3028.
So, this is where I find myself, coming home after pulling some overtime, and I treat myself to going home via East 122nd Avenue … the 122nd Way in Out 122nd Way.
I adore 122nd. I don't know, nor do I really care, who thinks that a bustling 4-lane boulevard with a turn-lane, capped at one end by a care-worn Kmart and at the other end by a 7 Eleven and businesses who habla Español with a vengeance would be treasured by someone as some of the most beautiful city-scape in the world would be a crazy or stupid thing. Pfui on the rest of you, Portland, for pretending that everything east of I-205 is unworthy of that peculiar Portlandia-style cool. We rock out here, and this is my heart.
122nd Avenue. Damn right.
Here, on a bright, fresh, clear morning, at the end of February, in the year 2014, is a picture of Mount Hood, that most perfect of volcanic cones, from a 1972 VW Beetle parked just south of the corner of NE 122nd and Shaver and just north of the entry to Rossi Farms (a little green stamp that remains of what was once farms all the way from 82nd Avenue to Gresham):
Just wonderful and poetic. The ice-cold peak, new in an even thicker blanket of snow than last month (twice what it was last month, and just in time too … we're up to about 90% average snowpack in this basin, and it was starting to look more than a tecch dicey for the summer) wearing the clouds about it like a robe. The high clouds enhance the feeling of a distant chill; and the trees and buildings in the middleground, and the verdant spread of the Rossi property in front, juxtapose all that together and frame it thus-and-so, and you get the idea that the mountain fairly looms above you.
I don't know where I've found my compositional mojo latterly, but I've found it; the pictures I've been taking of Wy'east latterly have come closer to my subjective impression of size and space than anything ever.
And an improvement, by cropping out more of the crops and eliminating the competition from that tall tree:
Look, I don't get to participate in a lot of Portland. Despite my best efforts at schooling, all I can get anyone to give me is shift work that keeps me busy when things are happening and doesn't give me enough scratch to get too involved if I could show up. No matter. It wasn't the social whirl that attracted me to Portland anyway. It's the landscape, the precious background to whatever it is I'm doing. I can go out to Division Street, ride with my wife down to the Dutch Bros at SE 136th, and the working class neighborhoods are warm and humming, the strugglers are struggling, the stragglers are straggling, we out here aren't trying to be anything more than what we are or what we feel … and in the distance, this beautiful mountain peak, watching over all and saying "You're all OK. I can see that from here".
That said, if someone could see to it that I were a bit more well payed, I wouldn't fight it. Daddy does need a new pair of shoes betimes.
I adore 122nd. I don't know, nor do I really care, who thinks that a bustling 4-lane boulevard with a turn-lane, capped at one end by a care-worn Kmart and at the other end by a 7 Eleven and businesses who habla Español with a vengeance would be treasured by someone as some of the most beautiful city-scape in the world would be a crazy or stupid thing. Pfui on the rest of you, Portland, for pretending that everything east of I-205 is unworthy of that peculiar Portlandia-style cool. We rock out here, and this is my heart.
122nd Avenue. Damn right.
Here, on a bright, fresh, clear morning, at the end of February, in the year 2014, is a picture of Mount Hood, that most perfect of volcanic cones, from a 1972 VW Beetle parked just south of the corner of NE 122nd and Shaver and just north of the entry to Rossi Farms (a little green stamp that remains of what was once farms all the way from 82nd Avenue to Gresham):
Just wonderful and poetic. The ice-cold peak, new in an even thicker blanket of snow than last month (twice what it was last month, and just in time too … we're up to about 90% average snowpack in this basin, and it was starting to look more than a tecch dicey for the summer) wearing the clouds about it like a robe. The high clouds enhance the feeling of a distant chill; and the trees and buildings in the middleground, and the verdant spread of the Rossi property in front, juxtapose all that together and frame it thus-and-so, and you get the idea that the mountain fairly looms above you.
I don't know where I've found my compositional mojo latterly, but I've found it; the pictures I've been taking of Wy'east latterly have come closer to my subjective impression of size and space than anything ever.
And an improvement, by cropping out more of the crops and eliminating the competition from that tall tree:
Look, I don't get to participate in a lot of Portland. Despite my best efforts at schooling, all I can get anyone to give me is shift work that keeps me busy when things are happening and doesn't give me enough scratch to get too involved if I could show up. No matter. It wasn't the social whirl that attracted me to Portland anyway. It's the landscape, the precious background to whatever it is I'm doing. I can go out to Division Street, ride with my wife down to the Dutch Bros at SE 136th, and the working class neighborhoods are warm and humming, the strugglers are struggling, the stragglers are straggling, we out here aren't trying to be anything more than what we are or what we feel … and in the distance, this beautiful mountain peak, watching over all and saying "You're all OK. I can see that from here".
That said, if someone could see to it that I were a bit more well payed, I wouldn't fight it. Daddy does need a new pair of shoes betimes.
