy & Eye Patch Man

Stories from the Streets and Buses of Seattle

First noticed Fone Guy at a bus stop sitting inside the shelter on a wet, wintry day speaking passionately into his old-style flip fone while I waited for the bus. His voice was as crisp and clear as a lawyer arguing in court and as fiery as a street activist bellowing into a bullhorn. Most of the time, however, he could’ve been one of those YouTubers pontificating like Joe Rogan on the state of everything from wars to boxing matches. We were up in the north end of the City of Seattle where the neighborhoods of Greenwood, Bitter Lake, Carkeek Park/Broadview, and Crown Hill come together in one of Seattle’s somewhat chaotic, funky, octopus intersections. There I stamped around waiting for the southbound # 5 to head south down thru Greenwood and up along Phinney Ridge. Fone Guy was dressed like a laborer but without any particular jobsite uniform. His heavy coats hung open around his burly, middle-aged frame. Dawned on me he was probably homeless and the bus stop shelter was his office. In those moments, however, he was King of the Shelter and Emperor of the Flip-Fone. Continue reading

Tears for Years over Eons of Blood

Cry. Suffer. Violence. Cry all time. People suffer. No one cares. Just make money & go go go like a UFO!

Violence carves up the news. Violence renders history. Mutilates art. Destroys life. New wars break out as yet more bloody reruns of neverending dramas. Tears flow for years and years then dry up as deserts fill with sand and dust. Years of tears. The biggest desert, however, is the ocean, and it is full of salt.

Recently watched HBO dramas The Pacific and Band of Brothers on Netflix about American units in the Second World War. Was appalled by the savagery of high intensity combat. These shows captured the ultimate essence of violence, it’s banality and senseless destruction as well as how those contradict with the necessity for violence and survival. Grim. I felt the same watching the horrors of melee combat in films set in Ancient times such as The Gladiator and The Eagle. Felt the same grimness watching the Medieval combat within The Last Kingdom series, Braveheart, and shows set in the Crusades. First World War movies such as every version of All Quiet on the Western Front and 1917. There are amazing war films and shows set in Ancient and Medieval East Asia, in Africa, in the Americas, and many others whose titles jumble together in a carnage of memories set free with tears. The glory and the heroism itself brings tears as well as the horror of heroism.

Oh, the vastness of wars stretched out over time and place. Who remembers those where many hundreds and many thousands died in longago wars and battles so remote in the mind even history buffs must look them up? There are wars lost to history where not even the names and places are remembered. Often the tribes, cities, and civilizations of everyone and anyone who could and would are extinct. Continue reading

Little Boy with Toy Truck

A little Seattle vignette

The ramp in the story. We staff were rearranging the store as we transitioned from spring and summer to fall and winter.

A child, one little boy – maybe two, three years old at the most – pushes a yellow, toy Tonka truck down the ramp here at work in the Downtown Seattle REI store. He’s fierce, determined, and lost in focused joy. His Mom stands at the top of the ramp watching, bemused, as he takes off a pushin’. My coworker the Bandana Man stood near the bottom and off to the side, chuckling, chuckling hard enough to make his belly shake. Continue reading

Ripples Sparkling in the Sunset

From a magickal evening at Lime Kiln Point State Park, San Juan Island, Washington

Ripples sparkle in the sunset on our honeymoon.

Faithlyn and I, newlyweds, sat in a restaurant on the edge of Friday Harbor and asked our server where do locals go to enjoy the best sunsets. 

“At the old lighthouse at Lime Kiln!” she blurted as she stood up straight with a grin. “My parents used to run the lighthouse there back when it was a real, working lighthouse.”

So that’s where we went. Continue reading

The Girl at the Register

A vignette, stark & blurry

The girl working the register is sick. Red faced, sniffling, swallowing repeatedly, more sniffling, sneezing, watery eyes…don’t know & can’t tell if she suffers from allergies or sinusitis or, hell, the latest, horrible variant of COVID-19, but she looks so miserable. I feel sad for her. Neither one of us wears a mask. Continue reading

Street Scenes from the Neighborhood

Three Vignettes from Shoreline, a small satellite city on the NW border of Seattle

There’s a mentally unstable young bearded White fella dancing, leaping, and spinning around in the intersection of N. 155th and Aurora 99 near our apartment complex in the south-central Shoreline neighborhood of Westminster. He’s acting like a dumb ass goofball. The man dramatically waves around a cardboard sign as he squats and jumps as he begs for money. He acts silly because maybe he thinks his showing off out in the streets looks cute, but all he’s really doing is pissing off every driver around as he frolics right out there in the middle of the road as if he’s up on stage. At least he got some pants on, a pair of blue tropical-print board shorts. And they’re pulled up, too. Some folks out on the streets don’t even have their britches up.

Had noticed him earlier as I drove uphill to the pharmacy at Walgreens. Passed him crouching at the corner of McDonalds munching fiercely on whatever food he got a hold of. He chewed in a hurry as he peered all around with feral intensity. Reminded me of a wild beast backed into a corner and about to pounce up into your face. 

Drove into the parking lot at Walgreens and stopped. Parked. Garbage was strewn around the store on the Shoreline side of the Seattle boundary. Most of it was the kind usually associated with the trash left behind by homeless people and too many lazy ass bus riders who don’t give a shit about much of anything anymore. Not just metro riders either. Saw plenty of people pull up in cars, park, open their doors, and toss handfuls of garbage out across the pavement. A primal urge rose up, a desire to slam my car into theirs and dart over and smash them in their stupid fucking heads with … something … a caste-iron granny skillet, and, of course, the feelings pass and I shrug and let it all go like my parents, my teachers, my therapists, and the authorities have showed us over the decades. Yes? Pick your battles. Not worth going to prison over. No right to play god. We aren’t in their shoes. Practice acceptance, compassion, empathy, forgiveness, and agape. Yeah, I get it. Still wanna kick their careless, apathetic, dumb, stupid asses, tho.

There was a young White lady in Walgreens with longish blonde hair, dressed like a hooker in a tight pink stretchy outfit. She’s dirty and bruised. Maybe she’d been evicted from those two sleazy motels the cops shut down the other day on North Aurora for human trafficking, sex slavery, drug dealing, rapes, illegal prostitution, violence, shootings, and even a murder. Minors barely into their teens were being forced into prostitution. There pimps operated them out of the Seattle Inn and the Emerald Motel. Some pimps were teenagers themselves. All those hookers, however, had and have to go somewhere. Saw this woman moments earlier while waiting for the traffic lights to turn green on Aurora. She’d lugged an enormous tote bag full of her belongings across the street. Ah, gosh, I feel sad, curious, frustrated, and resigned. Wouldn’t it be so much better to legalize, regulate, and tax prostitution? Seems having licensed, adult professional sex workers would be a good idea, yes? What would the consequences, however, for all the illegal ones and their criminal pimps, especially the minors?

Here she was again, the woman in stretchy pink who crossed the street with all her belongings, now in Walgreens, bent over the check-out counter speaking agitatedly. She desperately tried to get the cashier to convert a wad of bills into … smaller bills? Didn’t make any … sense. I couldn’t hear them well. Difficult to understand. Hard of hearing anyway, I am. But the cashier, of an East Asian ethnicity, a woman who struggled to speak English clearly, could not understand the young White woman either. She quickly got frustrated, saw a line of other customers forming behind the dirty, bruised lady, and tried to wave the assumed-hooker away out the door. The hooker lady grew more desperate and tearful. All this transpired in seconds as I walked slowly down the aisle past the counter. Walked slowly because my low back and knees hurt like hell from chronic injuries. OMG what are we to do? What are we to do? I texted my wife about this. My wife and I are both messed up as it is, lol but not LOL, as we have our own problems piling up, but at least we aren’t like those fellow humans. Our fellow humans.

Makes our squabbles over messes in the closets seem utterly frivolous by comparison. Continue reading

A Close Brush with Death on the Freeway

Unexpected terror & confusion as the author and his bride returned from their honeymoon up in the San Juans

William & Faithlyn goofing around at Roche Harbor on the day before the near-miss on the freeways home. Definitely did NOT look this jolly after such a close call. Grateful, tho, for all’s well with life, limb, and property.

Selfie of us earlier the day of the near-miss. We’re in San Juan National Historical Park at the British camp.

Our car earlier Thursday in San Juan National Historical Park.

Another ferry passing ours on our way home Thursday afternoon from Friday Harbor, San Juan Island, to Anacortes on Fidalgo Island (connected by a bridge to the mainland). We had no inkling whatsoever over what was yet to come.

Called 911 yesterday for first time ever. Faithlyn, my new wife, and I were heading home to Shoreline from our little honeymoon to San Juan Island near the border with Canada. I drove. Our car was a white, 2020 Subaru Forester, Touring Model, in great shape. We were southbound on I-5 outside of Lynnwood when I realized I entered the entrance lanes to I-405. Traffic was moderately heavy, typical for summer evening traffic in our urban corridor. We were passing thru lower Snohomish County heading for King County where our home is. The day and date was Thursday 3 August 2023.

Looked both behind us & to my left, open lane, & so merged left. Our Subaru has flashing yellow lights to warn of vehicles in our blind spots or passing, but they did not go off, i.e. the lane was clear. Local time was about 6:50 PM PDT. Suddenly a large white sedan rocketed around me at high rate of speed as in pursuit. I immediately thought police car, unmarked, but did not hear sirens or see flashing lights.

The “cop” sedan swerved between cars and cut in front of us – its brakes squealing as its tires sent up black smoke of burning rubber. The car slid and spun in front of us as the driver fought for control. They lost control. The car spun around backwards into traffic to face oncoming cars and trucks. I continued to drive forward even tho slowed way down. For a nanosecond of eternity the careening sedan spun right alongside our Subaru as I drove ahead. I saw the white car and its bumper inches away from us thru violent smoke. The car slid in a cloud of burning rubber across 2-3 lanes of traffic. The sedan skidded off the pavement, slammed against the steep rise of a brush-covered bank on the driver’s side, and rolled over uphill as it flipped into small trees and bushes. Other drivers slowed down everywhere and all seemed in control. All of this happened in seconds, in seconds with the heft of hours. Continue reading

William & Faithlyn’s Wedding

Shoreline/Seattle, Washington

Wednesday 26 July 2023

A snapshot of our journeys from Virginia and Jamaica to other places and eventually Washington where we became engaged and eventually married. Ours was a pandemic romance that occurred quite by happenstance and twists of fate. Our partnership and marriage became our destiny. Faithlyn created the video with Final Cut Pro from many fotos and videos by and from us, family, and friends. We had to cut so much out! Frank Sanborn, the wedding photographer, provided his services without charge. Enjoy!

 

William Dudley Bass & Faithlyn Ann Robinson Bass
Sunday 30 July 2023
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Earth
Sol

 

Copyright © 2023 by William Dudley Bass and Faithlyn Ann Robinson Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author, his Descendants, and his Wife Faithlyn until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

Bad Bad Bus Ride…& the Decline of America

A crazy sad madcap urban bus ride vignette 

My bus ride this morning was epic bad, the kind that makes me not wanna ride it again, LOL…well, lol but not LOL.

It’s not funny. No. Sad, yes. Madcap, maddening, tragic, stupid, bonkers Seattle. 

Was insane!

Yes, I’m with the progressive PC Woke crowd, and it’s all gone too darn far, way too far, dammit!, when chaos, anarchy, and disease take over, fear dominates, and citizens are cowed into submission, apathy, and violence.

Apparently the buses bombing straight up and down Aurora pick up the worse of the worse – about 75% if not more of the riders seem homeless. Most appear to have bad mental health, drug & alcohol problems. One old, White man with a shaggy beard kept shuffling around with his pants down around his ankles and no underwear – he tried to hold them up by hand but gave up as the bus lurched around traffic – and tried to hand folks a one-dollar bill. No one took it. Why? Cuz the money looked like he’d wiped his ass with it! He shuggled forward towards the bus driver and offered her a nasty looking dollar bill, too. He seemed confused and perhaps wanted to somehow pay someone for for his ride on the metro bus. She waved him away. Told him to go sit down and pull his pants up. He turned around looking confused with his britches still down with the money still in hand. He left a wad of bills on his bus seat along with folded pieces of notebook paper, but no one dared grab such nasty looking money or attempted to sit down on the same two-person seat. No way! And there were preteen kids on the bus with big eyes! A family of tourists! God! And the old fellow kept babbling really loud in a obnoxious way – except his babble actually RHYMED in a cute way that also grated on yer nerves. Continue reading

Man on the Morning Bus

A Seattle Bus Ride Vignette

Don’t laugh because it’s really not funny. OK?

A homeless man got on the bus talking vigorously to himself in gibberish. Plopped down across from me in aisle-facing seats. Scratched his head ferociously the whole time with his right hand as he gripped a crumpled stack of cash in the other. A hundred dollar bill stuck out between his fingers like a squished mouse.

He scratched & skritched & scrotched head so mightily I was afraid, truly afraid, he was gonna fling head lice on me with his right hand all the way from where he sat across the aisle from me. Then I thought he was gonna fling cooties into the back of a young Muslim woman’s hijab as she sat scrolling down her fone in a forward-facing seat. Was gonna holler at the bus driver if he did. Continue reading

Between Snotrockets in April

Text chat with my old friend Kurt Snotrockets after fist bumping Young Mister Snotrockets out in the Street

The following occurred in the City of Seattle on Monday the 18th of  April 2022:

Kurt: Hey, Sir William! Still blowing snot after a cold. Life is good.

Me: Dude! That’s nasty! LOL

Aye, I fistbumped a strung out young druggie with enormous snot rockets reaching down thru his red moustache & beard at the bus stop last week who was posturing around like a ruff & tuff gorilla wearing only red & black plaid pajamas with dingy Superman pants pulled up over them & a gray T-shirt and it was cold as Charles Dickens with the threat of snow flurries in the air. Then when I looked the scary guy in the eyes above his snot rockets, I glimpsed sadness & bafflement & fear in his soul. Or were his eyes mirroring mine? Continue reading

Baked Potatoes Faithlyn Style

Love in the Kitchen upon the Eve of a Wedding

Frigidaire! Looks like a 30 inch, 5-Element Freestanding Electric Range in Stainless Steel with a Self-Cleaning Oven.

“Our stove is weird,” my dear fiancé Sweetchickens likes to say. “Every stove is different. This one requires different settings than other stoves.”

“Well, won’t this be in a YouTube video?” I ask. “About hot love in the kitchen with hot potatoes? Y’know, taters and lusty romance?”

“No!”

“OKay…”

“This is what you do, Sweetie.” Continue reading

Mowing my Eyebrows

Finally had the courage to bushhog my eyebrows with my beard trimmer.

Kristina used to chase me around the house with scissors. Back when we were lovers and married. I was skeered she would accidentally pierce my eyeballs. It’s not why we broke up and got divorced, tho. 

Alicia, my current hairperson at a funky, post-hipster arty working class barbershop somewhere along the crest of Phinney Ridge, would trim them sometimes. With scissors. With shiny, silvery scissors. I tipped her more, too.

Didn’t want to look like a spooky old grump with barbed wire eyebrows with wild snowwhite hairs lancing out in all directions like mad cat whiskers. Somehow these bouncy thorns would twang up and away as they sprouted from my eyebrows. Yuppers, skippers, my eyebrows were WILD! You could lance a boil on a dead fish with one of my scary eyebrows!  Continue reading

BAN ALL INTERNET COOKIES!

ABOLISH THE HORRORS!

Free download of Cookie Monster image from clipartmag.com.

C‘mon, advertising wizards, WTF are all of you doing pushing cookies and cookie pop-ups on us? It ain’t working. [Imagine this space churning with profanity and fed-up energy!]  We HATE them! What’s taking so long for y’all to notice? These corporacratic “tools” are not even addictive so don’t even try to pretend it’s digital fentanyl. Screw fentanyl anyway as opiates are a scourge as bad as any nasty viral epidemic.

Please, for God’s sake, even if you’re an atheist, study basic 21st Century human behavioral psychology. We’re not all slobbering capitalistic Pavlovian dogs! Yes, we struggle with overconsumption, pollution, and affluenza, sure, and we all HATE WEBSITE COOKIES! How cruel it is to tease one with some faint, nostalgic reminder of hot, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies hoping such memories of happy holiday treats will make us consent to installing cookies? My goodness, I rarely write the way I am here in the now. I feel so exasperated, frustrated, and angry as this mini-essay unfolds into a diatribe as businesses continue to bobble senselessly along the edges of the Charybdis of Cyberspace. Continue reading

A Raincloud for Halloween

My four year old daughter determines to be a Raincloud for Halloween 1998

Morgan (now Dylan) as a Raincloud for Halloween 1998.

Continue reading

This is home now, far from home: Snapshots of Dad on the U.S.S. Midway

“This is home, and so big too.”

Pictures are also from Bill Bass’s time in Boot Camp in Great Lakes and elsewhere.

The U.S.S. Midway, my father’s ship, passes a smoking volcano while sailing across the Mediterranean, 1952. Home away from home, and far away indeed. The volcano is Mt. Vesuvius on the edge of Naples, Italy.

Bill Bass, U.S. Navy. 1948-1952. My Dad before he even met my Mother. These pictures survived my house burning down in March 2010 and thus some damage remains evident. Life is messy.

These picture frame glimpses of my late father, William Merritt Bass, known as Bill, from old fotos and papers recovered from my 2010 house fire. He served in the United States Navy from 1948 to 1952. Bill Bass started out, as did many new sailors, at the historic Recruit Training Command Center at Naval Station Great Lakes. This was boot camp, in the midst of a bitter cold winter, located on Lake Michigan, in the upper NE corner of Illinois between Chicago and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The majority of his Navy years, however, was spent upon the U.S.S. Midway, an legendary aircraft carrier rich in history. Born, raised, and educated in Virginia, Dad lived his entire life in his native Commonwealth except during his time in the military and when he was traveling. Dad was proud of his service to his country during the early Cold War.

Continue reading

In Memory of Dave

A new friend passes & a movement feels his loss

Dave Thompson was a a man who saw the comedy in life and laughed often AND was also a fierce advocate for social justice and for improving the lives of working class folks and their families. Foto was cropped and modified from the one posted on the Socialist Alternative website. Unsure who took the original picture sometime during 2012-2014.

Copied & pasted directly from my posting on the Legacy website:

As time already passes into the past, I contemplate Dave’s various circles of friends, some of which overlapped for the first time at his lovely Memorial Service. I feel impressed how his friends, family, & colleagues from each circle each spoke to his brilliant intellect, his loyalty, his do-anything-not-can-do-but-will-do attitude, his quiet yet ferocious stands on controversial issues, his humbleness & lack of ego, which is rare for us political activists. Dave was funny, too. Made us all laugh together. Continue reading

Car Crash ’n’ Storm outside REI

Motor Vehicle Accident in a terrible storm outside Work down in our rapidly changing planet

Staring thru the windows at traffic in the storm. Tuesday the 9th of November 2021.

Earlier today during a unseasonably ferocious storm somehow a driver got their car got turned around the wrong way on the freeway. The driver immediately drove South into Northbound traffic and crashed. Up on the interstate right outside the huge Downtown Seattle REI store where I work in outdoor adventure retail. I-5 was elevated across the way where it bisected the city and funneled traffic onto and off the mighty Ship Canal Bridge. We watched big tow trucks with flashing lights lumber into traffic to clear the wreckage. Continue reading

Siri says, “Suck my titties!”

Apple’s Siri tells a schoolteacher in a classroom full of young Deaf children to, “Suck my Titties!” LOL!

Once upon a time before the Covid Pandemic struck, a Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing teacher brought her new iPhone to work. She was so PROUD of her new iPhone. The mobile device was a sophisticated piece of technology she regarded with amazement. Twas nearly magical! Her iPhone integrated well with the other tools Deaf and HOH people require to function at a higher level in our complex society. Oh, she was SO proud of her new tool-toy! Or is toy-tool a better description? Depends on the desired function at time of use! For one thing she used her iPhone to FaceTime Hearing people and read their lips and facial expressions. She could also sign in ASL with others who communicated in sign language as well.

This woman taught at a prestigious and world renowned school for Deaf children in the Southeastern United States. She’s a person whose politics skew quite a bit to left of center, but her personal values and lifestyle are rooted in traditional conservatism. Fascinating, brilliant human being with a riveting life stories, and she made me promise not to reveal her name and the name and location of the school she taught at on the day of the incident.

The teacher propped up her iPhone on a desk at the front of the class and asked Siri a question. Siri is the artificial intelligence programmed into Apple products with a feminine voice to algorithmically respond to human inquiries, commands, and requests. Siri was ready to go.

Teacher asks question.

“Suck my titties!” Siri responds. Continue reading

HAS THE WORLD CHANGED?

A Homeless Man asks a question with his pants down, but can anyone really answer?

Gawd, now I know I’m back in my beloved but gone-to-hell Seattle. While changing buses at Northgate Way & Aurora Avenue on my way home from a long trip to North Carolina, I came upon a homeless man of about 40 years old who also happened to be Black and bearded. He stood on the edge of the curb on the west side of Aurora next to the crosswalk, cupped his hands up to both sides of his face, and bellowed out into traffic:

“HAS THE WORLD CHANGED? HAS THE WORLD CHANGED?”

“WELL, HAS IT?” was my automatic response tho only in my mind.

My second response was the temptation to shout at him to pull his damn pants up, but that was before I listened to him.

Then he rhythmically pulls down his dirty gray sweat pants and shows his naked ass to the whole wide world and then swings his cock up and out across the way like the neck and head of a goose jerking forth from a lake. It looked large and waxy in the harsh, September sunshine. Pulls his pants back up with this tip of his penis perched upon his waistband like a damn peacock peeking out. Damn, I looked away, away, AWAY!, but, OH GAWD was too late as it all happened in a flurry of seconds as the crossing lights hadn’t changed yet. Couldn’t unsee this mess. Felt transfixed, no, crucified, crucified! Felt crucified by the clarity of his call and response during the middle of our long, apocalyptic slide into Armageddon. Continue reading

In Remembrance of Ellen

A wonderful friend from long ago passes on

Ellen died on Thursday 20 January 2022. Her transition was peaceful. She and her wife was surrounded by dear friends local to the area. Pancreatic cancer is a horror. So many people I know have battled cancer of all kinds. Some died, such as my parents, a grandfather, and my partner’s Mum. Cancer is an umbrella term for a complex of nightmarish diseases. May cures for all cancers be found. Put cancer in the past. Make it history. Kill it, dammit. Kill it! Because I miss my friend. Wish we’d had more time to visit. Last saw her in circa 1995 when she and Ron last visited me and Gwen at Orca Landing, an urban cooperative household in Seattle. They were on their way from southwestern North Carolina to bike the West Coast. Decades slid by in time. She and Deb were gonna come out and visit us in Seattle before heading into the North Cascades National Park Complex back in the Summer of 2020. The double punch of the COVID-19 Pandemic and megawildfires with smokestorms, unfortunately, caused them to cancel. So never got to reconnect in person. We texted a few times. She and Deb decided to get away into the Boundary Waters Wilderness instead. There they had a great time canoeing and camping, and that was the last I heard from her.

Yeah, I miss my friend. Ellen had a delightfully chuckley laugh that could range from a loud bark to a jolly trainwreck of silly giggles. Ellen loved animals and spent much of her later life rescuing and caring for them. Was an activist in PAWS. Born in New Jersey and worked in New York. Worked for Playboy even! For the corporate NYC side, that is. Was too much for her. So she met Ron and together they moved away from the big urban corridors for a life of outdoor adventure and rural, small-town living. She had strong opinions and fierce convictions. Loved exploring the wilderness by foot, by boat, and spent many long miles pedaling her bike. Ellen Kilgannon is forever unforgettable.

From my words to her on the Caring Bridge site: Continue reading

MLK Jr Blues on a Cloudy Day

We see you. And we’re not messin’ around.

Today is the official federal holy day honoring the late, murdered Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior. I’m in Seattle with my Sweetie Sweetchickens. Both of us are FV & Boostered, we don’t feel well, and she feels worse than me. We’re waiting for the results of her test for COVID-19. Got tested Saturday. So with all due respect to MLK we avoided marches, rallies, and social gatherings indoors. We chose to go for a meandering ramble up in Shoreline at Richmond Beach Saltwater Park. We need wide open spaces with healing views of big sky, open water, and a breeze. Temperatures were in the low to mid 40s. Fahrenheit.

Contemplation of stillness amidst vast spaces…and those waves of energy rippling out thru air and water.

We contemplated the winter sun, the sea, and overcast skies. To our surprise one lone boat was way out there crossing the Sound. Then it dawned upon me the Salish Sea appeared so bereft of boats because of the threat of tsunamis from earlier in the morning. Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai, a submarine volcanic mountain in the South Pacific, had exploded in spectacular and deadly fashion. Tsunamis shot across the Pacific in all directions, battering other islands including Hawaii, Fiji, and New Zealand. These walls of water reached from Japan and Australia to the entire western coasts of the Americas all the way from Alaska to Chile. I wondered if any waves crashed up on Kamchatka in the Russian Far East.

In the Vast

Ahhh, yet another dreadful yet mesmerizing apocalypse. Fell into a funk as I considered the current state of voting rights in my country, the creeping and creepy push towards an American dictatorship, the clamor over civil war, multiple pandemics and not just COVID, the economy, asteroids, comets, Earth slowing down and cooling off, the paralytic crises in governments, the weather, the climate, murders and robberies…aye, twas a deep funk. So I opened wide into the mystery, the majesty, and the terror of it all.

Continue reading

Wounds of War

Visible & Silent

Reading of the current horrible war in Tigray with massacres and atrocities on all sides, especially by Ethiopian Federals and Eritreans, and watching the videos of massacres reminded me of an earlier time in my life. I was a licensed massage therapist and master bodyworker with a clinical practice in the Green Lake area of Seattle. My clients included people from all walks of life. They came in for reasons as varied as relief from pain from auto accidents, sports injuries, chronic pain, general health and well being, pregnancy, depression and anxiety, and a host of other reasons. The bulk of the people seeking bodywork were White with a smattering of Black and people of South and East Asian ethnicity. I myself am White, originally from Virginia.

Once state laws changed and insurance began to cover a greater range of treatments with what was formally called Complementarty and Alternative Medicine, or CAM, we began to see a greater cross-section of humanity upon our massage tables. I began to get a number of men, mostly slender Black men who spoke minimal English, as clients. Nearly all of them had scars from bullet wounds and sharp blades. As one of my backgrounds was world history and current affairs, I realized I was working with people seeking relief from old war wounds from the Horn of Africa. Being with these men and their injuries felt humbling, tragic, and even awe. 

As time progressed and more of these African immigrants began to open up, I felt startled to discover they were from different formerly warring groups. I worked on men who identified as Ethiopian, Amharic, Eritrean, Tigrayan, and Somali. A few were impressed I was aware of the complexities of the Ethiopian and Somali Civil Wars including the Ethio-Somali Ogaden War. I don’t know if they were combatants or refugees or both other than they were all former hostiles living peacefully as immigrants in the same city in the United States.

The horror and tragedy of multigenerational wars perpetuated back and forth across time and space hit me. Had to fight down tears. These men were all silent. They had endured bloodshed and terror and agony.

William Dudley Bass
Wednesday 30 June 2021
Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Earth
Sol

 

Copyright © 2021 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

 

 

The Verdict: Justice Achieved

George Floyd, Derek Chauvin, and the United States of America

Encounter with Cops and Protesters in a strange demonstration

To many a surprise and with great relief, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, a White man, was found guilty on all three counts in the murder of George Floyd, a Black man from Texas, originally North Carolina, who had recently moved to Minnesota. There was not any hung jury nor partial rendering of justice. The jury, itself composed of people from different ethnic groups including Blacks and Whites, deliberated quickly and returned their verdict to the court. The verdict took mere minutes to read out loud, and the world changed. Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree unintentional murder, guilty of murder in the third degree, and second-degree manslaughter. Sentencing is set for two weeks, why so damn far out I don’t know, but the killer will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars. Although Minnesota abolished the death penalty back in 1911, the murderer of George Floyd is more likely to be killed in prison by fellow convicts than to die of old age.

Faithlyn, my fiancé, first notified me by text while I happened to be on a break at work. We are both hard of hearing so we text to stay connected. She’s excited, riveted, and texted me “…The verdict is about to be read!” Moments later, she wrote one text: “Guilty.” Then, “On ALL counts.” Later on, she texted me it felt “so surreal.” Sent me an image of her avatar crying, “TEARS of JOY.” Full disclosure here: my Beloved is Black, Deaf, and an Immigrant naturalized as a US citizen while I am White, Hard of Hearing, and a native-born US citizen. Aye, tears of joy! Continue reading

Waking up early is an abomination

The Author explores a socially charged minefield of complaints and efforts to understand the whats, whys, and hows so we may find more effective resolutions to chronic sleep deprivation in our 21st Century Earth

“Wha…? Hey! Don’t wake me up! Leave me alone. Please!!!” The Author awakes from a short afternoon nap at 17:06 from having to get up at 6:00 after 4.5 hours of sleep, Wednesday 24 February 2021.

Getting up early is an abomination. Abominable! Unless one is a morning lark or a lion chronotype, of course. I’m neither as I’m a night owl. My chronotype is the wolf. We creatures of the night represent about 15% of humanity. Apparently owls and wolves are more creative than larks and lions, hunt better in the evening, but are not as “healthy, wealthy, and wise” as the early birdies. Hey, who and what determines the rules here? See, waking up early for me feels horrid, even painful. Embarrassing as well as our work culture frowns, no, scowls down at people who don’t naturally jump out of bed early and quickly to joyfully pounce upon their jobs.

Societies the world over, especially those disrupted by constant violence including warfare and further perturbed by industrialization and electrification, have nearly destroyed our natural sleep cycles. Electrification and resulting technoeuphorias under capitalism, indeed, under all -isms, has led to fantastical material progress. They’ve also generated nonstop media agitation, addictions to social media and video gaming, and even more online distractions such as celebrity gossip and multiplatform video streaming. One may get obsessed with nonstop global news of faraway local events or constant sports events in play somewhere on this planet. These factors have disturbed all of the chronotypes from their natural Gaian order. This disruption seems to be intensifying as well, altho such perceptions may be skewed by repetitive interruptions of sleep.

Even so, nearly 55% of people are bears, the middle-middle folks, those who prefer to get up “at a reasonable hour” neither “too early” nor “too late.” Bears tend to go to bed at a “reasonable” hour as well. While one can force their sleep and wakening patterns to change per their work and family schedules, such changes do not alter the underlying chronotype. Me, ah, I’m a sleep-deprived wreck. You?

Grew up on a farm where we got up at 4:30 or 5 in the morning if not earlier to be at work by 6 o’clock. Every day. Still had to milk the cows and feed the livestock even on the most sacred holidays. Ditto as a kid when my sibbies and I woke up early to eat breakfast with my family, get ready for school, feed our pets, get on the school bus, and ride 30-45 minutes further to arrive at school before classes began at 8:00 AM. Those kids who got on the bus earlier often spent a full hour on the bus. The afternoon bus rides home, or perhaps team sports, school-based clubs, part-time jobs, and chores left little time for homework and studying before going to bed. There were times when I was in high school I would have football practice at school after class, drive home in a car as the busses have long since left, do homework, engage with my family, do house and yard chores, study, then go up to the barns and do chores. I used to climb up into the barn loft and shovel grain for cow feed over into a big chute at 1 in the morning so whoever feeds the cows about 6:15 or so will have enough grain ready to flow. Then come home and get ready for bed. To get up early the next morning. My siblings had their own responsibilities, too. We were chronically sleep deprived even back when we needed sleep the most. Continue reading

I feel a dread coming…

Good Morning. I feel a dread coming. Happy New Year!

It’s a feeling, this dread, this existential, apocalyptic dread. Feel it coming round the mountain, I do. Feel it coming down the pike. It’s already loosened from our heads, this mighty dread.

I can’t help it. We live in an apocalypse of multiple, grinding, prolonged calamities. The weather turns gloomy one day, storms rage, and happy sunshine sparkles again. Then more darkness falls from skies heavy with silver and gray. The news cycles seemed trapped in their own circular inertia of addictive doom and gloom. Social media ricochets between apathy, denial, and toxic vitriol and self-righteous hatred. Facts and truths are buried under landslides of lies and illogical, insane, so-called conspiracy theories. Continue reading

Life in the Time of COVID-19: A Broken Journal

Notes from the Beginnings of the Apocalypse

Thursday 9 January 2020
There’s much to say and write down as existential dread grips the beginnings of this new year. Therefore, silence. Silence was my first language. Silence was The First Language.

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To the River House

Our blended family’s joys & sorrows finding, gaining, enjoying, and losing our dream house and the many wacky adventures & jolly mishaps in and around the area, 2007 – 2010

*Click on any picture to expand and enlarge*

*This is a graphic intensive foto essay with 246 fotos & 1 video, and the larger the screen the better*

Kristina out in front of our new home with our realtor Randy V. We called it The River House. I took this picture with a LG smartfone camera at the time, Tuesday the 16th of October 2007, down in Mule Tail Flats outside Plain, Washington, in the Greater Stevens Pass – Leavenworth – Wenatchee Corridor.

The River House, Monday 18 August 2008.

Our back yard ends here at the river. The Wenatchee River flows thru the Cascade Mountains from Lake Wenatchee down thru several canyons before merging into the huge Columbia River. Wednesday 26 December 2007.

Blended family dynamics, y’all! Trying to get ourselves togerther for a family portrait by our comic genius Emily, one of my oldest daughter’s closest friends. I’m on my knees in the snow. Behind stand L2R: Talia, Kate, Morgan (now Dylan), & Kristina. Wednesday 16 January 2008.

Kids were at the right age for goofy pranks, too. Here my oldest, Morgan/Dylan discovers, well, this shower stall doesn’t quite work like one of Dr. Who’s TARDIS booths. This one here just sucks people screaming down the drain merrily, merrily, merrily into oblivion. OK, well, I don’t know exactly what she’s up to here, LOL! But Emily does! Mid-January of 2008.

Talia & Kate wrecked & laughing at the Sledding Hill over in Lake Wenatchee State Park close to the River House. A big day for Talia as she got back into snow sports after breaking her leg in a sledding accident on the same run two years earlier. Taken on Monday 15 February 2010.

The back side of the River House, the side facing the Wenatchee River. Yeah, I cleared and cleaned up what was an overgrown, debris-strewn yard. “Parked it out,” as the locals say. Took many long days and weeks. Had to for wildfire insurance, too. Hot tub on the deck picture right, and an onion swing, a fun gift for the kids from family friends up in Edmonton, Alberta just left of center. Aye, we love this place. Took us a long time to get over its loss. Was a house we’d expected to leave to our kids and their kids and have family & friends from around the world visit us here. Monday 18 August 2008.

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Red Car from Minnesota

Vignette from the Palouse in Summer

We barreled along freeways across ancient landscapes, the two of us, strangers unknown to the other, me in my beat up, old, green minivan, she in a little red car. One could tell hers was a new car even tho dusty from long hours on the road. Both of us headed West across Palouse Country toward the Pacific. The Palouse is a mix of rolling hills, wooded groves, and raw, naked canyons carved by ice and water thru prehistoric fire and lava. Now the Palouse seems quiet aside from the sound of blowing wind and heavy farm machinery. Local farmers and ranchers worked off in the distance churning up clouds of dust and chaff as they brought in the last of the wheat harvests.

Howard, a migrant farmworker during my youth in Virginia once told me one of his most cherished life experiences was the magic of working the wheat harvest. He and his fellow laborers would start in the South and work their way towards the Far North across the Great Plains of the American and Canadian Heartlands. They called it, “following the harvest.” Howard considered it a pilgrimage, tho he didn’t use such words. It clearly affected him deeply in a religious sort of way. He did chuckled once as he reminisced following the harvest was about as close as going to church as he was ever gonna get.

Today the hills rolled forth under a hot August sun and all seemed earthbound shades of yellow and brown ringed by evergreen trees. I-90 stretched across the Northern states and out here ran from Spokane in Eastern Washington near the Idaho border all the way into Seattle on the Salish Sea. Along the way the interstate traversed multiple ranges of the Rockies to cross the Palouse. Then the blacktop zooms across the Channeled Scablands of Washington Desert, an arid, rocky morass of steppe, sagebrush, and astonishingly huge canyons carved by immense Ice Age floods, to push on thru the mountains and passes of the heavily forested and still icy Cascade Range. The road dropped down the mountains into the urbanized lowlands along Puget Sound where ships come down thru the Salish Sea from the Pacific Ocean. 

She zoomed towards me from behind in her little red car, passed a line of trucks barreling west, and then passed me on my left. Curious, I glanced over as we sped along around 75 to 80 miles an hour. Young White woman. Blonde hair. Aquiline nose. No glasses. Not even sunglasses. Looked straight ahead. Unwavering. Hunched over and gripping the steering wheel. Sun visor down. She kept steady, tho, and, I, uninterested in racing, slowed down a tad to give her space. Her short, little red car shot on by. Continue reading

Crazy Love on the Go

A Vignette of a Man on a Mission to meet his Mate

COVID-19 is a vicious disease and as ephemeral as smoke. There isn’t any social distancing at the airport. Oh yeah, people start out 6 feet or 2 meters apart or so, and then all efforts fall apart with kids underfoot, cantankerous libertarians, confused idealists, families freaking out over minor technoapocalypses such as all their flight information seemingly vanishes from their smartfones between cybercracks in the wifi, officials in uniform interrupting and waving their arms ever whicha way, clouds of shampoo and sweat and coconut pomade and invisible floating parasites including vast hordes of invisible killer cooties, i.e. invasive novel coronaviruses. We’re at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, too. I’m traveling solo, and I am in the company of fellow bipedal social mammals.

Wow, a whiff of sage from someone somewhere lingers in the air triggering flashback memories to explorations of Washington Desert Coulee Country.

Anxious people grow more fearful of missing their flights or keeping their jobs. They strain and push out in all directions beyond social distancing markers on the floor and lean over human fencing straps as if searching for … God? Continue reading

Dirtyface Love: Sweaty Romps up Dirtyface Peak

Two eccentric, adventurous lovers hike, scramble, and explore a rough and tumble mountain in the backcountry of the Greater Leavenworth – Lake Wenatchee – Stevens Pass Area one frosty midweek day in February 2007 and again one blazing hot Saturday in July of 2008. For love is a choice, and a relationship may be as strong and as fragile as one’s trusty, old, hiking stick.

Dirtyface Views. Saturday 26 July 2008. Fotos by the author & his partner.

Kristina on top in the bright, bright sunshine.

William Bass on Dirtyface.

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Father’s Day on The Mountain, June 2008

Snapshots of a family in the Great Outdoors playing in the shadows of volcanoes, Sunday the 15th of June 2008

The Mountain. This massive, majestic, and dangerous volcano loomed above us wherever we went this bright, sunny Father’s Day.

The author with 2 of his daughters: Foto Left to Foto Right: Katie (10 & a half+), me (49), & TaTa (6). Kate performed over 30 cartwheels nonstop earlier this day, her personal record. We all encouraged her, of course, coached her, too, and, to be clear, it was all hands off. Left us in awe. As did being up in the snow at Paradise in Mt. Rainier National Park wearing sandals and flip-flops.

Breakfast for Daddy! Red eyes for the camera & all! Kate & Talia surprise William for Father’s Day 2008. Foto by Kristina.

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Tauroidalus Babbleyonno Riddim Polyammo

Spun forth from pre-Covid-19 txts w my oldest child Dylan in NYC…

Yep, this is me, LOL! Goofin’ by the railroad at Carkeek Park, Seattle, a few crazy days later on a Wednesday afternoon the 12th of February 02020, a Taurus in a Toroid.

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Big Snow at Brew Creek

Cocooned by record breaking snowfall, a man in training to be a psychospiritual counselor allows himself to rediscover, accept, and integrate long forgotten aspects of self only to later find out ugly truths as he extricates himself from the remnants of overlapping Canadian-American cults gone supernova.

~Early January of 2007~

***This article remains a work in progress. Enjoy the journey!***

The author at Brew Creek Centre, a remote sanctuary roughly halfway between Squamish & Whistler, British Columbia, on the morning after the snowstorm. A friend of mine in the training took this foto of me with my camera. Early January 2007.

*Fotos taken in cloudy, darkening conditions with an older LG (Life’s Good!) smartfone with a slide-out pushbutton keyboard bought thru Verizon.*

Snow fell so deep and so fast as to bury the entire part of Canada where I planned to immerse myself in a psychotherapy training.

The main lodge after the storm.

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Joshua Tree: Rites of Passage

Sun, Rocks, Sand, Stars, and Scuffling with Fear out in the Desert
Friday 24 March – Thursday 30 March 2006

*Click on any foto to open up & expand the picture.*

On the rocks in Joshua Tree National Park! Morgan (now Dylan), age 12, learning to rappel with her climbing instructor on Sunday the 26th of March. Gravity rocks!

Stepmother & stepdaughter grinning together in the desert.

At Joshua Tree looking across the California desert to the mountains beyond. March 02006.

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Before I leave Facebook: FB Posts November 2018 – May 2019

Stories & Observations from a Social Media Memoir 

Preface

I avoid full names & Facebook hyperlinks to maintain some degree of privacy. As people gripped in the passing urgency and speed of social media rarely spell in Standard English or punctuate, I left all actual comments copied over as they were and are, ergo as (sic), Latin for the English thus. Quotes are placed in quotation marks. Ellipses preceded by quotation mark and followed by text imply the name of the Facebook friend addressed was removed, such as “…gotta go there!” People’s names in conversation were replaced by, “Friend.” I also broke up the long, socmed style blocks of sentences into shorter paragraphs.

Plus I use a version of an international dating standard for calendars that makes more sense to me as it’s logical and less tainted by religious and nationalist hubris: day, date, month, year, era.

This series of socmed vignettes begins in the eleventh month of the previous year.

My exit from the corporatized commons of socmed began back in the Great Global Recession as my life fell apart. Felt too overwhelmed by a crush of shame, hurt, fear, anger, and melancholia to write much at all. Those times gradually faded and I began to reemerge. But I began to leave once and for all in late summer of 2017 in the wake of heartbreak as a romantic relationship that seemed so serendipitous with a “this is it, finally!” quality faded away on the Pacific Crest Trail as ghosts between trees.

More and more information emerged as well as to how so many corporations including high-tech, internet-related, and social media companies were manipulating, misusing, and even abusing our private, personal data. Governments were engaged in this toxic stew as well. Criminal hackers, corporate spies, and government controllers interfered more and more with our lives. The rise of populist and extremist politicians of all stripes left and right further poisoned socmed and their rabid, ideologically rigid, slobbering followers turned social media into a toxic wasteland of dueling echo chambers where so-called Influencers dominated with their capitalistic narcissism. I got frakken sick of what I once loved and enjoyed becoming a putrid void of well, vomit, blood, and shit. I had to get out!

Leaving this emotionally distracting digital world began to speed up in November of 2018 and by Spring of the following year I was done. Didn’t delete my account, however, as the task to save fotos, especially of my children as they grew up to explore their lives is a laborious one. As is gathering the contact info of so many wonderful, faraway friends I desire to stay connected with regardless of socmed. Aye, this is my Exit back into the real world, my exit to a wild Cascadia, a world where even Terabithia is more real than socmed.

Peace.

 

Sunday 11 November 2018

The horror of World War 1 ended with a ceasefire 100 years ago today, although people continued to die by the millions in the numerous revolutions and civil wars left blazing on nearly every continent while the Spanish flu pandemic burned grimly around the globe. My paternal grandfather, Carol M. Bass, served in the United States Navy in those terrible times. He fought in the North Atlantic hunting German submarines. His ship sunk subs full of sailors from the other side. I remember asking him what it was like way back when I was a preteen lost in fantasies of glory.

Pops, our name for him, struggled to describe his experience. He didn’t say much, and he died of cancer when I was 12, so all I can recall were impressions as if splashed with black and red paint and cold water. Pops said being on a ship out at sea during the winter was freezing cold and sometimes scary. The ocean was immense, dark, stormy, and deep. The ship was small and noisy. He and his fellow sailors lived in dread of being torpedoed by German U-Boats and going down far from anywhere. Even when the ocean was calm and beautiful. Continue reading

My Journal: 2019

My various journals, diaries, memoirs, and personal letters range across the times and spaces of my life. Sometimes I kept extensive private records, usually with an eye toward possible publication. Nearly everything I wrote was written with the intention, indeed a commitment to share with the world. Most anyone was welcomed to at least read my work. For perhaps too many other times, unfortunately, I didn’t record anything. Most of what I wrote prior to the house fire of 2010, boxes filled with letters, journals, and diaries are gone forever. All burned up. Regardless of what others thought, however, I wrote with the determination to show, tell, and share the truth as I believed and experienced events and the emotions, thoughts, and feelings related to them. Of those matters I felt too ashamed, embarrassed, hurt, or afraid of to address in public, well, I simply didn’t even write about such things. Those things may follow me into death for all I know. This diary-journal hybrid represents 2019. One last thing: I don’t use the full names of certain friends, relatives, and acquaintances. Some of them are disguised. Thank you.

Me in the middle with my two youngest daughters all so grown up. On picture-left (my right) is Talia. On your right is Kate. Both are children I chose to take on, love, and raise as my own. My oldest, Dylan, formerly Morgan, was unable to get off work. This was taken shortly after Talia’s dance recital at Broadway Performing Arts Center, Seattle. Saturday the 4th of May 2019.

Wednesday 23 January

Life is like a rollercoaster off the rails, ha ha! I’ve a muck hole fulla crappo, and ya know what? It sux, lol! And life is great anyway! Yeah, I’m good. 

Sometimes in the Silence I can feel energy from afar like water in the body. Can’t explain it, really.

In the moment an opening existed thru which I could feel you far away. I was reminded what a beautiful, brainy, emotional, & sensual woman you are way over there. It’s all reading energy by feeling into the energy as the conscious mind expands out into the world.

Praying for lots of peace & healing. Altho I don’t really pray. Not in a conventional sense. Maybe it’s time we just frakken beg for all we desire without any shame. Continue reading

“Where are all the weapons?” asked an Incel Joker in the Store

Paranoia, revenge, & murder as fantasies in the mind being acted out wherever all the world’s a batshit crazy stage

“Where are all the weapons here?” Squirrelly Clown Dude asked me in a British accent. Like he came to America for the damn weapons. His CO2 gun with a big, plasticky pistol grip still shoots even tho it is not a “real” firearm but a sophisticated “toy.” The barrel looked primarily red and blue with an accent of white. 

This crap all started when a murderous, clown-brained incel dressed himself as the Joker, a fictional comic book character, and shot up a Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado back in July of 2012. The guy was a mass murderer idolized and revered by the incel movement. “Incel” is codeturd for “Involuntarily Celibate.” These are mostly men who view themselves as physically unattractive, even ugly, are often broke, and many of whom seem addicted to porn. Incels feel they have some degree of divine right to get laid and laid by beautiful women.

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In Memoriam: A Letter to Nancy’s Family

Rev. Ms. Nancy Patricia Griffin Hughes, 1932 – 2019. Foto from one provided to the public by the family for her obituaries in various newspapers.

This letter was written to the family and friends of Nancy Hughes, the mother of my ex-wife Gwen and grandmother to our two children, Dylan (formerly Morgan) and Kathryn, aka “Kate.” Although she passed in June of this year, her family elected to celebrate her transitions this past October at a wake they dubbed Momfest, held out at the Hughes family cabin at Willow Lake outside Lynchburg, Virginia.

Had hoped to attend and read a version of this letter, and was unable to do so. My printer wouldn’t work, didn’t have everyone’s email addresses, and didn’t wish to burden my ex-wife with reading my letter out loud for me at such an emotional gathering nor make copies to hand out to people. I think she emailed it forward to her siblings, but not everyone in the family knew of the letter. So now this letter is shared here this Xmas Eve for anyone to read. For Nancy was a Gift for the whole world.

Goodbye, Nancy. May the Afterlife be the journey you always imagined it to be. Thank you for sharing your life with so many people from Egypt to Tibet, from Canada to Ireland, from France to all over the United States and elsewhere. Here’s my letter as follows:

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Day Trips with Li’l Butterfly

Remembrance of Journeys Past with my Stepdaughter across the last month of 2008 and the first three months of 2009

Talia debates going to the top of Kite Hill at Magnuson Park, Seattle. Tuesday 31 March 2009.

She was my third and last child, the stepdaughter I read to while she was in her mother’s womb and caught in my hands as she was born after long hours of struggle. Kristina, TaTa’s “Chee Chee Mommastina,” called her daughter, “Little Sitting Buddha Girl,” for she would sit still and quietly observe everything around her with precision and presence. As her “DaDa William,” however, I called her my Li’l Butterfly.

Distant Olympics on a ferry ship sailing across the upper part of Puget Sound as we traversed the Salish Sea, Washington. Sunday 4 January 2009.

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The Little Girl on the Floor

A little girl playing on the floor of the store melted my heart and opened my mind. In doing so she tilted the fabric of spacetime as one would water pour from a pitcher into a drinking glass. Doorways of mind and heart closed momentarily and yet holographically appeared as a line of portals between parallel universes. My timeline felt bifurcated. Both lines vanished into the future as quickly as turning the water tap in the kitchen sink on then off. All drains still lead to the same underground pipe. All was done inadvertently from her end, however, such was her power on those around her. She was one of the most adorable little toddlers I’ve ever been fortunate with whom to engage. This child was not only incredibly cute, but she also demonstrated a degree of presence unusual for any human being. Usually I’m one to shy away from the young children of others. This little girl with shaggy blonde hair, however, reeled me in with her playful curiosity, intense focus, and ability to seemingly anticipate adult commands.

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Atomic Mushroom Clouds at One in the Morning

Sun of Godzilla

Staggered downstairs into the kitchen for a bite to eat, and thru the windows saw a strange, orange yellow red glow growing swiftly on the horizon. Forgot all about nom nom nomming on a post-midnight snack. Felt confused. Fear came alive as I watched the weird glow expand into a raw, giant, golden, Godzilla cloud.

Big windows looked west from the great, long hill in North Seattle called Phinney Ridge. I currently abide there within an old, dilapidated house built over a century ago. Shared it with two other single, divorced guys, too, plus two elderly brothers down below in the daylight basement. From an old, grandma kitchen we could look west over the top of Ballard across the Salish Sea into the Olympic Mountains. The United States of America maintained one of the world’s largest stockpiles of thermonuclear weapons right in the guts of Cascadia just over there across the water from Seattle.

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Sky Orgasms over Richmond Beach

Bending the fabric of space, time, and memory

Storms roll in over mountains and sea create

Orgasms in the Sky

“Dynamic clouds – the whole sky is an enormous wet orgasm,” I posted on Facebook back on Wednesday the 31st of March 2010.

Three friends, all women, responded:

PPB: “love it……perfect……..”
GVH: “I did not quite see it that way 😜, but yes it was very dynamic.”
JAG: “Goodness William, I want what you’re having”

My house had burned down, and all I could do today was to look up and see orgasms in the sky.

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Big Dawg in the Parking Lot

An urban vignette

After I parked my old green minivan at the Greenwood Fred Meyer store about 21:50, a young couple with a pit bull bounded down the entry steps mad as Hell. They were yelling & arguing over whether or not their dog had taken a big poop. Made me forget for a wee bit why I drove all the way there after work to buy food & toiletries. Did the dog take a big doggie dump inside the grocery store? Next to all the food? Or not? Well, dayum!

People are something else. Humans are a mess. Life is messy, and people will choose to do what people do when they remain unaware they have choices. And Big Dawg in the parking lot? Big Dawg clearly didn’t give a shit and wasn’t about to shit for the asshole yanking back on its leash as they both bounded down the concrete steps from the store into the parking lot ahead of the woman yobbling out behind them. Dayum! Oh, shit, are these too many damns and shits for thee? Read on, thy fair readers. Tis merely a vignette!

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MAKE IT STOP

Insanity in the City of Cranes

(Early 21st Century Americana with short Audio-Video further down below)

Found art by a tagger cartoonist as construction noise roars across traffic. South Lake Union/Downtown area of City of Seattle. Discovered one Thursday morning on the 5th of September 2019.

My beloved Seattle has mutated into a nightmare. The once Emerald City, the former Jet City, is now the City of Cranes. We’re the Abyss of Homelessness for those whom the Great Global Recession never ended and for whom the well-to-do would rather eradicate from view. Left my creaky old minivan at home, walked up the long, steep hill to the top of Phinney Ridge, and caught the bus to work. The #5 dropped me off with others 3 blocks further away than where it used to do as the cancer of over construction tore thru our city of dust & mud & noise. Dammit, I must zig zag this way & that way just to get to work!

Gosh, thought I would get to work early! Not now! Streets seemed closed in all directions. Sidewalks, too. I must cross the wrong way here to get over there to go the right way. To go west to east to get to work, I zig north, then south, then north, then east, then south, then west, south again, north next, north again, then east, then zag around the darn corner to end up going east again. Why? Because every block is different in a city cluttered with octopus intersections. On one block the sidewalk is shut down on one side and on the next shut down on the other side. Just like that, back & forth block to block.

People are both amused, stressed out, befuddled, giggling, and pissed off. Uber & Lyft drivers block honking buses. Lime-green & orangey-red app bicycles litter broken curbs. Hashtags litter all languages. Tourists peek back and forth between smartfone screens and big, floppy maps. Both are already obsolete. The lights take forever to change, traffic is too heavy for me to leap out into the street all skippity dippity dooby doo, and, ya, there’s ewwie random piles of doggie poo oozie-oozing outa tossed plastic baggies to hop over, too! Work is waaay up there beyond the top of the next hill. If I can just get outa this crazy ass place! Construction is so LOUD I turn off my hearing aids merely to keep my eyes open to see my way thru the madness.

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Family Beach Trip to Moclips & Pacific Beach 2006

Memories of a magical & unorthodox beach trip to the Washington Coast,
July 2006

*This is a work in progress. Most of the fotos of this place were lost in the 2010 house fire. Enjoy anyway!*

The Three Sisters playing in the sand. Morgan, age 12, who later changed her name to Dylan, sits partially buried on the upper center right. Kate, about 6 & a half, is on foto left. Talia, bottom right, is 4 years along. Tuesday 1 August 2006. Foto by Daddy William, age 47.

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Cape Disappointment Happy Blues 2007

Snapshots in time of a family in the wind

Early January 2007

Cliffs at this edge of ocean were forbidding, terrifying, and hypnotic in their power. We felt mesmerized as we watched massive waves roll in thru wind and rain to explode upon the rocks below and roar up cliffs into the sky. The Columbia River surged down from the Canadian and American bowels of Cascadia into the vast Pacific Ocean. River and sea currents smashed together to form one of the most chaotic, dangerous, and dynamic river deltas in the world, the Columbia River Bar. Kristina’s Dad goes out fishing in it all the time.

Bass-Katayama Family near cliff’s edge at Cape Disappointment, Washington. L2R: front row: Talia & Kate; middle: Kristina & Morgan (now Dylan); rear: William. Pics recovered from Kristina’s old camera fone. Tuesday 2 January 2007.

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Surfing the Deep Blue Void

Stay on & surf it, woo HOO! Just remember all rides come to an end.

Today I feel alone and overwhelmed. I pace with anxiety. Yet when I step back and take a few deep breaths, when rumination becomes contemplation, suffering becomes the past. The flesh of my body, however, holds the pain of all my yesterdays. My mind seeks to leap ahead via quantum gravity loopholes it’s certain to untangle with the creative power of consciousness. Must be some technique of mind and machine to burst apart and push aside those illusions we behold as consensual reality. Or are such actions merely humdrum fantasies built up from staring impoverished into mists of silver drizzle from the windows of one hundred years plus of dilapidation? Continue reading

Upside down in Snow

A romp in the woods with my lover at the time & two of our kids goes, well, upside down! Our winter ramble in Snoqualmie Pass, Washington, near where the old Mountaineers Cabin used to be one Sunday on the 22nd of January 2006.

Silly Daddy leads the way. Kristina laughed & refused to follow. “I’ll just take pictures. How about that?” she said & chuckled again.

Kate & Talia can’t wait! Kato’s in purple & purple, and TaTa’s in pink & polka dots. Sunday afternoon on the 22nd of January 2006.

Four of us rode up together in our blended family minivan. We all wanted to go play in the snow! Except for my oldest girl, Morgan, now called Dylan, and I cannot recall why she stayed behind. Probably because the future Dylan Blair preferred to pal around with her tween friends. Especially as she was 12 years old back then and soon to turn 13 in less than 3 months. Hmn. Never mind my pet baby name for her was my Li’l Twinkle Star. Katie Kate Kate could barely wait, tho, and she was already 8 years along. No longer was she just my Li’l Kitty Kat. Our youngest, Talia, or, ahem, TaTa the Tater Tot, as we called my Li’l Butterfly back then was still an adorable 3 years old. I drove thru the village of Snoqualmie Pass, known for its concentration of ski resorts, hiking, climbing, and even a small, rare cave system, and parked in a cleared-off lot near a snowy lane leading to where the old Mountaineers’ old cabin is.

Or was back then in January of 2006. Cabin is a misnomer. Aye, it was a palace in the forest! The Mountaineers Club, however, called it a lodge. Snoqualmie Lodge. Hey, this place was historic! Snoqualmie Lodge was a major hub for backcountry action for over half-a-century. A quasi-medieval frontier fort of a sort, the lodge looked ramshackle and all teeter-tottery after the snows melted, but altho rustic, it was built solid by engineers and carpenters. By men & women who knew what tools they held in hand, knew what they were doing, and if they didn’t, they knew how to work together to figure things out and make it so. The snow seemed to help hold it up, but truth is the snow exerted walls of pressure on the famous old building. This was before the Fires of Spring.

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Winter Romp at Twin Lakes, December 2005

Taking my Seattle, Washington family to romp about old haunts from my youth at Twin Lakes State Park in rural Virginia, on the day after Christmas,
Monday 26 December 2005

Hey Hey Hey lookit us FLY! Kate & her Dad goofin’ off. Foto by Kristina.

Our family of five liked to play outside in nature’s Great Outdoors. We still do, altho we aren’t quite a family of five any longer. We had flown out to Virginia, the five of us, to celebrate Christmas with my Family of Origin. Especially my Mom. She lived alone as my Dad had died a little over a year earlier on the 1st of December 2004. Strange thing was the First was also the 3rd Anniversary of my relationship with Kristina. Mama lived on to pass on my brother’s birthday in November of 2006. This time, however, she was very much alive, her cancer in remission, and she couldn’t wait to see us. My brother, Joe, and his family lived down the road from our mother.  My sister, Beth, with her new husband and little daughter, had moved all the way from Arizona to the family farm to be near Mama. This day, however, just the four of us out in these Virginia woods. As our intertwining journeys of life played out, tho, this trip was the last one we would ever make back to my old Virginia homeplace as a Family of Five.

We somehow thought we would always be together other than the kids growing up and out. Such ideas seem a wee bit silly nowadays as we look back across the warping, moving fabrics of spacetime and timespace. I grew up in the 1960s and 70s on a family farm anchored in the dairy industry. Riverview Farm was located in Piedmont hills & gully country. It sprawled along the edges of the Sandy River drainage of Prince Edward County. The farm sat between the little country village of Rice to the East, Green Bay towards the South, and the town of Farmville towards the West. This place was home for me. It’s where I grew up playing in the woods and fields and swamps of my farm boy childhood. The area is haunted, forever, by the ghosts of slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction, racism and sexism and class warfare, religious intolerance, and the revolutionary turmoil of the 1950s and 60s. Many of those who lived there lived in denial of their own damn history. So I had to get outa there! But, where?

After a few spectacular adventures West of the Mississippi River, I knew the American West was where I must go and live my life. It was sad to depart my family of origins, and I did so anyway. My parents felt incredibly sad, the guilt ate at me, yet I felt compelled to follow my own heart and play my own drum. Made many mistakes along the way, still do, and, well, as you must surely know, life is a flippin’ mess sometimes. Most of the time I love it. Ended up in Seattle. Started out goin’ to California by way of Wyoming, but fell in love with Gwen from Virginia and ended up with her in Seattle, Washington instead of Alaska. Yeah, wanted to keep going north as far as I could get, but she refused. We headed back to Virginia, then North Carolina, paddled rivers and backpacked around the nation, finally returning to our beloved Pacific Northwest in January of 1992.

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Snakes & Horses! Lake Wenatchee Family Camping Trips 2005 & 2006

Memories & Restored Fotos from two family camping trips a year apart to Lake Wenatchee State Park and nearby Nason Creek Campground in the surrounding Wenatchee National Forest, May 2005 & May 2006

*This is an unfinished work in progress. Please enjoy anyway. Thank you.*

Snakes! Kate with a corn snake, Monroe, WA. Memorial Day Weekend, Monday 30 May 2005. Here’s she’s about 6 and a half years old.

Horses! Talia upon a horse in Lake Wenatchee State Park, WA. Sunday 28 May 2006. Talia had recently turned 4 years old.

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Goofin’ with my Fam on Cam: An intersection of family & technology captured in time

Fun Family Moments with technology & the Memories they generate recaptured from May 2000 & June 2001

The Bass-Hughes/Hughes-Bass Family goofin’ around on their new LogiCam attached to their Compaq computer where they lived at Orca Landing, a small intentional community as urban cooperative household  in Seattle. L2R: William, Baby Kate, Morgan (now Dylan), Gwen, & housemate Baby Dylan (under Gwen’s chin). Tuesday 9 May 2000. Foto by Computer!

These pictures are not by any means “good” as far as quality of photography goes. They are fuzzy, blurry, and fusty. Nor is this a traditional article the general public may seize upon with joy. This is more of a family legacy post, a digital heirloom for now, nearly two decades later, and the future beyond every tomorrow. Yet these capture a certain nostalgia, a few moments back in yonder spacetime of joy and befuddlement, of tears and misery, of surprise, confusion, and laughter. Even moments of glee!

All but the last three fotos were taken by what was then an amazing new tool, a Logitech Webcam mounted atop and connected to our Compaq Presario desktop PC running OS Windows 98. At the time the Internet had shifted from bulletin boards & Gopher protocols to MS-DOS-based programing for Microsoft programs, IBM Peanut desktop computers, and Apple’s Macintosh to the growing, glowing World Wide Web with way cool browsers such as Netscape. Oh yeah, remember MS-DOS? And those fancy, old Peanuts and sublime early Macs? Gosh, remember Netscape? What an astounding expression of technology the Netscape browser was! All of these artifacts are today considered “vintage technologies.”

Morgan & Kate. Morgan now goes by Dylan. Here they are focusing on this hypnotic vintage technology! In the age between TVs and smartfones, too! Here at Orca Landing, Seattle, woo HOO! Wednesday 3 May 2000.

While we were having so much fun posing & goofing around with our new Logicam, these hi-tech companies were booming themselves right up into a massive financial bubble. The Dot-com Bubble began around 1994, the year my first daughter Morgan Hannah (now my eldest child Dylan Blair) was born, and ended in 2000. This hyperspeculative bubble finally burst, many companies died, the economy crashed, and a recession kicked in. The bursting of the bubble was a process lasting into 2002. Around the same time Compaq, once one of the top leading brands of personal computers, fell apart and was gobbled up by Hewlett-Packard.

This particular recession, which in some ways began a decade earlier in Asia, continued in parts of North America into 2003 and across Europe till around 2004-2005. This crazy tech boom of the 1990s laid the foundation, however, for stunning digital transformation of civilization over the next two decades. This remained true even into the midst of the Great Global Recession, an economic and financial catastrophe that began in late 2007. These events greatly affected our family and friends even as we carried on our daily lives. Our vintage technologies allowed us to preserve some of the good times amidst all of the gloomy news. Such memories remind us our glasses were more than half-full rather than half-empty or knocked over. So let’s raise a toast to those happy moments of yesteryear and be present to the little joys all around us even now, woo HOO! Yes!

Here we are, however, back in the day at the turn of the Common Era’s 21st Century in awe of those blurry, silly, and spontaneous “vintage tech” pictures. Digital spontaneity is one of the keys to understanding this brief time in history. The astonishing speed of computerized camera technology reached the point people felt free to be spontaneous in the moment. These were the beginnings of the digital selfie boom! People were goofy! Solemn. Smiling! Frowning. Weeping! And grinning, too.

Momma Gwen gets in on the action, too!

Small, precision-image camera technology making the Logitech cams and then the tiny iPhone and Android fone cams were initially developed back in the 1960s by the NRO, the secret National Reconnaissance Office. This unique technology was finally released into the public marketplace, seized upon by private companies, and made its way into mobile devices such as cellphones. The NRO was a clandestine Federal intelligence agency formed in 1961 but wasn’t officially declassified until 1992 after the Cold War was over. It’s early cameras are considered superior to those in the later Hubble Space Telescope.

Social media entered the global picture, and, boom! Our planet would never be the same again. At the same time, sadly enough, this the lull before the storm, before the growing, intermittent Global Long War on Terror exploded into a worldwide conflict with the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States Home Front in September of 2001.

In the meantime, while this long war still burns and smolders around the world, let us nevertheless enjoy these precious moments in time. Perhaps they will fortify us to more closely re-examine our history of violence as a species. Perhaps doing so will illuminate and motivate us to find ways to generate peace and love instead of war and hate. Meanwhile, we move forward. Life is messy! Enjoy the pictures!

“Shirley Temple Kate.” Kathryn Elizabeth stylin’ at Orca Landing in Seattle, Tuesday 26 June 2001.

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Morgan at Whitehorse Mountain, June 2010

A father struggles with PTSD as he idolizes his daughter in the wake of tragedy and before she changed their name to claim a deeper, truer identity

Dylan Blair, age 16, nine years ago as I write this, back when she was known as Morgan Hannah. She stands in a roadside field in the Stillaguamish River Valley below the bulk of Whitehorse Mountain.

Being outside in nature can kill you. Or nature can heal you. My family and I needed nature’s medicine. We lived in Edmonds, Washington at the time. Just north of long, skinny Seattle. Been there only three months. Moved in on the 20th of December 2009. Five hectic days before Christmas. Our large, rental house, a temporary abode in the wake of losing our homes and finances in the wake of job losses, embezzlement, and the Great Global Recession, caught on fire and burned down one Saturday morning in March of 2010. My oldest daughter, still called Morgan back then as she hadn’t yet changed their name to Dylan, was celebrating her 16th Birthday with a close circle of friends on the weekend following her actual birthday. I was out and away picking up her two younger sisters, Kate and Talia, from different sleepover parties at their respective friends down south in Seattle. Kristina, my third wife at the time, was at the vet with our dog, Jo. Apparently so much thick, toxic smoke rolled up from the basement rooms no one could get out the front door. Her friends, all high school girls in their mid-teens, had surprisingly expensive belongings downstairs where they had spent the night. The day was warm and sunny for March. Indeed, this Saturday the 20th was the first day of Spring.

The flames spread fast in a big house designed to function like a tipi merged with solar panels and a hot rock room. The home was a gorgeous experiment built on a steep slope near the head of a large ravine. It faced out to look west towards water and mountains, and had been designed by an already deceased husband-and-wife team of architects. Thick, toxic, black smoke billowed up the stairs from the lower levels where the kids had slept. The girls made a flurry of fone calls to 911 and to parents, but began to panic. They were desperate to race downstairs to retrieve personal items such as sleeping bags, clothes, shoes, gifts, smartfones, iPods, toiletries, luggage, school books, papers…when Morgan shouted at all of them they “all need to get out now! We need to get outa here now! That way! NOW!!!”

Following her lead, they raced across the house towards the back, the side facing water and mountains. There the teenagers climbed up over a wooden railing and jumped off the deck. Jumped off wearing a mix of t-shirts, underwear, pajamas, gym shorts, socks, and bare feet. Depending on the incline, the deck was anywhere from one to half-a-story up in the air. They were terrified! Fire and smoke and poisonous stench and crackling, crashing noise seemingly everywhere. Within moments after all of the teens climbed over the wooden railing and jumped off, possibly within seconds, the whole back deck, the one facing down a wide ravine to look out across the Salish Sea and the Olympic Mountains, collapsed in fire and smoke and disintegrated.

Foto of our house in Edmonds erupting in flames moments after the birthday party girls jumped off the back deck in picture left and fled before it collapsed.

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Twin Falls on a February Sunday: A Dog, Kids, Love, & Waterfalls

A Family Dayhike into the Twin Falls Natural Area, Olallie State Park, Washington,
Sunday 13 February 2005

*This is a work in progress as rediscovering “lost” stories, documents, & pictures salvaged from the 2010 Fire continues. Have fun anyway! Click on each foto to blow it up big. Enjoy!

The Author & his kids & the family dog at one of the overlooks along the Twin Falls Trail in Olallie State Park. L2R: Talia (in pink jacket), Katie (just behind her), me, William (in back), Morgan (who now goes by Dylan), & Jo, short for Joline, our English Springer Spaniel. Foto by Kristina. Sunday 13 February 2005.

We were a blended family, a goofy family, & we loved to get silly. We faced many challenges of blending post-double divorce family born of a wild and yet strategic mix of polyamory, intentional community, and devotion to conscious parenting. Kristina & I sought to ground our blended family outdoors in nature and indoors with fellow communitarians. For us, deep relationship was a spiritual practice, a challenging practice, and one demanding constant practice with ever-evolving self-awareness. In the moment, however, hugs & fun & even an, “Uh, Dad, what is going on?” is everything. And now, with the passage of time, forever gone.

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Mowich Lake Snafus: A Family Camping Trip goes off the Rails

Everything fell apart, we grumped and fussed, and we all laughed anyway. Laughed some more, too! Ahhh, what a strange misadventure into the beauty and awe of Mt. Rainier National Park, September 2005

*This is a work in progress with more pictures to be recovered from the wake of The Fire. Enjoy anyway! More awaits.*

“Hello, I see you!” Talia, my stepdaughter I’ve raised since birth as my 3rd & youngest daughter. Her cold weather clothes got left behind at home sho she had on my 1986 wool shirt and Gwen’s old anorak from the Appalachian Trail. Life is funny. Life is messy. Yes, it’s cold outside, colder than it’s supposed to be for summertime, and, hey, we’re having fun anyway!

Sometimes everything goes wrong. Nothing is as expected. Certain private fantasies and anticipations get pushed aside. Expectations turn upside down like toddlers flipping bowls of wet, mushy food. Whatcha gonna do, huh? Call Ghostbusters? From many miles deep in a national park? Where there aren’t any payphones to “quarter out” from nor cell towers for cellphones to connect thru? Well, you share everything you have, take a deep breath, grin, giggle, and chuckle at the gauntlet of predicaments until hysterics take over, and laugh. Laugh at the silliness of the living as we live ones sort out our messes from being too busy living without paying attention to…well, as most parents may understand, parenting children in the midst of everything else provides those perfect storms where focus scatters when priorities themselves become distractions. How in the world does that  happen? No matter. Gotta go potty. Real bad, too! Figure it out on the way there and all around trying to get back from lost, not-lost. As we did back in the Summer of 2005.

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“Are you hitting on me?” asked a Redneck Nazi

A vignette of unexpected homophobic dumbassery sprouting from the grotesque American intersectionality of Nazism and Trump in the Spring of 2019

War could break out in a clothing store faster than cranes can collapse. In April a crane broke apart and collapsed killing four people and injuring others. The deadly collapse occurred minutes before I was to drive into the exact spot cars were crushed. Sad. Tearful. Terrifying! Felt tragic. And sobering. Gravity is Still, the world felt on edge even as people joked and kidded and complained about things. Two burly men rambled around the urban Co-op where I worked alongside many others in the outdoor adventure and travel industry. While officially retail, our positions often felt more like education and instruction than sales alone. I felt proud to work in the Mothership. One of the perks working here was this store is one of the top three tourist destinations here in the City of Cranes. We meet so many people coming and going from all over the planet. Yes, not just from all over the city, the county, the state, and the region, not just from North America, but from all around the world! Welcome to the one city in North America with the most cranes! 

These two guys stood out, however, but so did many other people passing thru. What was different, however, is these men appeared uncomfortable in their own bodies. They energetically felt uncomfortable to me with an odd mix of quiet, minding their own bidness alertness, squirminess, and nervousness. They were dressed in everyday clothes: blue jeans, flannel shirts, and baseball caps. Dirty and greasy from long hours of hard work. Without any laundering, too. So what? I’ve dressed like that myself, altho it’s been awhile. The way they wore their clothes, however, made them stand out from the all the others who wore similar clothes. To be clear, we get a fair number of homeless people and travelers passing thru, many in various stages of being unlaundered. These two guys gave off airs, a pretense of menace, as they pretended not to pose while posing. They walked quickly and heavily, as if they were stomping but not trying to stomp so they pivoted and swung around the sunglasses and stomped quickly towards me. Bam! Boom! Bam!

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Smelled a flower today

An urban vignette

The flower.

Stopped and smelled a flower today. Just now. Moments ago. A magnificent iris flower! A densely purple blossom on the edge of the sidewalk here in Seattle. Smoofed it this Sunday afternoon at about twenty minutes to five. I mean I walked over there, bent over, and sniffed the darn thang. No, no snorting! Stuck my nose into its blossom, tho. Like a lover too embarrassed to be seen mounting his beloved in public. Gently, slightly, carefully yet a bit brusquely I plowed my nose between its petals until they barely touched my cheeks. Lingered a moment all too brief in time, then pulled out quickly lest anyone among the general public would think I was a flower snorter or some kind of foolish and possibly dangerous nutter. 

Oh my goodness, the scent of these blooms stimulated my mild synesthesia. Made me horny as a dog, too! This iris smelled so intoxicating I felt lost in enchantment. For a moment I could barely move as I smelled colors and saw smells and felt sounds all around. As light and shadow turned inside out beneath the brightness of day on a planet spinning toward night, right here within the next moment already passing I realized just how much of a ghost I’ve become. Aye, a damn ghost! Been ghosting thru life as if I was some broken and forgotten clumpenproletariat of chunky concrete abandoned against some godforsaken wall of a cobblestone alley in a rundown factory town on the edge of perpetual shadow. Continue reading

Excuse me, Sir, I’m starving

Seattle, City of Cranes, 2 April 2018.

“Excuse me, Sir,” the man called out. “I’m starving. Can you help me please?”

Frank was out in the streets again struggling to move his broken body this way and that way as he pivot-twisted and zigzagged from curb to curb only to give up from exhaustion and wander right down the middle of the road, getting run over by humans in cars and trucks be damned and indeed goddamned. Spring 2018 in Seattle, Washington. Giant construction cranes hovered overhead like those gigantic Martian battle tripods in the 2005 War of the Worlds movie. The Emerald City, once the Jet City, has now become the City of Cranes, a muddy, noisy, chaotic mess of hope, despair, greed, beauty, boondoggles, and opportunity.

I shared this with Rockcatcher, one of my managers as I came into work thru the employee entrance. He earned the nickname for catching a large, softball-size rock bouncing down the mountain directly into his face when he and a few others were climbing over in the Olympics. Snagged the rock with both hands without toppling backwards down the cliff, too. Both of us, however, had encountered Frank plunging into traffic to declare his hunger.

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100 Years after the Armistice

Granddaddy in the First World War with Contemplation, Tribute, … & a Warning

The horror of World War 1 ended with a ceasefire 100 years ago today, although people continued to die by the millions in the numerous revolutions, civil wars, and ethnic conflicts left blazing on every continent except Antarctica while the Spanish flu pandemic burned grimly around the globe. My paternal grandfather, Carroll Melvin Bass, served in the United States Navy in those terrible times. He fought in the North Atlantic hunting German submarines. His ship chased and sunk subs full of sailors from the other side. Born on Sunday the 9th of April 1893, he turned 24 years old three days after the U.S.A. declared war on Imperial Germany. He achieved the rank of MM1, Machinist’s Mate 1st Class, short for Machinist’s Mate Petty Officer First Class, USN.

I remember asking him what it was like way back when I was a preteen lost in fantasies of glory. Pop, our name for him, struggled to describe his experience. He didn’t say much, and he died of cancer on Wednesday 10 March 1971 seven weeks before my 12th birthday. My paternal grandfather’s gravestone is dominated by references to his service in the U.S. Navy during World War I. In death his experiences during the Great War seemed to have formed the defining, even pivotal period of a life lived across nearly eight decades. All I can recall, however, were impressions as if splashed with black and red paint and cold, cold water.

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Ghosts in the Forests: Family Adventures in Olympic National Park 2004 & 2005

Memories from Family Adventures in the Mountain Forests

*This is an unfinished work in progress. Enjoy anyway!*

Long ago memories: Talia before a downed tree in Sol Duc Campground, Olympic National Park. Kate is on the distant left. The boy on foto right is one of their new “campground buddies.” Summer of 2005. Foto by Morgan Bass.

Our blended family enjoyed many adventures into the wilds of Washington State. We spent more time in Olympic National Park than in any other national park or wilderness area. Memories of these trips, while wonderful, flitter like ghosts in a sad happy kind of way. Most of this is due to the disruption caused by the March 2010 housefire in particular. We lost about 90% or more of our print fotos, slide transparencies, and digital pictures from the time before the Fire. We had many hundreds, almost 2,000 pictures from family trips to the Olympics after the Fire such as from the Summers of 2010 and 2011. Only a small few images remain from some of our adventures before then. In some cases, however, nothing survived the Fire.

These losses led to a blurry fragmentation of memories as we all struggle to recall what happened when. These pictures, for example, stem from two family camping trips to the Olympics, including both Salt Creek Park – Clallam County Recreation Area and the national park as well as visits to other local gems in the area. One set of fotos is from our August 2004 trip there and the other from 2005, possibly August as well, altho the those pictures stamped February 2006. They clearly were taken in the summertime thus placing them back in 2005. These digital images have been copied and shared several times. Often the time dates reflect the time copies of the now-lost original images was shared, saved, recopied, reshared, and saved again. My family’s story here is as much about our relationships to our memories of places, times, and people as well as the road trips and camping adventures we found ourselves upon. Sometimes all this feels as if we’re chasing ghosts thru the forests.  Continue reading

Grove Avenue Blues: Scenes from Richmond’s Fan

Scenes from Life in The Fan District of Richmond, Virginia, 1985-1986

All Fotos by the Author unless otherwise stated.

*This is an unfinished work in progress. Enjoy anyway!*

Me in December 1986. A rare throwback foto rescued from the 2010 Fire & cleaned up, a still ongoing project. I’m 27 yrs along then & soon to graduate the same month with my MFA from grad school @ VCU in Richmond, VA. Foto by friends David Wilson & Tina Ennulat, who lived across the hall from me in an old row house in The Fan, the Bohemian area back then. I’m in their apartment holding EJ the Kitty Cat. EJ’s short for Emma Jean. Funny thing you wouldn’t catch me dead in that shirt today, but back then it was among my favorites, lol… Hair’s a lot longer now, way pass my shoulders, but no where near as thick. Ahhh, train wrecks on Memory Lane!

The Fan was the Bohemian part of Richmond, Virginia. Those of us who lived there back in the 1980s and earlier fancied ourselves to be living in the Southern, post-Confederate equivalent of New York’s Greenwich Village or San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. New Orlean’s French Quarter probably had a better claim, but The Fan was unique and bizarre back when I lived there for two years in the mid-to-late 1980s.

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Cherry Blossoms in Twilight

Images from an evening stroll across The Quad on the University of Washington campus as cherry trees blossomed in the wake of the Spring Equinox, Wednesday 29 March 2017.

Students, staff, & numerous visitors gaze in awe at the profusion of cherry blossoms across The Quad on the UW Campus. The Sun going down with temperatures dropping didn’t stop anyone from walking amidst these giant organisms.

This magnificent burst of life so soon after the end of Winter upon the Spring Equinox heralded for many the rebirth of life and the promise of hope amidst the uncertainty & violence plaguing our planet.

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Golden Leaves of November

Walking back to catch the train home after a dentist appointment brought unexpected surprises as a late blaze of Autumn glory swiftly turned into a fierce storm in mid-November of 2017

*This is an unfinished work in progress. Please enjoy what’s here as I complete it. Thanks!*

Click on each picture to expand it. All fotos by the Author.

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A Slime Mold comes to Visit

Two Weeks in the life of one Fuligo septica in Pictures

Meet Bobby Sue, a beautiful Dog Vomit Slime Mold, who chose to visit us in Green Lake for a month. Bobby Sue appeared on the edge of the front steps around the 10th of May 2015. This foto was taken on Tuesday the 12th of May after the slime mold had already crept a short distance.

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Lost My Wife

Foto by William Dudley Bass on Saturday morning the 24th of July 2017.

Walked down the street on the way to work recently & came upon a haunting illustration at the rear of an abandoned restaurant slated for teardown. Felt intrigued by the bittersweet mix of symbols & metaphors. What’s the story behind a mystery as old as time when the first dawning of love went awry?

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Videos for Rose

There’s a story behind these videos. Both are personal and initially intended to be private. As I’m a beginner with handheld videos, these are, from any professional and even personal viewpoint, terrible in quality. They are shaky, unedited, and thus raw as Hell. Even so, I’m sharing them. Doing so is, for me, a breakthru in shame and embarrassment, of breaking thru mental barriers of not-looking-good, not-sounding-smooth, and worrying about what others may think. Toss all that crap. Yes! Even so, I feel shy in making these videos. My hearing impairment’s there. My speech impediment is there. The TMJ (temporomandibular joint) injuries from long ago gradually worsen over time and increasingly affects the ability to open my jaws properly to speak. Still, I go for it anyway, damn my own fears.

Besides, these videos are not for me. I wouldn’t put them up except to get those videos to someone special who lives far away more than halfway “down” the planet. She is one of the most amazing, inspiring, funny, romantic, and eccentric women I have ever met. We are so much alike with so many unexpected and startling synchronicities we wonder if those esoteric spiritual descriptions of Twin Flames are true. Seems so for us, anyway. Especially as we met by accident in such a fantastical way with mindboggling results. So of course the possibility of us being Twin Flames feels real for us. Besides, even if Twin Flames are more of a mythic fable, it doesn’t matter for we are both at choice to choose the next step together…or apart…moment to moment.

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Aurora Avenue and the Dark Side of Love

A Nest of Urban Vignettes

Machines break down and stop. People break down and somehow keep going. Machines are all about function and efficiency. People are for creativity, making messes, and love.

Chaos was silent. No blaring horns from cars around me. No one reads beyond the edges of their digital screens any more. Finally stopped wondering how people sitting in cars behind me might respond or react to my bumper stickers. Nope. They’re too busy merging with their, ahem, “mobile devices” as they herd themselves into the Internet of Things. At every stop during the last few days all across the City of Seattle I’d see heads bow down and fones rise up in the postmodern autonomic digital prayers of the unconscious. Can’t even get a HONK! Not even one faint li’l bitty ol’ frickin’ honk. Then, BOOM BOOM CHOP! I had to put my 16-year old blue car in the repair shop up north on the Greenwood side of Aurora Avenue, and I met real people out on the streets in the everyday circus of madness and bliss.

She sat hunched over in the woodchips alongside the sidewalk in the shade of Gold’s Gym under a row of leafy trees with her face kinked between folded arms and knees. Her body was so scrawny the spinous processes of her lumbar and thoracic vertebrae poked out like those strange fins on a stegosaurus’s back called scutes or dinosaur dermal plates. They arched over with her spine in such a way I could almost feel the connection to her reptilian brain, but, hey, she’s a mammal, a hominin like me. We’re hominins in America. Hominins in America! The United States was and is still a quasi-fascist, pseudo-democratic oligarchy masquerading as a constitutional capitalist killer clown republic, Barack Obama was POTUS, and the Dem-Rep Duopoly self-gridlocked. Global Climate Disruption worsened, and the Great Global Depression wasn’t over at all for millions and millions of unemployed and underemployed lost people like us. She sat. I walked. She smoked. I judged. She despaired, and so did I.

A red suitcase lay loosely shut with clothes hanging out next to her. She smoked a cigarette somewhere down there under crossed arms, I could smell its acrid, stale heat, but I couldn’t see her face. I could see the crack of her ass between her shirt and her shorts. She was a young White woman with brownish, straw blond hair and all skinny and boney and all alone. I felt huge sadness and empathy. Oh, she was so alone in this world! I felt her energy as I strode around her towards the Gym. Without even trying, I could feel into her dark pool of synaptic fog just by walking by her. She felt sad, hung over, frustrated, desperate, and zonked out depressed. I could feel the ice-cold glitter of pain screwing thru her veins as the yearning for the next fix built up hot under her long sleeves.

I was in a hurry, however, as my car was in the shop, I had errands to do, and I was walking everywhere without any wheels. I wouldn’t take the bus. Nope, no bus today. Gonna walk for exercise. I stopped myself from going over to her, however, and reminded myself I have an old, bad habit of rescuing people. I am not going to rescue anyone anymore, no more drama triangles in life, and so must hold tight to my boundaries. Yes?

Hurried off into the Gym and trained hard with the weights. Slowly regaining my health after a prolonged and strange illness. Came back out after my workout with a long walk ahead of me. There she sat, more sad and desperate then ever, without looking up. She didn’t need to look up. She was primal enough to sense what was happening around her, even if her senses were warped and fragmented by too many of the wrong kind of drugs. I felt her coil without coiling and sensed the dead pulse of mutant killer kundalini. She cranked taunt as locked gears forced apart and popped as automatically defensive as a robot sentinel left behind to guard some long-abandoned ancient fortress. I stopped. She bristled and the image of her lunging at me with a dirty syringe in hand burst into my mind as real as a wild ass grizzly bear rearing up on her hind legs. I shuddered and recalled being homeless myself not all that long ago…and scared.

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In the Swirl of a Dish

Petri Dish Man’s Urban Seattle Socialist Vignette

Hungry. Sun blazing in my eyes. Making me squint as my belly growled low like a dog guarding a slab of meat. Hadn’t eaten since yesterday. Felt ravenous after I spent too much of the morning in the hospital being poked, pierced, measured, and explored by fantastic doctors and their curious assistants. Prodded me like a damn bug followed by quick pecks on their computers. Felt as if I was a giant insect splayed out and peeled apart in an enormous Petri dish by mad scientists and clever kids. Who behaved as if any moment they would hobble over and slather weird baby food goo all over me to see what monsters might grow. Ahhh, yes, call me…Petri Dish Man! BAM! BAM! BAM! DON’T BAN THE PETRI DISH MAN! ran thru my head over and over, tho I dared not tell anyone at the time, as it felt so strange.

Brought back memories of being in the Battle of Seattle during the so-called Anti-Globalization Revolts, and memories of being in Occupy Seattle and Occupy Olympia. Yes, even brought back memories of being homeless during the Great Global Recession after rich, capitalist pundits declared it long over. Despite being such a proficiently medically inspected man, however, I felt grateful for Obamacare’s ACA here in Washington State. Thank goodness it covered what my employer’s private health insurance plan wouldn’t cover. I shake my head funny too, as it seemed plain old common sense for 21st Century America, indeed all of Planet Earth, to have an integrated single-payer universal health care system, a democratic economic system, a socialist system.

Thus satiated on clarity of vision, I ventured hungrily into The Dish, a funky Seattle café, for a belated breakfast. Call it brunch. Time was 11:30 am. It’s a lively little café in my neighborhood. I currently live in a small, quasi-cooperative household below the landlord’s family in a house uprooted from the I-5 Corridor running north and south across the States between Canada and Mexico. The house sits beneath three immense Western redcedar trees in the Tangletown-Latona part of Green Lake up in the middle of North Seattle. At least till the rent rockets up. Only my second visit to this cafe, too. Rarely eat out anymore. Now it’s a treat! The place was abuzz, too.

Two staffers had called in sick, however, leaving the business understaffed. Only two other people were out front serving including one new worker who admitted she didn’t know how to work anything quite yet. But they were game and smiled anyway. Big, welcoming smiles, too. They bustled in and out among crowded customers, and the one cook in back paced himself as he had to. The warm smells of cooked food swirled with exuberant colors intoxicated yours truly Petri Dish Man.

The ghost of a homeless guy watched everything right over the lip of his big orange coffee cup. He was so invisible it as was if I couldn’t see him but nevertheless still sense his presence. I felt the color of his large, tattered coat fade charcoal and gray. Was his bright orange cup just a reflection of the Sun upon a glass bowl of slivered fruit? No, he wasn’t there, just a coat and a cup and the ghost of a man who gave up everything precious but his dignity and curiosity.

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The Moaning Pad

A Nutty Vignette

A group of us men and women worked steadily in the cavernous chill. We stood and shuffled around large, crated boxes of outdoor adventure travel products. These items were all returns, i.e. customers had purchased them from the retail company we worked with and for whatever reason returned them. We prepped them for a one-time clearance sale and marked down the prices with metallic silver ink pens. It was early in the morning close to the Winter Solstice. While it wasn’t freezing, we were in a large concrete cargo bay where it sure felt icy as Hell. Cold, dank, clammy, and gloomy, too. We kept ourselves warm by wearing layers of funky colorful clothes in all combinations borrowed from where they were heaped up in those crated boxes. I didn’t even check to see if I had on a woman’s or a man’s fleece jacket. One person pulled on a kooky mix of pants under two padded, insulated skirts and giggled. We quickly discovered a certain rhythm and worked hard. At the same time we entertained ourselves by reading the return tags to see what reasons people used to justify returning an item.

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Farting Uphill to Poo Poo Point

A Tiger Mountain Adventure,

Or, rather, a Meditation on Relationships

Mount Rainier aka The Mountain from along the Chirico Trail on West Tiger Mountain on Monday the 26th of January 2015. Furthermore, it’s time to restore The Mountain to her Native name: Ti’Swaq’ … the Sky Wiper!

Mount Rainier aka The Mountain from along the Chirico Trail on West Tiger Mountain on Monday the 26th of January 2015. Furthermore, it’s time to restore The Mountain to her chosen Native name: Ti’Swaq’ … the Sky Wiper!

Monday 26 January 2015

Our day hike had two purposes: to spend time together reconnecting as father and daughter, and for my daughter to train for her upcoming attempt to thruhike the Appalachian Trail. Morgan and I are both rather eccentric. We both know it, too, and value such in the other. We both appreciate being outdoors and nature is a spiritual connection. Otherwise it feels like night and day to me. This day, however, we were late getting ourselves together as we made the gravest error of making busy work a priority. Especially me.

“Hurry up, Dad!” Morgan shouted. “Jeezus, Dad! You’re always yelling at me to hurry up and let’s go and all, and here you are texting old girlfriends and stuff!”

Except I didn’t have any girlfriends at that point, old or otherwise, as I was divorced and still single.

At this point our hike had to meet several criteria so as to qualify both as quality bonding time and provide at least SOME training. First, both drive time and trail mileage had to be short. The trail also needed to be steep as all get out to make up for being so short. We also wanted a trail we haven’t done over and over again.

Ah! Poo Poo Point! Yes!

“What?” Morgan asked with a scowl. “Poo Poo Point? Ew, gross, Dad. Like what, horses and cow poop and stuff?”

“No, it’s a short, steep hike up the side of Tiger Mountain from the back side of Issaquah. You’ve done it once before with Kate and Talia and me and Kristina back when Kristina and I were married. We watched paragliders sail off the cliff top.”

“Oh. Yeah, I remember now. OK, let’s go.”

What many call the Poo Poo Point Trail is really the Chirico Trail. This locally notorious footpath drives straight up the slopes of West Tiger Mountain. It’s steep and sweaty sweet before unraveling into rambling twists and turns. Two open, grassy meadows high up near the summit provided launch jump-offs for hang gliders and paragliders. Well, one doesn’t see hang gliders much anymore as paragliding has won out as technology advanced. Hiking thru wintry trees, however, one can look south upon the mighty leviathan bulk of Mt. Rainier, or as the Native Americans prefer, Ti’Swaq’ the Sky Swiper!

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At the Bottom of The Mountain

A Winter Day Trip to Mt. Rainier in the Throes of Climate Change,

Monday 29 December 2014

Morgan (L) & Anne outside the Nisqually Entrance to Mount Rainier National Park.

Morgan (L) & Anne outside the Nisqually Entrance to Mount Rainier National Park. Normally the snow is deep and there isn’t much frozen snowmelt on the road. Not the case here this time nor up around the bend.

On the last Monday in the Year 2014 Common Era, I drove three of us to Mount Rainier National Park. The other two were my oldest daughter Morgan, a few months shy of turning 21, and her maternal cousin, Anne, of about the same age but a little older. Morgan had recently moved back to Seattle from Bellingham to prepare for her journey along the Appalachian Trail. Her mother Gwen Hughes, Anne’s auntie, and now my ex-wife tho still dear friend, and I had thruhiked the AT once upon a somewhat long time ago back in 1991. Gwen and I, originally from Virginia, still lived in Seattle, Washington. Anne was from Florida, and had not ever been to Seattle or Mt. Rainier before, and wanted to go. Woo Hoo, Mt. Rainier! Off we went. We didn’t make it past the bottom of The Mountain.

We determined to have fun anyway.

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Old Man God with the Green Guitar

Discordian Harmony at the Pacific Northwest Folklife Festival

with

Zombie Jimi

Mystery Musician aka Zombie Jimi

Mystery Musician aka Zombie Jimi

 

Sunday 24 May 2015

My eyes heard him hunched over his old green guitar before my ears could see him stretching notes thru the air. Old Man God stood in the Center of Seattle crouched in the corner facing Jerusalem on the other side of the world before turning his back on Abraham’s minions to face Ancient Timbuktu instead, his skin all black as Mississippi Goddamn and his beard as snowy white as polar bear belly all while focused on changing what never changes as he grasped the old, banged-up, burring, purring, electric, green guitar in his hands the same way Neptune once burst open the sky with his trident held high all a buzzsaw humming like Betty Dodson’s Hitachi Magic Wand gripped in Goddess hands orgasming the Himalayas apart with the Love Song of a Cosmic Chainsaw. His hands trembled all steady with purpose as he caressed his green guitar with the adoration Zeus once had for electric thunderbolts and nymphs sweaty with humid rust. Old God Man shuddered back on his feet, unwound his pelvis as Mike Mulligan once cranked up trusty Mary Anne, lumbered forward at the wall as a Zen steam shovel on testosterone and played his green guitar with a certain must with a deliberate lust driven to play things as they are with a ferocious thrust not what others demanded oh yeah he played with raw beauty and ugly grace oh yeah he played with verve to shear men and women like sheep oh yeah played his old green guitar so damn hard I swear the sky blazed electric blue and in the midst of such Rapture heard a vast groaning zombie drone as reanimated angels buzzed straight up outa the ground like Jimi Hendrix lighting up Woodstock high up on stage high above the mud deep down in O Mississippi Goddamn mud it’s Nina Simone eating up the sky with her brow all furrowed like eight thirty o’clock way up upon a stage crowded with pianos on fire PIANOS ON FIRE! giving voice to the lynched the burned and to the drowned. Aye, my hearing aids filled with the android squeals of Betty Dodson Jimi Hendrix Nina Simone jackhammering open bones skin and soul to touch my love with feathers stuffed with steel.

See, I heard all these things in a voodoo of pain nothing could change not even Deuteronomous Dali Bosch. Continue reading

Dragonfly People: Coming together in Nature for Adventure and Community, 2002 – 2003

A real Dragonfly Community in Nature.

A real Dragonfly Community in Nature.*

Dragonflies are small animals and ferocious predators. They live all across the planet except Antarctica. Prehistoric ancestors of today’s dragonflies were huge insects with wingspans of almost 30 inches or 7.6 centimeters across. The Dragonfly is also a symbol of transformation, power, adaptability, and poise. A number of us communitarians came together from different urban cooperative households across Greater Seattle to explore new communal possibilities. Some of the early meetings held anywhere from 20 to nearly 50 people. A few individuals, including Syd Fredrickson, known as a major player within the intentional communities movement, helped facilitate many of our early sessions. Eventually some of us moved to form a new intentional community. Our new family came to be known as Dragonfly or the Yellow Dragonfly House. We chose this majestic, wild animal as our spirit totem with a focus on personal and group transformation.

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TRANSFORMATION: a 150 foot long dragonfly crop circle apparently created overnight in England, the U.K., in June of 2009.**

What came to be known as simply Dragonfly or the Yellow House was established in October 2003, but the process of community formation began much earlier. People from older groups such as Orca Landing and The Barn began coming together in 2001 to determine what was next for them as individuals, families, and communities. Some of them were monogamous families. Others were engaged as a polyamorous cluster. And a few were single. Several shared children between them. All were deeply spiritual and engaged in profound personal and professional growth, training, and development. Most were ethical stands for love, communication, and for community. Those who were not left Dragonfly of their own accord except for one person, initially intensely involved, who was asked to leave upon being a fraud and a manipulative con artist.

During the years of 2002 – 2003 the members of Dragonfly embarked on a series of trips to spend time together in nature and to strengthen the bonds of community. Not every member of Dragonfly Community went on every adventure. The following fotos are from six of our trips including our major outings. Some of the earlier members and candidates are not in any of these fotos. The core ones are celebrated within. These pictures survived the 2010 burning down of my and then-wife Kristina’s post-Dragonfly home. I took most of these fotos, and some were by Kristina, and others by friends who gave us copies after the fire. I edited most of those images. They captured moments in time and space representing the forging and celebration of relationships amid the great outdoors of America’s Pacific Northwest. These pictures represent a perspective of Dragonfly history as captured by cameras. This article is not about the record of meetings, finances, interrelationship dynamics, conflict resolution, coparenting children, politics, religions, and such. It does, however, illuminate such challenges and joys via the surviving pictures thru the lens of the cameras with my historical point of view as author and participant. Enjoy!

Dragonfly Backpacking & Camping Trip to Second Beach, Olympic National Park, Thursday 4 July – Sunday 7 July 2002:

L2R: Talia, William, Atreyu, Edan

L2R: Talia, William, Atreyu, & Edan.

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The One Place on Earth to Go

One of many travertine falls in Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia, European Union. Photo by Donar Reiskoffer in the Public Domain. 2013.

One of many travertine falls in Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia, European Union. Photo by Donar Reiskoffer in the Public Domain. 2013.

What is the one place down on the surface of Planet Earth’s crust should everyone go visit at least once in their life? As gorgeous as they are, it’s not those beautiful lakes that fall one into the other in the picture above.

So many people pass thru Seattle these days and night, coming and going and going and coming, from somewhere to nowhere to everywhere. It seems Seattle is now the one place to go, or it’s what I hear from so many tourists. Which surprises me. Seattle is booming, yes, one survey earlier this year counted 80 construction cranes dominating the Downtown and Belltown areas alone. Despite the magnificent scenery of the Salish Sea and the Olympic and Cascade Mountains, however, Seattle isn’t The One Place On Earth One Must Go. I love Seattle, tho.

During the Great Recession I worked in retail at the Downtown Seattle REI Store, its largest flagship, and met people from around the world. Still do. Love working here at REI. Many fellow human beings from all over Cascadia, too, came and went and come and go as they tell stories about past trips, excited or in some cases afraid of upcoming adventures. Many people come into REI to buy supplies on their way to help out others, whether it’s devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal, supertyphoons in the Philippines, giant mudslides in Latin America, or the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

At work I am usually in sustained motion. When it’s slow, I either stock products or stand briefly and people watch. Engage and talk. Ask questions and listen. Help them find appropriate products, or if we don’t have them, suggest other places. Once there was a man from Yakutsk, the capital of the Sakha Republic in Russia’s Siberia. He was of Turkish-Mongol-Siberian ancestry, was unusually tall, and was in the United States for the first time. Dressed like a cross between a tweedy college professor, a backcountry woodsman, and a steampunk engineer, he was in quiet awe of the amount of merchandise in every store, including North American grocery stores. He was especially in awe of REI’s depth and breadth in outdoor adventure travel.

Claiming to be among the numerous proud descendants of Genghis Khan’s warriors, he said I should visit Siberia. I’d love to go, I replied. Siberia! One of the wildest, most extreme regions on Earth! The vast boreal forests of the Siberian Taiga, deep and mysterious Lake Baikal, hungry brown and black bears raiding villages, gigantic rivers pulsing towards the Arctic Ocean, bitter subfreezing temperatures, exploding scary ass methane craters in Yamal, the wild, remote, volcanic Kamchatka Peninsula, meteorite-hit cities, huge mountains and isolated deserts, southern steppes and northern tundra, Eurasian ethno-cultural blending amid ancient, little-known ruins, and the longest railroads in the world. O, Siberia!

But, no, not even majestic Siberia. There’s another place even more incredible everyone must try to get to. Yes, everyone.

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Three Bands wrack Café Racer during one magnificent wet Saturday night in Seattle

“Yeah! I think this is like Your Band’s first review!” ~ Ben Callup of Your Band

Your Band distorts gravity down at Cafe Racer

Your Band distorts gravity down at Cafe Racer~

My Saturday was awesome. Awesome beyond cliches, Hell yeah it was! The 3rd of January! 2015! Busted my middle-age Happy New Year ass in the Gym. Hung out with a dear friend I haven’t seen in almost 2 years and dove down an esoteric rabbit hole with her between death & life, and spent the evening of a Full Moon Eve at Café Racer where I met up with friends from the Socialist Alternative and listened to a trio of bands jam. It was good to get my butt away from the house and out on the town a bit. Slowly enjoyed a pint of Scotch Style Pike Kilt Lifter Ruby Ale from a scruffy, jolly bartender. I’m a glass-draining, guzzling gulper by habit, so I disciplined myself to slow it waaay down to one, delicious slow-drinkin’ beer while eyeing all the qwerty-quirky colorful, kitschy, & strange ugly ass art all over dayglow walls. Outside on the sidewalks knots of people smoked cigarettes in the rain as if it was the most natural thing to do at night in the misty Seattle rain.

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Skipping Rocks at Carkeek Park

Blended Family Fun on the Beach just after Sunset

Morgan & Talia at Play

~ Summer of 2004 ~

All photographs by William Dudley Bass.

Click upon any photo to expand it. Click again to make it bigger! Click the return arrow to go back to the previous page to the photo’s original size.

Morgan showing Talia how to skip rocks into the Sound, Carkeek Park, Seattle, June 2004.

Morgan showing Talia how to skip rocks into the Sound, Carkeek Park, Seattle, Wednesday 16 June 2004.

Kristina, my partner at the time, and I discovered one of the best ways to blend our quirky families was to play together. Shared activities made any chore much more fun and the play a hooty wild blast. Sometimes we played rough, too. My kids and I called wrestling with Daddy “rumble tumble.” Kate was the roughest, although Talia enjoyed a good tumble, too, until she decided she didn’t appreciate a particular move. Morgan didn’t care for such forceful fun. She was a more gentle, restrained, and patient player who valued eccentric, witty goofiness over “play fightin’.”

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The Lost Creek Monster

Did a Sasquatch tear up the woods between two Virginia farms?

The mystery of this strange event has never been solved. Recent scientific discoveries and claims, however, may provide the inquisitive with clues.

It’s springtime in Virginia. The year is either 1967 or 1968, and possibly as late as 1972. My memory of time and dates from long-ago events are a little hazy these days. Not the incidents and sequences of events, however long ago they occurred. These events are crystal clear in the “documentary film” of my memories.

A giant and mysterious beast went berserk in the woods shared by two intermarried family farms. The destruction was extensive and required immediate repair. We farmers kept our herds of cows and heifers separate to prevent them from getting all mixed up. Both farms had planned to turn loose their herds into adjacent fields separated by the fences along Lost Creek. Compounding the mystery was odd feeling the destruction appeared to be far more playful than malicious. Or perhaps it was a warning?

Maybe there was more than one entity. Perhaps a small family of these unknown monsters was responsible for the bizarre rampage. At the time people, adults as well as us kids, thought a tornado was the most likely culprit even if a tornado made no sense at all as there were no storms. So we imagined a giant, troll-like creature and named it the Lost Creek Monster. We certainly hoped if there really was such a beast there was only one at most. Feeling a bit superstitious, we nonetheless prayed the monster would leave us alone. Especially if it was the Devil. But we were just as afraid of God.

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Doppelganger Among the Cows

Once I saw a doppelganger, although I wasn’t aware of it until the next day. This mysterious event still baffles my mind. Strange and still unresolved questions were raised for which “hoax” would be the easiest yet least likely answer. There are questions regarding the possibility for the bilocation of matter, especially biological organisms, at high levels of material cohesion. Can a person split themselves at will or unconsciously? Other questions provoke inquiries into the evidence consciousness extends beyond our living bodyminds as well as continues, at least for a while, after death. One may speculate as well upon the spiritual ramifications of doppelgangers.

I was not the only witness that warm, sunny afternoon. First, however, what is a doppelganger? Yeah, what the heck is that? And is it dangerous? There’s no way this was a hoax. Well, a hoax is highly unlikely. I’ll explain why further down in this article.

Doppelgangers have existed in myths and legends since Ancient Times. I’d never given the phenomena much attention or credibility prior to this event. Yet my wife and I and others witnessed a doppelganger. Later that afternoon, one man even worked unknowingly alongside this doppelganger. When the man discovered he had done so, he freaked out and prayed feverishly to God so he wouldn’t be snatched up by the Devil and flung down into the fires and stench of Hell.

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Summer Twilight of the Burning Sky

The following anomalous event occurred one summer in the early 1970s in rural Prince Edward County, south-central Virginia. It remains unexplained.

This weird incident happened about five or six years after my family and I experienced an unidentified flying ship over the fields and woods behind our farmhouse. Those two experiences may have nothing to do with each other except both were strange and were dismissed, ridiculed, or explained away by our American Government.

Our paranoid Cold War fears intensified after the anomaly occurred this particular hot and sweaty summer evening. I was a young teenager back then. A group of us kids played outside in a grassy cow pasture between my house and the neighbors’. Joe, my younger brother, was running around with us, too. Our parents were out and about in their respective yards. The fireflies were already out, winking on and off along the edge of the woods bordering the field even though there was still plenty of light left. We called ’em lightnin’ bugs. The sweet smell of wild honeysuckle drifted in from the bushes growing thick along the edges of the fields. We jerked alert as we found ourselves and everything around us bathed in glowing light. It happened fast. BOOM without sound.

“Whoa, look!” shouted one friend in awe. “Look at the sky!”

“Oh, wow!”

“What the hell is that?”

“I sure don’t think it’s Jesus comin’ back. Don’t hear no trumpets a blowin’.”

“Trumpets, shit. Maybe the Russians are bombin’ us.”

“Or aliens from Outer Space!”

“Whoa, look at that! Hey, over there, too. Oh man, the sky’s on fire!”

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Ghosts and Hauntings at the Old Bass Family Farmhouse

Old Bass Family Farmhouse on a visit to Virginia from Seattle, December 2005. Foto by William Bass.

Old Bass Family Farmhouse on a visit to Virginia from Seattle, December 2005. Foto by William Bass.

A ghost, yes, an invisible ghost, scared me nearly all to pieces once upon a time back when I was a little kid. I was young, so you can laugh if you wanna, but I was well read and smart, too for being such a squirt. The way that ol’ ghost stomped down the hallway of an old farmhouse in my direction freaked me out. Made my big Frankenstein hearing aid SCREAM. I could hear this ghost, too. I could feel it, feel both the vibrations of the stomps and the cold blob of air moving along with it.

I was a young boy back in the mid-to-late1960s sometime. I don’t remember how many years old I was or what grade I attended in school. What I do recall, however, was the weather. It was Summertime. Lush, green Summertime! It must’ve been between grades. I reckon I was in late elementary school or maybe even early middle. Not sure. But it was Summer that I know. And a ghost scared the bedoobus outa my insides. This true story began late one afternoon.

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Big Belly Cigarette Smoking Man Swimming in Winter

The Author staring across Puget Sound towards the Olympics from the beaches of Carkeek Park, Seattle. This foto is not from the same time as the essay, it was taken years later on 6 November 2011 by Kate Bass, but it captures the chill of the story as the slide fotos of the actual event were lost in the 2010 house fire.

The Author staring across Puget Sound towards the Olympics from the beaches of Carkeek Park, Seattle. This foto is not from the same time as the essay as those pictures, original slide transparencies, were lost in the 2010 house fire. This foto was taken years later on 6 November 2011 by my middle daughter Kate Bass. Even so, Kate’s picture captures the chill of the story.

One bitter cold sunny day I came upon a tall, balding man standing on the beach wearing nothing but a skimpy Speedo swimsuit and smoking cigarettes. He had an enormous belly, a tremendous leviathan of a belly; the kind of tight power belly a big man could even feel proud of. Yet he moved like James Bond in the movies. He smoked like Humphrey Bogart used to in the movies, too. Him and Katherine Hepburn, remember? This man stood barefoot before me in sand, pebbles, and broken seashells as he gazed across the Salish Sea from the shores of Carkeek Park. I estimated he was a youngish sixty. An icy breeze sliced through my coat and stung my cheeks.

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Inner Shifts of Being

Sunset from the bluffs while gazing across the Sound toward the Olympics. Richmond Beach Park, Shoreline, Washington, Sunday 23 September 2012. Foto by William Dudley Bass.

Sunset from the bluffs while gazing across the Sound toward the Olympics. Richmond Beach Park, Shoreline, Washington, Sunday 23 September 2012. Foto by William Dudley Bass.

Something has shifted in me recently. What has shifted is I’ve lost my taste to speak harshly of others.

During the unexpected challenges of recent years I almost crumbled. The past few months were particularly difficult emotionally and financially. I could’ve sunk deeper into cynicism and bitterness and wallowed in apathy and self-pity. Instead I found the strength and the courage to pivot into a field where there are no paths. My life was my own to choose. My life was mine to live.

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Running from Mad Yellow Jackets

Two Days Later... (Click on all images to enlarge.)

Two Days Later… (Click on all images to ENLARGE.)

There it is ... Pandora's Garbage Can.

There it is … Pandora’s Garbage Can.

I pissed off a blizzard of yellow jackets the other day. They were the Mask of Death rising up without any forewarning or expectation. The Grim Reaper swung out his scythe in warning as I jumped high, and we both whirled away in opposite directions. Death by surprise with the horror of a thousand toxic stings. Except it wasn’t my time to pass on through to the other side…yet.

On a sunny Tuesday afternoon in early October 2012, on the 2nd of October to be exact. I stepped outside into the backyard to help clean up some trash and debris. I’ve been staying with my friends Gabriel and Joy in Shoreline, just north of Seattle, as they settle into their “new” home. The backyard was a glorious overgrown wood with tall, beautiful trees and thick bushes bunched around an urban meadow of shaggy grass and dandelions gone to see. In the corner set an old, abandoned metal garbage can. The lid sat somewhat ajar. Bits of trash hung out over the rim. One long, blue length of twine spooled down and out and lay snarled in weeds and sticks.

Behind me on the upstairs balcony Gabriel and his little boy, the one I call “Young Master,” were cleaning up, too. They watched from above. And they just as easily could’ve been out in the yard, too. Young Master could’ve been walking right there with me to peek inside the old garbage can with the same curiosity that possessed me. After all, he was out there messin’ around a couple days earlier over the weekend.

I carried two bags of trash and one of compost. Without much thought I strode up to the ugly old can squatting among the bushes on the edge of the woods. My hand reached out, grabbed the lid, and lifted.

My eyes caught a quick view of what looked like gray paper. Immediately, a monster swarm of bigass yellow jackets rolled out in a thick curling cloud. These were plump, end-of-summer demons all fattened up to die in another month or so. They came together in the air like a biological chainsaw, like a living robot from the Transformer movies, and they were enraged. When I lifted up the lid, apparently I’d ripped their nest apart.

For a moment so brief yet so long I stood there on hyperalert seeing the massed swarm of buzzing yellow jackets pouring out of the can into the air around me. Everything seemed to move in slow motion, way slooooww mooooshunnn. I felt as if I was inside The Matrix movie.

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I Smashed My Brains and Saw the Stars of Heaven

Concussions, Sports, Psychology of Sports Injuries, and Brain Trauma

Yes, on one sunny afternoon during high school football practice I smashed into Doug helmet to helmet. We crashed to earth, I blacked out for a moment, and then I awoke and saw the stars of Heaven. Damn, I felt drunk and drunk enough to play again. Our coach pulled us aside.

Doug kept his mouth shut as he walked as normally as he could without wobbling. He was smart and played cool. Me, I played doofus dork and insisted I saw stars. They whirled around my head. With eyes open, too.

“What happened?” asked Coach Fore. Coach Skeeter Fore, as he was called. He was locally famous for being a ferocious winner and a gracious loser. Coach was a caring, generous, funny man and the opposite in body type from a li’l bitty mosquito. He simply didn’t know much about brain injuries back in those days either.

It was the mid to late 1970s in Farmville, Virginia. Late Summer-early Autumn of 1976 to be exact. I was a senior in high school, Class of 1977. I played varsity football for the Prince Edward Academy Wolverines, and I was the smallest person on the team. I played primarily defense, often as a nose guard, and ran on kick-off. I rarely played offense, but I was a rascal of a nose guard. I’d throw my little ass across the legs of those big brutes hulking over me and logroll ‘em good. I’d dart between giant cavemen-like high school students who look like they should’ve graduated three years ago and try to tackle somebody before I got stomped. I loved wearing my orange-and-black Wolverine jersey with the black and white lettering. Even if I got stomped by trolls.

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The Devil in Uncle Watt

Family Stories & Genealogical Exorcisms

Uncle Watt bit off the head of a big, fat, juicy green tobacco worm, peed on his deaf cousin Aumon, and poked mules in the ass with a sharp stick just to see ‘em kick. Oh, yes, he was full of the Devil. Yes, he was! So people said as they laughed remembering the men, and thus my efforts to untangle dead ancestors one from the other to find the truth lured me down into a genealogical exorcism stained with the racism, class struggles, and violence of our common history.

“Oh my Lord, he done got the Devil in ‘im BAD,” Raffie, an ancient-oaken-looking man who said he used to work beside Uncle Watt on the farm once told me back when I was a young laddie lad. “Yeah, Lord, I’m tellin’ ya, it was BAD! Yessir! Twas BAD havin’ the Devil take a hold of him like it did.” As late as July 2009, Helen, one of my beloved aunts and a Beatnik artist then in her 80s, when asked about Uncle Watt called him “quite a character.” And so I tumbled down the dumbwaiter chute of a family mystery. Who was this “Devil?”

My Dad told me stories. Raffie told me stories. Uncle Willy told me stories. Even Uncle Aumon who got peed on told me stories. Willy and Aumon were brothers, and as they were also my Dad’s uncles they were really my paternal great-uncles. All of them would shake their heads with bemused dismay and chuckle. They could laugh simply because Uncle Watt was dead. He died young and wasn’t around anymore to torment anyone with all his foolishness. I never got to meet him. Dad said, “Uncle Watt died before you were born, Son, long before you were born.” He didn’t remember what of, tho.

“You don’t remember what he died of?” I asked all eaten up with a bug-eyed churn of impatient dismay.

“No, I don’t recall anything,” Dad replied. “Wait. Something about his toe. His big toe, maybe? Hell, I don’t know. Can’t help ya there. Got work to do now. Don’t you?”

Turns out Uncle Watt died long before my Daddy was born, too, as in a little over two decades before Dad’s birth. The strangeness about Watt Bass includes those who told all those crazy wild tales about him spoke as if they were there running alongside him in the same window of time. Whenever I asked way back then how long ago did those events happen not one person seemed to know. Asking a few questions turned into an unexpected adventure in genealogy as I dove into the rabbit hole of fading memories, cryptic notes on faded paper, and incomplete information online.

Watson Bass was a fun-loving guy who apparently was constantly pushing people’s buttons, telling jokes, and playing pranks like biting off the head of a giant caterpillar to pee all over Uncle Aumon, who was but a laddie-lad, then, too. He lived life on the wild side. Chased pretty girls but never married. Or so I was told. Which I found out was wrong, wrong, wrong as he certainly did marry. Unless I stumbled upon the tombstone of the wrong Uncle Watt. Turns out I didn’t as the correct tombstone was also the same shared with his now-deceased wife.

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The Horror of a Tortured Barbie Doll: Moral Dilemmas in Everyday Life

A blonde Barbie doll sticking halfway out through the roof of a car shuddered as the edge of a sliding glass window trapped her against the edge of the sunroof portal. A grinning man kept jamming the edge against the trembling doll as his kids watched in horror. Buckled up below in the back seat, his little girl screamed. For a moment I felt I actually heard the Barbie doll scream. Maybe, in a way, it did.

Moral dilemmas pop up, of course, when you don’t want them to. I mean fast moving ones such as right now something terrible is happening, events are unfolding, life is happening and maybe dying. Moral dilemmas force us to make decisions when we’re caught off guard. As we are always at choice in life, choosing to react blindly or to respond with intention, too often moral dilemmas trigger fight or flight or freeze.

Since this seems to happen to me more than I like, I hate moral dilemmas. And at the same time, oh, what a gift. Yes, these are gifts, each one a lesson in failure to feel into, to study, and to learn from. Part of the practice is for me to let go of remorse and stop beating myself up. In a perceived reality of cause and effect, where our thoughts and emotions lead to action, we are always at choice. Yes, in spite of circumstances, history, ethnicity, gender, religion, abilities, genetics, geography, culture, education, socio-economic class, and the illusion of true free will, you and I are always at choice.

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Last Night I Dreamed of a Dead Woman from Long Ago

Six nights ago I dreamed about a long-dead friend and have felt obsessed about it ever since. Just finished looking at old pictures of her I found in dusty high school yearbooks. She graduated in June of 1976 a year ahead of me. Her name was Jo Anne.

We didn’t hang out much at all in high school. We became friends many years later after she tracked me down to Richmond, the capital city of Virginia, where I lived and attended grad school in the mid-1980s. She wasn’t my girlfriend. We were never lovers. More like I was her confidante – we were buddies and pen pals there for a while. Before she died.

We were both rural kids bussed from the far corners of Prince Edward County into the town of Farmville, where we attended high school in the south-central part of Virginia. She was a wild beauty who once stood up and shouted out in the one class we ever shared, “If it feels good, do it!” Followed by a big, goofy laugh.

The rest of us fool kids giggled and either nodded our heads in agreement or shook it like “She’s crazy, crazier than us, like rilly crazy.” I did all three. Jo Anne was tall and slender with long, black hair. She carried herself with an air of crazy confidence, reminding me sometimes of that zany Swedish character Pippi Longstocking. Art was among her favorite subjects, and she was known to be quite imaginative with both pen and brush. Back then I was way too shy to do anything but laugh with her and admire her daredevilry.

Ten or twelve years later, after I had already graduated from high school then college, been married and divorced, moved to the city, and was buried into my first intense year of graduate school, Jo Anne looked me up and found me. She got my contact info from my parents back on the farm in Prince Edward. She knocked on my apartment door where I lived down in The Fan, the Bohemian part of Olde Richmond Town. I opened my door, and she came on in and sat down. Just like that. Out of the blue.

I had to hold my breath and pretend nothing was the matter. She had warned me, but it was still a shock. She was all broken up from a terrible automobile accident. Or maybe it was a motorcycle wreck? I just don’t remember now. But she had a severe limp, was kind of hunched over, and had lost an eye and part of her face. Her voice was husky and whispery, as the accident had damaged her neck and throat. She was still beautiful in a ghostly way, and it was clear she was struggling with it all even as she tried to dismiss it all as another “just what happened, life goes on” kind of thing.

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My Third Wife Changes Her Name: Gender Issues, Ex-Wives, and Surname Conflicts

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The Blended Family Wedding of Kristina Katayama (L) and William Bass (R) with vows to their children (Morgan, Kate, & Talia) and with their Community.

I married Kristina this past Saturday the 11th of July 2009. She was the great love of my life at that time. We have been together over 7 years, ever since late 2001, as I write this essay. Kristina is a vibrant and dynamic woman, bold, sexy, intelligent, professional, and passionate. She lives full out as a Postmodern Age human being. We married ourselves privately in bed back in May 2005 and became officially engaged in November 2005. We intended to celebrate with a public, legal wedding in the summer of 2006. Didn’t happen. We felt too busy with careers and children, however, and lived as if already married. In a way we already were. And in 2009 we finally did it. Up to our Wedding Day, Kristina used her father’s family name, “Katayama,” as her own. And after our wedding she insisted on changing her name. Or, to be more accurate, adding my surname to hers.

“What?” I asked incredulously. “That’s old-fashioned culturally-ingrained male domination of females. I don’t own you. I’ve fought against this kind of bigotry my whole life.”

I had more to say, too. “I LIKE the Japanese sound of ‘Katayama.’ Mine is an “Olde English” name. I like the global feel of Bass and Katayama being together as a couple. It supports Euro-Asian-American planetary integration! My name is short and monosyllabic. Yours is long and lovely with four syllables emphasizing the same vowel. And don’t you dare hyphenate! That’s a monstrosity!” Blah blah blah.

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Crazy Fun Family Bike Trip on the Iron Horse Trail

Our Blended Family Bike Excursion on the “Iron Horsie Trail,” Washington State, during the Summer of 2006

Biking down into the Center of the Earth, or so it seemed at the time... Katayama-Bass Family Self Portrait, Sunday 20 August 2006

Biking down into the Center of the Earth, or so it seemed at the time… Katayama-Bass Family Self Portrait, Sunday 20 August 2006.

Woo Hoo!!! A Wild Family Trip with William & Kristina and the Kids! Yeah!

We pulled it off! Our wild and crazy family mountain bike ride across the Washington Cascades! Well, sort of. At times we felt we descended beyond the Gates of Hades on our own nutty journey into the center of Planet Earth. But a fun journey. It was a logistical workout, and blessed with a treasure of memories. Originally Kristina and I planned a 3-day family bike ride with all 3 kids along 40+ miles of the John Wayne Pioneer Trail thru Iron Horse State Park in the Cascade Mountains. We’d planned to carry all of our gear and camp along the way. We were unable to work out the logistics to our satisfaction, however, as we didn’t want to take two cars.

So we turned it into a different sort of trip and just took off on Friday 18 August 2006. By then all the campgrounds were full. We whimsically drove up winding National Forest Service roads and stared over cliffs toward dramatic mountain scenery. In grim, puzzled silence, we rumbled past a weird, old man living out of a rusty, red car who tied plastic bags up in the bushes alongside the road. He turned and stared at us as if he could eat us all up for supper. Imagining great and terrible things then giggling like embarrassed maniacs, we drove on around the rocky corner.

Many a dusty mile later, we found a lovely, open spot among the woods, rocks, and overgrown logging slash. There we wild-camped near the top of Amabilis Mountain. Arid conditions and clear skies greeted us. Big, wide-open skies. The Milky Way seemed to cleave the heavens in half like some incandescent sword. A meteor shower was in progress, too. Beginning every late July and stretching into the middle of August, the Perseid Meteor Shower is a treat out here in the clear, arid skies typical of our Northwest summers. Several spectacular shooting stars and flurries of little ones blazed across dark skies every night. Friday night there we slept.

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My Beloved & I (2001-2013)

I love this amazing woman, Kristina Katayama.

Then 12 and a half years later we divorced, darn it, but not before we dove thru our Hearts deep into the Center of the Sun.

Kristina Katayama: Businesswoman, World Traveler, Adventurer, Mom, Stepmom, my Fiance, & then my Wife. Professional Photo by Cass Redstone for Kristina, April 23, 2008, & adapted on iPhoto by William Bass, March 17, 2012. Seattle, Washington, Cascadia.

Kristina Katayama: Businesswoman, World Traveler, Adventurer, Mom, Stepmom, my Fiance, & then my Wife. Professional Photo by Cass Redstone for Kristina in Seattle on 23 April 2008, & adapted on iPhoto by William Bass for this essay on 17 March 2012. Seattle, Washington, Cascadia.

Note: Click on any photo to expand it, and click again to make it even larger. Click the back arrow to return to the essay. All photographs protected by Copyright with All Rights Reserved. Thank you, and enjoy!

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Morgan Bass Dives Into Life

A brief photo-essay of memorable times when my oldest daughter Morgan Hannah blossomed from pre-teen into full adolescence as she navigates to womanhood. She was 14 years old and a 9th Grader at Roosevelt High School in Seattle, Washington, when these photos were taken. They were shot by a classmate in black & white for a photography class Morgan and her friend participated in. In just two more days, Morgan turns 18 years old as she enters adulthood as a young woman. I am thrilled and feel deeply blessed. Here is a snapshot in time altered for fun as we explore life from sometimes unusual angles.

Morgan Hannah Hughes Bass, age 14, Seattle, WA, Autumn of 2008. Photo by Classmate.

Morgan Hannah Hughes Bass, age 14, Seattle, WA, Autumn of 2008. Photo by Classmate.

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My Girls’ School Pictures 2007-2008

Youngest first! These school portraits provide snapshots in time when my three daughters dove into life. The originals were destroyed when our home burned down in 2010, so these are digitalized copies from those halcyon days before the fire.

All photos are from the Seattle Public Schools in the northern half of Seattle, Washington. Enjoy!

Talia Katayama (now Bass), my beautiful, talented, and sensitive stepdaughter since before her birth. I helped deliver her at home on the floor and helped raised her up, too. Continue reading

Broken Glass

My Momma always used t’say I was rough on things. And after awhile, my Daddy started saying the same thing. They called me by my middle name, and said, “Dudley, you’re rough on things!” Well, I was a very energetic little boy. Things had a tendency to break around me.

I grew up on a dairy farm in Prince Edward County in South-Central Virginia during the 1960s. I lived in a house built in the middle of what used to be a big pigpen. “Hogs,” they called ’em back then. When pigs got big they called ’em hogs. “Hawgs.” As in “Hawgs!” You could even see the straight line of trees where the old woven wire fence used to run to keep the hogs in the pen. Otherwise it was all green grass, daffodils, shade trees, pansies, irises, and vegetable gardens.

It grossed me out a few years later, though, when I got my hands on a couple of Daddy’s college textbooks on parasitic worms and other nauseating diseases associated with domestic livestock. The books showed the most graphic and horrible pictures, and I found them quite fascinating – until I realized I lived inside of an old pigpen.

My house back then was small. I could run from one end to the other, and often did. The front door opened from a small, cozy front porch into the living room on the almost-east side of the house. That flowed through a big wide walk-through into a dining room, which opened into the kitchen, which opened onto an enclosed back porch where the washing machine was. All the bedrooms, closets, bathroom, and the den were on the sorta-west side of the house. I could run all the way from the front door to the back door and back again. The full length of the house. As hard as I could. Fast!

Drove my Momma crazy. “Dudley,” she would yell, “Stop slamming the front door! Either go out and play or stay inside and be quiet.”

“Yes Ma’am!” I shouted and deciding to stay inside, charged through the house as fast as I could, my little feet drumming across the floors. That drove my Momma crazy, too.

“Dudley!” she scolded again. “Stop running in the house! Go outside and run.”

Oh, boy, but I was having too much fun.

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“Dat Kate!” One Morning of School Bus Madness

Kate the Great was in good spirits this one, crazy Seattle morning in early Autumn of 2007. And after being so TESTY last night, too. Play play play every day day day. Even raided Gwen’s kitchen, the private abode of her mom who lived downstairs.  Raided the kitchen like a hyena turned all a loose up inside cupboards, refrigerators, garbage cans, and every darn thang. Tho she did gwarbbled up the eggs I scaramboolled up with sharp Irish cheddar. Yea, play play play all day day day. After just one visit back to Virginia, Kathryn’s grandparents on both sides of her family nicknamed her “Hurricane Kate.”

She’s such a BELOVED third grader, beloved because everyone who doesn’t live with her just ADORES her, and only 8 years old, too. Soon to be 9 years old, she’ll let you know. Kate is my wild, wild, crazy ass daughter. And I love her madly cuz she is so daggone crazy and she is clear her name is KATE and she is the only real KATIE KATE KATE this side of the Moon but she ain’t no loon!

And I’m in good spirits myself this morning, having drunk too much coffee, and being a beehive talkin’ country boy from the South who done relocated to the Northwest and tucked away my pitchfork, so started talkin’ like one to remind my lovely Emerald City lasses of their dangerous heritage. All of which drives my kids crazy cuz they HATE it and laugh and shout at me to “Stop talking like that, Dad. DAD!!!”

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On Living, Dying, Death, Loss, Grief, Ghosts, and Moving On

The events of my father’s death followed by my mother’s and all that arose afterwards were pivotal events in my life. They are, I would imagine, for the majority of human beings around the world. My writings on these topics took place over time and have evolved into the narrative contained within the following series of essays, ruminations, photographs, and poems.

Death is an everyday aspect of life, and yet in our culture perhaps the least visited, the least discussed, the most disturbing, the most feared, and the most liberating. Bereft of a cultural web of community grief and loss, we nowadays hurry the dying out of view and the dead into the ground or into an urn or whatever just so we can get back to what we really have reduced our lives to: being too busy. In the process of freeing ourselves up to be so busy we have unwittingly robbed ourselves of something intimate, indeed of something which can be a rich affirmation of life and purpose.

Loosely I lump the following as my “Death of my Parents” canon, and it’s much more than the deaths of Mom and Dad. Each is fully self-contained, although they do flow one to the other. Some are long, while others are short. Most have photographs, some don’t, and a few have lots and lots of pictures. I list them below in the chronology of which I published them on my website, William Dudley Bass on Earth at the Brink, although as with blogs they show up in reverse order with the last one posted at the top.

I invite you to dive on in and join me on a certain timed yet timeless odyssey.

1. “Death with Father,” https://williamdudleybass.com/death-father.

2. “My Mom & Death,” https://williamdudleybass.com/mom-death.

3. “During My Mother’s Dying,” https://williamdudleybass.com/mothers-dying.

4. “Mom Passes On: Ruminations,” https://williamdudleybass.com/mom-passes-on-ruminations.

5. “The Morning After We Buried Mom,” https://williamdudleybass.com/morning-buried-mom.

6. “Daddy’s Ghost,” https://williamdudleybass.com/daddys-ghost.

7. “Barreling Across America with my Daughter Morgan,” https://williamdudleybass.com/barreling-america.

8. “Dad’s Old Chair,” https://williamdudleybass.com/dads-old-chair.

Thank you, dear Readers.

 

William Dudley Bass
5 March 2012
Seattle, Washington
https://williamdudleybass.com

 

Copyright © 2012, 2016 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

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Naked Barbies at the Bus Stop

Tuesday Morning of 6 May 2002

Kate, my 4 year old, crawled around the corner into the room pushing a big, grey, toy horse with a shaggy, black mane. A naked, plastic woman was bent backwards across the saddle of the horse with her large, plastic breasts pointing up and out into the parlor. Unlike her limbs, her breasts were immovable. I was amused by the way Kate had the doll face-up over the horse instead of draped face-down as “in reality.”

Morgan, my 9 year old, stares.

“Oh, my God,” she blurts out. “A naked Barbie!”

Hmmnn, not only is my third grader a self-professed Atheist, who like many Atheists continue to use the Lord’s name, but she has become increasingly self-conscious about her pre-budding figure.

“Kate, are you ready to go to the bus stop with me and Morgan?” I asked.

“You are NOT taking a naked Barbie to the bus stop!” Morgan declared.

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Dad’s Old Chair

Poetic Ruminations from sitting in my dead Daddy’s favorite chair:

One morning in March
I go and find my father’s
Old green recliner and sit in it.
My dog sits at my feet
As my beloved sleeps
down the hall in the bed.
The old chair is cozy and warm.
No wonder my dad used to sleep in it.

I sit and stare out the window
At spring snow melting away,
At ponderosa pines, white birches,
Cottonwoods and old stumps.
Blue emptiness fills mountain skies
Out here in the Washington Cascades.

It would be an alien landscape to my father,
Who died three years and over three months ago.
My brother was spooked by the chair;
Thought it haunted, kind of, and asked me to take it.
Said it smelled too much of Dad.
That chair traveled over three thousand miles
From an old farmhouse in Virginia
To a new western lodge in Washington,
From the Sandy River to the Wenatchee.

Once or twice I thought I sensed my dad back in his chair,
Just left-over energy, an echo of a cherished memory.
Mom’s nurses swore they saw his ghost at least twice;
I wanted to see his ghost, too,
But never did.
My father moved on after Mom joined him beyond Death.

As I sit in my Dad’s old chair
With a dog insisting on being petted,
Pushing its head and lifted paw into my lap,
I surrender to God.
My ego battles with the Divine
Not owning its divinity.
I pray, meditate, contemplate the future.
And as I gaze out the window
I miss my Dad.

 

William Dudley Bass
March 2008
March 2012
Seattle, Washington

NOTE: Originally published on my old website Cultivate and Harvest, on Thursday 13 November 2008 at http://cultivateandharvest.blogspot.com/2008/11/dads-old-chair.html, then re-published here this 4 March 2012 with my permission as the Author. Thank you.

Copyright © 2008, 2012, 2016 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

*

 

Barreling Across America with my Daughter Morgan

Morgan gears up for The Long Ride, April 2007.

Morgan gears up for The Long Ride, April 2007.

Diary of a 7-Day Journey with my Daughter Morgan:

Morgan jounced along with me as I drove across the Continent from Virginia to Washington State in a moving truck crammed like an old-fashioned peddler’s wagon. My parents had died fairly recently, Daddy in late Autumn of 2004 and Momma about two years later in 2006. As a result of their passing, I inherited many of their possessions. The last time I’d driven a moving truck packed with so much heavy furniture and jangly stuff cross-country was back in 1993. This road trip also signaled a completion of a cycle of death-journeys back and forth from Seattle to rural Virginia around the deaths of both parents.

Catching Daddy droolin' one night sleeping in the Truck, April 2007. Photo by Morgan Bass.

Catching Daddy droolin’ one night sleeping in the Truck, April 2007. Foto by Morgan Bass.

Morgan and I arrived with all belongings in the wee hours of Saturday morning, about 2:30 AM, on 14 April 2007. It was quite a trip. And it was a special trip, a long overdue opportunity for some father – daughter bonding. Morgan is my oldest daughter of three and my only biological offspring. She had turned 13 a month earlier. I love her dearly, and it was painful to stand aside and watch her grow up and apart. I didn’t expect it to happen so soon, but at 12 she started taking off.

As my eldest daughter, she was but a sprout compared to her grandparents who recently died in their mid-70s. Dad passed first, dying on the 1st of December 2004, the third anniversary of my partnership with Kristina. After a few false starts, Mom finally followed on my brother’s birthday, 15 November 2006. My sister Beth had successfully navigated between doctors, lawyers, accountants, funeral home directors, tax preparers, insurance agents, courts, gravediggers, bankers, and stressed out relatives. Beth performed difficult job with perseverance and excellence, all while working full-time, raising a daughter, and settling in from Arizona back into Virginia.

The closure of this entire mess o’ dying proved to be an adventure yet.

Through the Windows over the Mountains

Through the Windows over the Mountains

Saturday 7 April – First, flying from Seattle, WA to Richmond, VA via Chicago was uneventful and smooth, albeit we landed at 11:30 PM that night. Ray Hinde, my sister’s second husband, was generous to pick us up at the airport as our rental car plan fell through. He had just driven to the airport the night before to pick up his son and daughter by his first wife. They had buzzed in from Arizona.

2x.2007_0414morganisoamazing0002

Morgan goofin’ up de plane.

On the plane I read David McCullough’s history book 1776 and was struck by the irony of me, a Virginian living in Washington, reading about George Washington, himself a native of Virginia and in whose honor my adopted state was named after. And Morgan is a native of Washington and is visiting Virginia. The events of that gripping narrative, however, describe a situation that changed history. If the American Revolution had failed there would be no “Virginians” living in Washington.”

Even so, we paid my Aunt Helen a midnight visit down in the Fan, the Bohemian area of Richmond. Helen, my daddy’s Big Sister, had a box of gold-rimmed china from her mother to give Morgan, who is Mary Yeatts Bass’s great-granddaughter. Helen, a morning lark, was kind enough to stay up late for us to visit. It was stunning to walk into her home in the Fan. On every wall was beautiful and vibrant art. On the table was another project in process.

Helen excitedly led us into her basement art studio to show us a number of fun and expressive pieces she was crafting from a mélange of seashells, driftwood, stones, beads, and paints. And also where she tripped over a cord and smashed to the floor. Morgan was thrilled to see Helen again and it was her first visit to Helen’s organic and living in-home museum and studio. I wished we could all visit more often; tough to do when we lived 3000 miles away. Helen, thank you for being such a gracious host beyond the Witching Hour. And Morgan feels awe to receive her great-grandmother’s china.

Ray drove us on back to the old Bass farm outside Rice. He and Beth have a new home on a hill overlooking the lake formed by the Sandy River Reservoir. He took us to my deceased parents’ empty house. Morgan and I spent the remainder of the night there, wondering if we would see ghosts. I slept very poorly.

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Daddy’s Ghost

As Momma lay dying of cancer, my father’s ghost was sighted at least twice. The home care ladies and nurses who saw him, however, begged me not to have that advertised back then as they didn’t want to be regarded as nuts or superstitious. Or maybe even lose their jobs. Who the hell would want to hire crazy people who see ghosts to take care of the dying?

Once a woman who worked in my parents’ home as a home care nurse was bent over cleaning the floor where my mother had just thrown up on the carpet. She glanced up and there he was. Bill Bass himself. His ghost, anyway. He stood there in the corner with his hands clasped in front of his privates like he used to do back in real life, looking down at her scrubbing the rug. It was clear as daylight that ghost was Bill Bass, and you could see right through him, too. The moment he realized she saw him, my father’s ghost moved quickly and disappeared in a flash of nothingness. Spooked the shit out of the lady on the floor. She wanted to go home!

A second time he was sighted by a different person standing next or behind my mother in their master bedroom where my Mom laid in a hospital bed. The woman who saw Daddy’s ghost declared it felt he was waiting for Momma to die and being a little bit impatient about it, too. She said it had a distinct feeling to it. It felt as if he was thinking “Dot, what’s taking you so long?” At my mom’s funeral the minister alluded to this incident somewhat obliquely. But my Dad is a warrior, apparently in death as well as in life, and while so impatient when things got serious proved to be the most patient one of all. Again, the moment that ol’ ghost realized he had dropped his invisibility cloak or whatever it was, he disappeared from biological view in a heartbeat. Snap! Gone, just like that.

My mother never commented on ever seeing a ghost. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to,” she once said with a shudder. “It would scare me to death.”

Continue reading

The Morning After We Buried Mom

Breathing in Ghosts

Breathing in Ghosts

Sunday 19 November 2006

The morning after we buried my Mother
Dawn opened up the day with mist and gray
I stood on the porch of my sister’s new house
Cold upon the lake
Remembering the chill of touching
Momma’s lifeless hands and face
As a wall of fog gray as corpses
Shields trees and water from view
Birdcalls sparkle in the void
Bordered by clay red and torn
Edged with grass brown and wet
Fog glued together heaven and earth,
Sky and lake, and turned bone-white
And as the sun rose above skeletal trees
The fog began to move and churn
Across waters stilled before the sun’s return
Unstaked wild life’s hunger for warm bright light
November brings paleness to shortened days
And time ebbs and flows
The moment recedes into the past
Memories become as fog
And all things die
As it’s just another day
As it’s just another day
And it’s just another day
Just
Another
Day
Before darkness returns to take us Home.

 

A Prose Poem

William Dudley Bass
19 November 2006
16 January 2007
Revised 29 February 2012
Rice, Virginia &
Seattle, Washington

Two Comments from the Original Posting from the older website:

True North said…Ahhh William, thank you…I have just come home from working downtown today, hung up my suit, brewed a coffee and opened your blog…my heart shrugs off the dense energy of cement and iron, unmanacles and expands into the depth and vision of your words…ahh, now I will read on…Cindy

A Flower For All Seasons said…So wonderful to hear your poet’s voice William. To touch the timeless through your eyes and breath. And a lovely feeling of anticipation as I choose to read only one entry on any given day, knowing that each time I visit here your voice will awaken something in me that will take me who knows where… Wendy

NOTE: This was originally published in my oldest blog, Cultivate and Harvest, on Tuesday 16 January 2007, at http://cultivateandharvest.blogspot.com/2007/01/morning-after-we-buried-mom.html, and reprinted here this January 2012 with my permission as the Author. I also copied comments from two of my colleagues from the Robert Augustus Masters’ Psycho-Spiritual Counseling Practicum we were in at the time. Thank you.

Copyright © 2006, 2007, 2012, 2016 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

*

Mom Passes On: Ruminations

Mom Passes On...

Mom Passes On…

Death is chaotic. So are funerals.

It was indeed a dark and stormy night when the phone buzzed with news from over 3,000 miles away. It was Wednesday the 15th of November 2006, my brother’s birthday. That wasn’t what the news was about, though. Waves of cold chills dashed across my body. I steeled myself to see my Mother’s ghost.

There wasn’t, however, anything remotely ghostly amid the crashing storm. And yet I was certain, grimly certain…there was something, faint and fluttery like a quick-darting butterfly, that was there, right there, and gone, nothing more, as if there never was any such beating of ghostly wings. In the darkness of pounding rain and gusty gales I wasn’t quite prepared to be scared out of my wits. After all, I wasn’t even properly dressed to greet Momma’s Ghost unless you considered a 47-year old birthday suit appropriate for such a passage.

Mom had been battling cancer since 2003. “Battling cancer” doesn’t even begin to describe the war itself. It is far more than the appearance of cancer cells and invasive tumors that seek to hijack and consume the body. The immune system degrades. Diet and nutrition suffers. Repeat secondary infections by bacteria, fungi, and viruses do tremendous damage and like squads of vicious hit men end up doing the killing. There’s the emotional, neurological, and psychological toll. There’s an enormous social toll and the rippling impact on family, friends, neighbors, and businesses, essentially all of one’s relations.

Cancer itself is an umbrella term for a messy web of mysterious diseases with multiple causes that mutate into one monster after another. And though a lot of folks are not always comfortable with the curious topic of money, cancer extorts a staggering financial cost. Is it any wonder we apply military terms to “dis-ease?” And perhaps, as humanity comes through millennia of slaughter to finally confront the useless futility of war, it is time we too consider embracing cancer and its runaway cells with something other than mortal combat. But war is the approach my feisty old mother chose.

Continue reading

During My Mother’s Dying

Little Dottie Wottie Totsie, age 2 or 3, Virginia, 1933.

Little Dottie Wottie Totsie, age 2 or 3, Virginia, 1933.

Dot Ussery, age 16 or 17, Blacksburg, VA. 1948.

Dot Ussery, age 16 or 17, Blacksburg, Virginia, 1948.

The Marriage of Dot & Bill, Blacksburg, VA. 22 August 1953.

The Marriage of Dot & Bill, Blacksburg, VA. 22 August 1953.

Golfing away the Summer of 1958...L2R: Ussery cousin & 3 Ussery sisters Dot, Marianna, & Nancy, Blacksburg, Virginia.

Golfing away the Summer of 1958…L2R: Ussery cousin & 3 Ussery sisters Dot, Marianna, & Nancy, Blacksburg, Virginia.

Proud Momma Dot & her children. L2R: William Dudley (me), Joe David, & Beth Bass, Rice, Virginia. 1970. Foto by my Dad (William M. Bass).

Proud Momma Dot & her children. L2R: William Dudley (me), Joe David, & Beth Bass, Rice, Virginia. 1970. Foto by my Dad (William M. Bass). I have a vague memory of not being exactly thrilled as I was told to do something and didn’t hear it or understand or didn’t want to in reaction. Joe’s mind is churning with observations, and my sister’s happy smile looks amazingly similar to that of my oldest daughter at times. Momma had her hands, full, too. So did Daddy.

Mom at 53 in Happier Days, Riverview Farm, Rice, VA. She's leaning over the bed of our old red Ford pickup truck with the unoccupied original Bass Family Farmhouse still standing behind her. October 1984. Foto by William D. Bass.

Mom at 53 in Happier Days, Riverview Farm, Rice, VA. She’s leaning over the bed of our old red Ford pickup truck with the unoccupied original Bass Family Farmhouse still standing behind her. October 1984. Foto by William D. Bass.

Blurry with Drink! Dot at the Pub, Bristol, England, UK. Summer of 1997.

Blurry with Drink! Dot at the Pub, Bristol, England, UK. Summer of 1997.

Near the End. Mom with Daughter Beth Bass Hinde and Granddaughter Allison. Late Summer 2006.

Near the End. Mom with Daughter Beth Bass Hinde and Granddaughter Allison. Late Summer 2006.

During My Mother’s Dying

Early July 2006. My Mother lays ill in the last cycle of her life after battling metastatic ovarian cancer for three years. Her name is Dorothy Elizabeth Ussery Bass. Most folks call her “Dot.” Although my home has been Seattle, Washington for quite some time, I am again in Virginia, the land where she gave birth to me, and feel compelled to write down the following impressions and chronicles:

Last night I slept ten and a half hours, awaking from a heavy dream combining aspects of Mt. Rainier, the Appalachian Trail, and my friends David and Tina from Richmond. The night before I slept only 3-4 hours. I got out of bed early and went for a walk, rambling around the farm and across the land. Did push-ups on the concrete apron of the old cow lane, my hands pushed down where cow shit used to pile up in boot-sucking quantities. Now the concrete runway’s been washed clean by the rains and bleached by the sun.

The most beautiful songs burst forth from songbirds perched up in treetops and on the barn roof cupolas. We don’t have songbirds much out West, they tend to thrive East of the Great Plains – they need deciduous forests. Astounding arrays of bird songs fill the morning air. The Virginia country air feels so cool in the morning, so cool but only because warm air is cooler than hot air. The temperature later shot up to a sweltering, humid 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Damn. People slow down. Dayum. Day-yumm. You walk with deliberation and a sense of conservation. People say it is unusual for such temperatures so soon. That’s August weather. Global Warning (sic, yes). Amid the dying of a matriarch I hear the songbird singing trail off into the blazing, hot Void.

Continue reading

My Mom & Death

Mom between Dyings; Her Last Christmas, Virginia 2005.

Mom between Dyings; Her Last Christmas, Virginia 2005.

A Letter to the Living…

Brothers,

Recently read Robert Masters’ book Darkness Shining Wild. One of his themes is bringing Death out of the closet. Into our everyday lives. Being present to Death. As some of you “older veterans” may recall I was with my Dad during his dying from cancer. That was a cathartic event that catapulted me into the workshop I jokingly refer to as “Nightmare in the City.”

Now my Mom is going down. After 3 years of battling cancer, almost dying the same year my Dad died, after going into remission and getting better, the tumors have returned and spread with a vengeance. She’s terminal, tho aren’t we all. Supposedly she has less than 5-6 months left. Who knows?

She is in so much pain now. The fury of the pain blinds her at times and robs her of her dignity. We think we’re going to die a certain way, looking good as we go, but often we don’t. My dad’s death taught me we leave this world as messy as we enter it. Covered in blood and shit. I will be at the Men’s Group this Monday, and then fly out to Virginia for a while, and then again this fall.

My Mother’s looming death feels like some kind of initiatory bookend. At times this woman was a horror and yet she gave me everything. Life. Love. I don’t quite know what to do except to go into it. And unlike some terminally ill folks she does not want to die. She wants to hang on to every breath she takes.

From an Email to Passion Warriors WarriorSage Seattle Men’s Group, Wednesday 21 June 2006.

P.S. I am no longer affiliated with this men’s group or with WarriorSage. Both served their purpose during a crucial time in my life. I have since moved on.

 

William Dudley Bass
21 June 2006
13 November 2008
Revised 26 February 2012
Seattle, Washington

NOTE: This was originally published in my earliest blog, Cultivate and Harvest, on Thursday 13 November 2008, at http://cultivateandharvest.blogspot.com/2008/11/my-mom-death.html, and revised and re-published here this February of 2012. Thank you.

 

Copyright © 2006, 2008, 2012, 2016 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

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Death with Father

 

William M. "Bill" Bass, U.S. Navy, 1949-1952; Norfolk, VA. (Photo damaged in 2010 house fire.)

William M. “Bill” Bass, U.S. Navy, 1949-1952; Norfolk, VA. (Photo damaged in 2010 house fire.)

Dot & Bill, Playful Lovers, Blacksburg, Virginia. Summer of 1953.

Dot & Bill, Playful Lovers, Blacksburg, Virginia. Summer of 1953.

Dashing thru the Rice: Dot & Bill Bass leaving their Wedding for their Honeymoon, Saturday, August 22, 1953. Blacksburg, Virginia.

Dashing thru the Rice: Dot & Bill Bass leaving their Wedding for their Honeymoon, Saturday, August 22, 1953. Blacksburg, Virginia.

My Dad & I home on Riverview Dairy Farm, Rice, Virginia, March 1960. He's 30 years young, & I'm 11 months old. We had 44 more years together.

My Dad & I home on Riverview Dairy Farm, Rice, Virginia, March 1960. He’s 30 years young, & I’m 11 months old. We had 44 more years together.

Bill & Dot Bass, Rice, VA. Early 1980s.

Bill & Dot Bass at home in Rice, VA. Early 1980s.

Brothers Dudley & Joe Bass, Rice, VA. Joe's 18th Birthday Party, 15 November 1982. Photo damaged in March 2010 House Fire in Edmonds, WA.

Brothers Dudley & Joe Bass, Rice, VA. Joe’s 18th Birthday Party, 15 November 1982. Photo damaged in March 2010 House Fire in Edmonds, WA.

Brothers Joe & William Bass, Rice, VA. Christmas 2005, about a year after Dad's death, and our last together with Mom.

Brothers Joe & William Bass, Rice, VA. Christmas 2005, about a year after Dad’s death, and our last together with Mom.

Intro from July 2006: As a Prelude of sorts I first include sections from an email I wrote a few days after my father died early in the morning on Wednesday on the 1st of December 2004. At the time my life had fallen apart about a year earlier and I was bankrupt, divorced, unemployed, and half-mad. I was struggling in my relationship with Kristina and desperately trying to get my feet back on the ground. It was one of the worse times in my life, and a cauldron for eventual success. I was also deep in the Warrior Sage work and had not yet been disenchanted with the philosophies and practices of David Deida and his followers on the West Coast. July 2006.

Death with Father, November – December 2004

I am a rich man. I am blessed with an abundance of pain and growth and waking up and amazing things happening, a wealth of life experiences. It’s been rough. I sail my ship thru one storm after another, and it’s been rough. My stomach heaves as each swell rolls underfoot and each rogue wave washes the decks clean for each new beginning every moment.

Dad died early Wednesday morning in the ER. It was bitter cold and the third anniversary of my partnership with my fiancé Kristina Katayama. My brother Joe and I were up all fucking night. Death was messy and brutal. As Gary, the founder of the men’s group I was in then told me afterwards, “We come into the world messy, and we leave messy.” At least it was quick. So quick I wasn’t even aware he was dead at first, just sleeping.

About three days ago I got my father alone and said, “Dad, listen up. I want you to know I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he said.

“I flew here because this might be the last time we see each other alive.”

“I know it.”

Continue reading

Derailed (The Fire, Part 3)

Click on any photo to ENLARGE it.

Blended Family Wedding: The Marriage of William & Kristina, Seattle, WA, Saturday 11 July 2009. Photo by Carol Ernst. Soon to be "derailed."

Blended Family Wedding: The Marriage of William & Kristina, Seattle, WA, Saturday 11 July 2009. Photo by Carol Ernst. Soon to be “derailed.”

My Camera Post-Fire (the memory card with ~ 800 pics survived) at the Burn House. Photo by William Bass.

My Camera Post-Fire (the memory card with ~ 800 pics survived) at the Burn House. Photo by William Bass.

Searching for Evidence in Kate's Room (below the Kitchen) at the Edmonds Burn House. Photo by John Westfall, March 2010.

Searching for Evidence in Kate’s Room (below the Kitchen) at the Edmonds Burn House. Photo by John Westfall, March 2010.

 at the Edmonds Burn House. Photo by John Westfall, March 2010.

Morgan’s Room…& Insurance Investigator outside. Photo by John Westfall, March 2010.

Sweet 16: Morgan's Harry Potter Birthday Party night before the Fire. Morgan is far left & front. Kristina's family Butsudan Shrine in the background. Edmonds, WA, Friday 19 March 2010.

Sweet 16: Morgan’s Harry Potter Birthday Party night before the Fire. Morgan is far left & front. Kristina’s family Butsudan Shrine in the background. Edmonds, WA, Friday 19 March 2010.

Morgan's Birthday Party w/ Peter Lik's "Tranquility" on wall behind the kids, Edmonds, WA, Friday 19 March 2010.

Morgan’s Birthday Party w/ Peter Lik’s “Tranquility” on wall behind the kids, Edmonds, WA, Friday 19 March 2010.

The Last Chess Game, Morgan's 16th Birthday Party, Edmonds, WA.

The Last Chess Game, Morgan’s 16th Birthday Party, Edmonds, WA.

 

Derailed

Fire changes things. Destroys. Creates. Transforms.

Think of metamorphic rocks, rocks such as gneiss, slate, quartzite, and marble. Think of transmutation of elements. Transmutation as illustrated by the old alchemical striving to turn lead, the base metal of Satan the Devil, into gold, the metal of Gods and kings, or modern nuclear reactions, explosions, and radioactive decay. One forgets among the unleashing of atomic demons the alchemists were more esoteric than literal as they sought to transform their very souls.

Sometimes those who spend lifetimes in search of such divine gifts never obtain their goals.

Sometimes those who don’t seek these Gifts of Fire end up in flames anyway.

Sometimes life spins out of control.

It feels that way at times. Certainly within our minds. Even if Life goes on until Dead.

Jeff Shushan, a brilliant and insightful psychotherapist Kristina and I worked with off and on through the latter part of 2010 into 2011, used the term “derailed.” An unexpected and traumatic event occurs. It is a life-changing event. Circumstances feel overwhelming and throw people off course. Yes, you can be alert, awake, aware, present, mindful, and choose to respond rather than react. Still, to full heal one must take time to grieve, to reassess, to determine what steps to take next and in what direction, with whom, and how.

My house burned down on the morning of Saturday, March 20, 2010. We lost almost everything, “we” being a post-double divorce blended family with my wife Kristina and our three daughters from prior marriages. Fortunately no one was burned or injured in anyway. Thankfully no one was killed in what the fire fighters called “a killer fire.”

Continue reading

After the Fire (Part 2 of 3)

This essay follows, “The Fire, Part 1 of 3.”

Click on any photo to ENLARGE it.

Keeping the Fire Down. Edmonds, Washington. Saturday 20 March 2010. Photo by William Bass.

Keeping the Fire Down. Edmonds, Washington. Saturday 20 March 2010. Photo by William Bass.

Thru the Front Door to the Sea. Photo by William Bass.

Thru the Front Door to the Sea. Photo by William Bass.

Entering ... Nothing. Photo by William Bass.

Entering … Nothing. Photo by William Bass.

Doorway to ... ? Photo by William Bass.

Doorway to … ? Photo by William Bass.

Kitchen floor collapsed into double bunk beds in Kate's Room on other side of wall from Morgan's Room & the Family Room/Library. Photo by William Bass.

Kitchen floor collapsed into double bunk beds in Kate’s Room on other side of wall from Morgan’s Room & the Family Room/Library. Photo by William Bass.

The remains of Morgan's Room. Photo by William Bass.

The remains of Morgan’s Room. Photo by William Bass.

Kristina & Kristen contemplating the Loss & the Miracle. Photo by William Bass.

Kristina & Kristen contemplating the Loss & the Miracle. Photo by William Bass.

William & Kate goofin' around 7 days after the Fire; Woodinville, WA. Photo by Morgan Bass.

William & Kate goofin’ around 7 days after the Fire; Woodinville, WA. Photo by Morgan Bass.

Morgan Bass below Whitehorse Mountain, near Darrington, WA. 12 June 2010. Photo by William Bass.

Morgan Bass below Whitehorse Mountain, near Darrington, WA. 12 June 2010. Photo by William Bass.

Talia cleaning Lindsay's Bathroom in Woodinville, WA. April 4, 2010. Photo by William Bass.

Talia cleaning Lindsay’s Bathroom in Woodinville, WA. Sunday 4 April 2010. Photo by William Bass.

William & Kristina Bass, New Year's Eve, Seattle, WA. December 31, 2010. Photo by Jean Katayama.

William & Kristina Bass, New Year’s Eve, Seattle, WA. Friday 31 December 2010. Photo by Jean Katayama.

Kate, Talia, & Morgan Bass (L to R) Celebrating DaDa William's Big Climb race to the top of the Columbia Tower, Seattle, on Sunday 20 March 2011 - Exactly 1 year after the Fire. Photo by Stranger for William Bass.

Kate, Talia, & Morgan Bass (L to R) Celebrating DaDa William’s Big Climb race to the top of the Columbia Tower, Seattle, on Sunday 20 March 2011 – Exactly 1 year after the Fire. Photo by a stranger for William Bass.

After the Fire

“Sometimes I can’t even feel the ground under my feet anymore,” my wife Kristina cries. “I can’t feel ANYTHING!!!”

Days and weeks wheel by in a blur after our house burned down in the Fire. Frenzied action is broken by spells of dazed inaction. There is too much to do so soon. We move through it all anyway. Sometimes we even laugh. Sometimes the Fire seems years ago, or feels it never happened at all, or worse, just yesterday. Saturday 20 March 2010, however, was only 30 days ago as I first write this blogpost for the bassfamilysupport.ning.com website friends set up to organize help.

Continue reading

The Fire (Part 1 of 3)

 Click on any photo to blow it up big.

Fire! Our house in flames, Edmonds, WA. Saturday 20 March 2010. Photo by Unknown.

Fire! Our house in flames, Edmonds, Washington State. Saturday 20 March 2010. Foto by Unknown.

Inferno of 1,200 Degree Flames & Toxic Smoke.

Inferno of 1,200 Degree Flames & Toxic Smoke.

Lingering Fire amid the Ruins, Edmonds, 3-20-2010. Foto by Youngman.

Lingering Fire amid the Ruins, Edmonds, 20 March 2010. Foto by Youngman.

Back of our Home, 20 March 2010. Foto by Westfall.

Back of our Home, 20 March 2010. Foto by Westfall.

View thru the Front Door out the back across the Salish Sea to the Olympic Mountains. 20 March 2010. Photo by Youngman.

View thru the Front Door out the back across the Salish Sea to the Olympic Mountains. 20 March 2010. Foto by Youngman.

Kristina Bass (left, in black) with friend Kristen S. a day or two after the Edmonds Fire. Foto by William Bass.

Kristina Bass (left, in black) with friend Kristen S. a day or two after the Edmonds Fire. Foto by William Bass.

The Fire: Part 1 of 3
Saturday 20 March 2010

One week ago our house burned down. It was traumatic. Thank goodness everyone is alive. No one got hurt. Not even the firefighters. But we lost just about everything else. And the response of our communities of family and friends from all around the world was and is deeply generous, much appreciated, and unexpectedly overwhelming.

We got uplifting responses not only from all over the Northwest but from folks from Japan to Norway, Virginia to California, New York to South Carolina, Alaska to Vermont, Mexico to Canada, Jordan, Turkey, Spain, Germany, Italy, China, Kentucky, Florida, Connecticut, North Carolina. Texas. Tennessee. Illinois. The list goes on. From Christians to Muslims to Atheists to Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and Pagans. Amazing. We were reminded not only how lucky to be alive but we’re all part of one giant family of humanity sharing one small, beautiful planet. And, yes, the Internet was the primary tool facilitating such communications, especially Facebook.

Saturday 20 March 2010. It was 11:00 in the morning in Edmonds, Washington, a waterfront city north of Seattle noted for its small-town feel with lots of trees. It was an unusually warm and sunny day. Morgan, my oldest daughter, had recently turned 16, and we were hosting a post-birthday slumber party for about 12 of her friends. The celebrations began Friday evening after school and work. Her younger sisters, Kate, 11, and Talia, 7, were at their own sleepovers back in North Seattle. I left to drive down into Seattle to pick up Kate and Talia and bring them home while Kristina left to take our dog Jo to the vet. There were 8 teenage girls left in our home by then.

They’re great kids, these girls. We’re delighted Morgan had a great circle of fun, funny, artistic, and responsible friends. They were hanging out upstairs playing chess and preparing to cook breakfast. First they noticed a thin smoky haze and remarked how pretty the sunshine was. Then they realized it was smoke. Were pancakes burning on the stove? No, no fire from the stove. No one was even cooking. There were no candles, no incense, no smoking, none of that. Thick, toxic smoke rolled out of the heating vents and roiled up the stairs from the basement, our first floor. The smoke was so thick they couldn’t even get out the door.

A few kids wanted to run down and rescue items: shoes/boots/clothes/cell phones/iPods/sleeping bags/coats/birthday presents. It easily ran to about $1,000 a teenager, mindboggling for even us parents when we tallied it all up, and among our guests were twin sisters, so, yes, many wanted to race downstairs, just once, running just really, really fast, y’know…and Morgan took a stand.

“No!” she shouted. “We need to get out of here NOW! This way!”

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The Grinch is Gone!

Somebody stole The Grinch from Candy Cane Lane! What a vile and horrid thing to do. Whoever stole The Grinch and thus robbed us all and not just the Whos of Whoville must have a heart so teeny tiny as to be even tinier than the Grinch’s. Hey Dude, yeah, you, you and your giggling, drunken, lamebrain buddies with cigarettes dipped in stale Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, hey, do y’all need suspenders to hold up your hearts or what?

Candy Cane Lane is Heaven in Seattle for Christmas lovers. It’s a small crescent shaped block of classic brick and wood homes from bygone “Grandma and Grandpa Days” carved out of a hillside in the woodsy Ravenna neighborhood of North Seattle. And a huge, big cutout of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas was stolen a couple of days ago. Cindy Lou Who and Max the One-Horned Doggiedeer Reindeer were left stranded and sad.

What will happened to Christmas without The Grinch? What will Santa do? And all those poor Whos way off in Whoville? What about all the good people of Candy Cane Lane right here in Seattle?

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Two Days After Veteran’s Day 2008

Veterans’ Day 2008 in the United States has come and gone now. It originated as Armistice Day to celebrate the armistice that ended combat on the Western Front in Europe in the First World War. It evolved into Veterans’ Day within the U.S.A. to honor veterans of all America’s wars. In other countries involved in the First World War it is still remembered as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day. Major hostilities officially ceased with the German surrender in 1918 at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Called the Great War, the War to End all Wars, it was neither the first nor the last world war, although it was the most terrible up to that time. Nor did it end with the signing of the Armistice. The actual peace treaty officially ending the war wasn’t signed until 1919 and fighting continued on other fronts as the international slaughter morphed into a vast, interconnected network of revolutions and civil wars across several continents and included great violence in Russia, Germany, China, the Middle East, Mexico, and elsewhere.

The so-called Spanish influenza pandemic swept around the planet in the wake of the First World War and killed more people than the war itself. The wars spawned by World War I eventually converged into the Second World War such that some historians include the violence of 1914-1945 with the Great Depression in between all one monstrous war. Some go further and include the Cold War of 1945-1991 as the last phase of a truly Great War.

My grandfather, Carroll M. Bass of Richmond, Virginia, served in the U.S. Navy in the Great War. All I can remember from family stories of that time is that he was out in the Atlantic Ocean hunting German U-boats as part of an anti-submarine unit. There was always present the fear of being torpedoed, blown up and sunk in unimaginably deep, cold water. A medal lies on my desk, an old tarnished coin-like medal. Face-up is an image of what I fancy is woman in a long dress waving good-bye or hello with a smaller, encircled image of the Goddess of Justice. On the back is inscribed, “Presented by the citizens of Richmond, VA to C.M.B. (illegible) in grateful recognition of patriotic service in the World War, 1917-1918.” Continue reading

Little Red Boots

I loved my little red boots. Little itty-bitty cheap plastic boots with plastic rubbery pull-up handles. They were so RED! And I loved red. I felt so PROUD! Cuz I wore them, or rather lost them, in receiving (remember, medals of honor are not awarded to winners but recipients!) my very first concussion, which was also the first time I fell out of a tree, and the very first time I broke through the ice over frozen water. Now, one can imagine little red boots venturing foolishly out onto the ice, but what in tarnation where they doing up in a TREE?

Oh, by the way, this was back when I was a little boy. I was a bad, bad elementary school lad trying to tag along with those badder than worse pre-teen boys my Momma hated me playing with. Of course, we didn’t use “pre-teen” back in those halcyon red rock-throwing1960s. Back then we li’l kids call ‘em “the Big Kids.” I grew up, see, in rural Virginia, on my parents’ dairy farm outside the town of Farmville, yes, the real Farmville, halfway between Richmond and Lynchburg.

One day a long, long time ago, decades now, I ventured out after a long and terrible storm. In my little red boots, of course. The sun was shining. The birds were singing. And all the plants and everything else outside was slick and glistening wet. It must’ve been Spring or Fall because I do remember wearing a coat and a hat.

I climbed up into a tree. I loved to climb. That’s why I was up in a tree. I began playing in it the previous summer. It was a scrubby, bushy, shrubby tree growing wild around the corner of the yard. My parents just mowed the grass around it. It was a tangle of shoots with myriad branches forking forth in all directions. At one point I slipped and grabbed, stopped myself, and ended up with a mouthful of leaves. Apparently I used my mouth as an extra hand. No wonder I have jaw problems these days! Continue reading

Interview Impromptu with a Murderer

People have no idea what a person goes thru in life. As a young man working on the family dairy farm I had the occasion to work with at least three murderers. All three were men. One was White. He boasted of what he did and would do. He later did it, too. Cut his own Momma’s head off. Two others were Black. One of those was matter of fact about the psychology of killing and was all business about it. The other hid out in plain sight. There may have been more killers working alongside me, too, but I only knew about these three during this time period of 1981 – 1984. This was back when I lived in Prince Edward County, tucked away in the Piedmont hills and low valleys of south-central Virginia. As I worked side by side together with them on the farm, we got to know each other well.

All three stirred powerful emotions in me. Once I almost killed one guy, a drunken horror named Paul Jenkins. It was my day off work, but I had to come in as Paul never showed up to milk the cows. He was home drunk off more cans of the cheap beer he called “liquid steak” then one could count. He jumped my back and drunkenly tried to choke me as we prepared to milk the cows, I lost it. Enraged and scared, I broke loose, ran into the cow barn, snatched a pitchfork from where it stood buried in a bale of hay, and charged him to drive those prongs in deep. At the last minute I stopped myself. I felt too much empathy. Reminded myself some of us carry a heavier cross than others at different times in life.

My drunk coworker then begged me to kill him, or he would commit suicide. He threatened to hang himself off the side of our 75-ft high grain silo. Another fed-up coworker, an older man semi-retired, would have no more of this interruption of work that must be done, and shouted at him to “Go ahead and hang your own damn fool ass off that silo! I’ve had it with all your shit!” After a few deep breaths I backed off as he flopped crying in the grass and almost knocked over a big, smelly pan of cow milk set down for the kitties. Yeah, we had a lot of cats and kittens around back then. The other man calmed down. Together we got the cows milked, but Paul staggered on off down the road, found a way to Charlottesville where his MaMa lived, slipped into her home in the middle of the night, and cut her head off. She whipped out a pistol from under her pillow, the same one she’d shot her abusive husband, Paul’s daddy, dead with, but she wasn’t quick enough. Not this time. Her son severed her head right there in her own bed.

The scariest one was a young man whose name I’ve forgotten. Although I can see his face clearly in my mind as I write this piece. So I’m gonna call him Mike. Though it might as well ’ve been Dick. Wait, I remember now. It’s Thomas! And one day during a slow time “cleaning up the barn,” our job description for gathering up and removing leftover hay, cow manure, bovine urine, trash, and anything else, I interviewed him. What follows is not a formal interview of direct quotes, but a close approximation as I paraphrase his stark use of language. In some ways it felt as if I interviewed him only yesterday. He, however, acted as if he was somehow my mentor, as if he was going to train me in one of the darkest arts, murder. I shiver even now in remembrance.

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Homeless along the Freeway

She stood surprisingly tall and alert but worn out and desperate. Unwashed blonde hair hung over gray-white skin. Her clothes were ragged, drab, and yet rich with color all at once. Bands of red, purple, and green zigzagged through the fibers of a dirty Sherpa hat pulled down tight. A turquoise scarf was wrapped around her neck and flung over her shoulders. Her eyes flickered between the waning control of high intelligence and the growing impulses for beastly survival. She looked real. She was real.

Upon the edge of an exit ramp off the freeway along which traffic thunders through Seattle, she stood there in mismatch boots holding up a ragged cardboard sign. It stated:

COLD

HUNGRY

I NEED MONEY

PLEASE!

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UFO witnessed in action from atop Mt. Erie, Washington

A group of six people, including myself, witnessed an unidentified flying object from the summit of Mt. Erie on Sunday 3 July 2011. We observed what we eventually determined to be a large, garbage-can lid type flying saucer shrink down into a bizarre high-speed orb. The other five observers were my then-wife Kristina (then age 42), my daughter Kate (age 12), and three men who appeared to be in their mid-to-late 60s. As I write this article I am 52 years old. Mt. Erie itself is a relatively short but steep mountain amid those scattered across the San Juan Islands. At 388 meters high (or 1,273 ft.) it is the most prominent in the area and dominates the Skagit River Delta region of northwestern Washington State. It also dominates Fidalgo Island and looms above a string of lakes near Deception Pass. The peak lies in the City of Anacortes park system. From the mountaintop we six saw a UFO engaged in unusual actions. Those actions were as if a machine ship or biological organism behaved as a subatomic quantum particle/wave.

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Boomerang Tree

Once upon a time when I was a brave and crazy fool I rode a tree like a dragon. Armed with a homemade boomerang, I was a pretty young lad somewhere in that transition between preteen to true teen. My exact age and even what grade I was in remain lost to memory. What I do remember is a gusty, late afternoon storm with cloudy skies churning the color of dark green moss. It happened in Virginia where I grew up on a farm, and I thought I was gonna die.

I felt proud of my boomerang. I’ve spent hours carving and sanding it from a piece of wood. When I whipped it through the air across the cow pastures on my parents’ dairy farm, my boomerang actually returned. It would spin away from me whirling like a helicopter propeller. As my boomerang spun it rose high and higher still, turned, and came zooming back to me. Sometimes it flopped and dug into grass and dirt and skittered off rocks. At other times, however, I had to duck as it zipped over my head. I dared not reach out to grab it. Those were the best!

My buddy Jerry Vernon and I were out in a huge cowpasture on the Gates Family Farm. Jerry’s dad worked for the Gateses milking cows and fixing fences, so we played a lot. My brother Joe, six years younger, also hung with us that day. Our dad ran the Bass farm for his uncle, who was cousins with the Gateses and further down the road the Bruces.

It was one afternoon after school, and I can’t remember if it was November or March. The weather felt heavy with a cloudy-late-afternoon-right-before-supper-time feel, and we had one eye out for bulls. Rumor had it the Gateses had turned loose a bull into the pasture to impregnate the cows, and he would snort, charge, stomp, and gore you all to bloody pieces if he discovered you simply existed. We were terrified of bulls.

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“Bobby’s shot! Bobby Kennedy’s been shot!”

When we first learned Bobby Kennedy was assassinated

Hot, muggy day in farm country Virginia. Late spring, not yet Summer. The Solstice was about two weeks off, but all practical purposes it was Summer with school soon to be out for the season. Humid with a hint of afternoon thunderstorms, the air was pungent with honeysuckle flowers and tree pollen and the promise of picnics in the shade and swimming in lakes.

I was outside in the yard playing. My little sister and brother were probably around somewhere, playing with me, but I don’t remember them this particular day. I just remember my Momma, and Daddy, too, a little bit.

We grew up on Riverview Dairy Farm in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Outside of the town of Farmville. Earlier in the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s the Civil Rights movement had swept across the South and into Prince Edward Country. Racial desegregation and integration efforts polarized whole communities, shut down the schools, and brought Mike Wallace to Farmville for the Evening News and Prince Edward County before the Supreme Court of the United States.

Vietnam and Southeast Asia burned overseas and riots and urban guerrilla warfare kept erupting all around the United States. We were still in the thick of it all, this second revolution or quasi-civil war or whatever you wanted to call these rock’n’roll times, with no end in sight. As time would tell, these Troubles would grind and rumble on till 1975. Though many in the Occupy Wall Street and Everywhere on Earth movement today claim to draw their inspiration as much from these turbulent times as from the Arab Spring.

The sharp staccato roar of the gasoline-powered farm tractor washed over us as Daddy drove it around and around the pasture out back. We were used to that awful mechanical racket, however, and other than a glance over now and then paid it no mind. It was a green and yellow John Deere 420 with a wide, adjustable-width front end manufactured back in the mid-to-late 1950s. Dad sat up in there turned sideways in the seat as was his custom, one hand on the steering wheel, the other gripping the big fin of the rear fender as he made sure the tractor and the mower and the line of hay and the lay of the land were in perfect alignment. He wore blue denim jeans, a white, short-sleeved T-shirt, and a khaki baseball cap. Back then he smoked Camel cigarettes, too.

I heard a shriek. Loud one, too. Momma! I stood up.

The back door of the house slammed open and Momma sailed down the stairs. I remember her in slow motion, dressed in white clothes, had on a white skirt or dress. Black hair thrown back. Her legs wide as a ballet dancer’s leap. She raced shouting toward my father as he rounded the side of the pasture closest to our backyard. By then I was running there, too.

“Bobby’s shot!” Momma yelled. “Bobby’s been shot!”

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back when we welcomed the invasion of the first colored television

I’m in my early 50s now, just a little bit more than halfway to a hundred. I know, I know, those elderly gents snort and splash air at me with wrinkled old hands, grin a somber smile, and remind me “Young man, you’re still just a puppy! Only fifty some years outa diapers.”

Tho I imagine another voice cackling among fluttering pigeons not to worry “cuz you might find yourself back in diapers before you get to turn a hunnert years old.”

Once upon a time, however, way back a long, long time ago, long before old folks could depend on Depends,  (wait, little ® there, right?), I was a wee little bitty fella all excited because every Monday night I could snuggle up next to my Momma on the sofa across from the TV and watch “Lost in Space.” Then talk all about spaceships, alien planets, and monsters in school the next day. Especially with my buddy Eddie. I was in First Grade, and our television was black-and-white.

B & W was all I knew. Clear, crisp black, grey, and white. Unless zigzagging zebra stripes took over the screen.

One evening my parents were giddy with excitement and anticipation. They beamed at me with eyes like flying saucers. I looked around in wonder.

“Come on,” Dad said. “Get ready. We’re going up the road to Charlie Watt and Rosella’s new house.”

“What for?” I asked.

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