Pirate Cafe

A crick runs through it

I got the survey on the land I'm buying and the creek I thought was not on the land is actually on it. What a great surprise! I wanted to get a creek for D, who has a rather sweetly eccentric love of them. We'll be walking through town sometimes and pass the daylighted creek here, and he'll say "Hey, lets go look at the creek" and then he'll walk over and stop and just look at it. His expression is something like a dog pointing. One time he pulled out a newspaper clipping about a hidden creek in SF that daylights here and there around the city. He showed it to me and said "Wouldn't it be cool to go look at this creek?" (San Fransisco is 6 hours away)

I'm going to try to write more in the blog about D. I've been reluctant because I hate feeling like his bitch... Still all sappy over him after 4 years and numerous other boy and girl friends, after 4 years of living together and arguing over housework, bad habbits, morality, the meaning of existence, who to vote for for president, after mutual putting-up-with-moodiness and mental problems, yep, I'm still a sucker for him. His adorableness exceeds his difficulty by just the degree necessary to keep me that way.

Land purchase in escrow
The following is a copy (specific locations omitted) of the email I sent out about the land I ended up deciding to buy!!! It's really happening.

Hello friends and family,

On my recent trip to look for land, I found a great property and made an offer on it. The offer has been accepted and providing the basic contingencies in the contract are met, I will own the land in a few weeks. There should be no reason why the deal doesnt go through. I am shocked something I have looked forward to for so long actually appears to be happening! I know most of the people getting this email would want to know about the offer even if the deal isnt finalized yet, but when it really is final I'll send out word at that point also.

The property is 5 acres, (although it feels much more private and remote than larger acrage I looked at) with a really nice diversity of kinds of trees and topography. Most of the land is flat or gently rolling, with steep slopes at the edge of the property on most sides. It is on the lip of a deep valley with a creek at the bottom, which isnt on the property, but which you can hear and sometimes see on the land. There are alder trees, maples, cedar, and fir, and the forest floor is covered with tall ferns. Many old trees with lots of character. There is a small orchard with about 10-15 sort of exotic varieties of fruit trees, apple, pear, plum, and asian pear are the ones I figured out so far. One of the trees is a red-flesh apple. I wonder if they are red on the inside?

There is a really cute and well-built studio cabin set far back from the small dirt road that leads to the property. It is in pretty great shape and has a wood stove, bathtub, and an on-demand hot-water heater. The property has a developed well and water storage tank, and the cabin is off the grid but wired for electricity. It has phone hooked up already. Much more civilized than the scenario I imagined for so long! I still plan to build several other buildings on the land, including the cottage of my dreams, but this will make it much easier to start. (Yes, there is enough room for several buildings and gardens, animals, etc.) The land also has a nice, covered woodshed and some partially cleared areas. The property is one of the last properties on a private, dead end road. No visiable neighbors.

The land was an obvious choice among the many properties I've looked at on my several searches in the area. Its kind of freaking me out to make such a huge decision, but the property is just so ideal it makes it easier.

OK! Its been awhile since the last post and now I have only 3 minutes at this internet cafe. I didn't get the last land deal, someone else bought it. Now I am back in the area shopping more. I may make an offer on a cabin on a nice very private very beautiful parcel of land. Stay tuned! I may be a land owner soon! The land has a nice mix of slope and flat... Surrounded by steep slopes on two sides which give it a fortress on the edge of a cliff feeling, although it is more like forest and meadow at the lip of a valley. There is a creek in the bottom of the valley at the property line that echoes up around the land, the sound of burbling water. So peaceful and quiet. Trees: maples, alders, and fir. Also has orchard with rare fruit trees, even a red-flesh apple. Totally hidden from the road. Cute cabin, very charming and well-built with loft, bathtub, phone, hot water heater, porches, out-door cold boxes, covered woodpile in woodshed, cute kitchen and windows, cedar shingles on one side. Very dear. Very move-inable. Space for friends to come build little cabins. No visible neighbors. Should I make an offer right away? How do I make sure this is the right decision? I'm afraid if I don't move fast someone will buy it like the last one I wanted. Help!!! Yay!!! Oy!!! I'm going to go see it again now. I'll keep you appraised of the situation.

I hope everyone got to sleep in for the holiday, or at least get some good holiday pay if you do have to work. Hugs to all! mwah.

Land update: I made an offer on the land and signed a contract and everything. The sellers accepted my offer AS THE BACK UP OFFER. Another buyer got them to sign a contract first. So now, if their deal falls through, I definately get the land. If I get it, I get it for the price I wanted. If I dont get it, I will move on to more searching. The earth is very large with lots of livable land afterall.

Land Ho! Part 6

Show me the money!

I didn't even get around to telling you about my favorite piece of land I finally found on my last trip to Port Willamette. I didn't even get to tell you about Roxanne, Goddess Realtor, with her plastic Gaia sculpture a la Wal-Mart and her poster of one scantily clad male angel in skimpy loincloth and large white feathered wings. I didn't get around to telling you any of that and its already time for me to make up my mind as to weather to put down an offer on the land. Comrades! We have some catching up to do.

OK: First, Lets review.
I'm shopping for land on which to start my permaculture style sustainable living homestead intentional community type thing. I think all those labels are really new-age and ridiculous, so lets just say I am looking for a little land to call home, and who on this earth ever in history hasn't been doing that? I made several trips to my target areas to look at land. I experienced many annoying realtors and always a lot of negative and suspicious attitudes towards what I am doing. (Along the lines of "grow up and stop dreaming" which I have heard steadily since I was about 14 so that I have at this point become immune to the words. Almost.) I looked at a lot of property, maybe twenty properties, and went through different feelings about each of them. There were several pieces with potential.

Then I got lost going from one town to another, and drove past a sign for Harmon Realty. I had not seen any realtors in this particular area, so I dropped in. Although the office looked clean and modern, I was instantly treated with the same respect I felt I would normally get if I were a middle aged man in a business suit. "Let me get you Roxanne," said the receptionist, who then got me Roxanne.

Roxanne is about 60 years old with very fake-looking died red hair, a low smokers voice, and a lumpy, heavy body which is usually clad in something vaguely hippie-ish that looks like it was purchased at Ross. As I said, her office decor gave her away as kind of a blue-collar Wal-Mart-style hippie with a distinct gay-divorcee humor I love in older women such as herself that forward emails around among their friends with jokes about, and lewd pictures of, men. A sign on the wall announced "Everyone brings a little joy into this office, some when they arrive, and some when they leave."

She did not attempt to push me into looking only at properties their agency was listing, but instead immediately assumed the role of a buyer’s agent with me, looking at the mls listings for all the properties in the area. She didn't try to persuade me I wanted something different. She listened and helped me narrow my search. It was such a relief after having the other realtors act like I didn't really know what I wanted, (after several years thinking about it and obsessing over real estate how-to books.)

This weekend I got a call from Roxanne saying another buyer was interested in the land. I had to make up my mind fast as to whether or not to make an offer on the piece I liked so much- 10 acres with 4 cabins already on it, developed water and phone, old-growth trees, everything...

After wracking my brain all weekend and having serious phone calls with everyone important in my life on the matter, I decided to make an offer.

When I called in this morning the other buyer had already made an offer and the land was in the process of being sold!

I am making an offer anyway, in case that one doesn't go through.

Trying to remain detached and ready to move on to other land. Its out there I know, this one was just particularly good for my needs. In the mean time, I’m doing something I haven't done in some time and breaking out the Voodoo.

I'll update you on our progress soon.

Am I getting old? Am I happy? Am I depressed?

According to studies, the issue may be I'm on the internet too much. Supposedly, this makes one depressed and despondent. I certainly am bored with living where I'm living. Why go out? More mediocre bands imitating mediocre bands imitating what was passé in the city 8 years ago. Why go out? More college bar scenes, or aging hippies having the same old cliché conversations over and over, or locals with whom I only have so much in common.

It’s inordinately difficult to have an original conversation here, where there is a cultural consensus that people have relocated here to partake in, and aren't about to deviate now. Patronizing smiles, too easy stoned-sounding laughter, and general flattery of the hippie male ego. (Envision wide-eyed nods from young girls who say "Yes!" and "totally! with great enthusiasm as if the stoned ramblings of said hippie boys were divine inspiration.) Everyone is busy agreeing with everyone about everything, except the things everyone agrees to protest.

Why must the hippie-ish culture around me be imbued with a sense of Christian charity towards everything, as if life itself needed a kind of constant patronizing affirmation? I swear life is not like a cause one can join. Or it is, but not of the sort people think. Is life not a cause one must commit to despite themselves, not out of a sense of obligation, but out of a resolve that is most deeply affirmed when one is in pain? To give life a standing ovation as an act of charity is an insult.

I like to stay home and clean my house and listen to the radio. I always did, but more so now. I exhibit symptoms of misanthropy and depression, but I feel happier than ever.

I can't seem to muster anxiety or drama for anything. The world feels like a place I already know. I’m not thrilled by participating in cliques, events, subcultures. Only personal projects and certain particularly wonderful people have any allure. I seem to have no storyline running about my identity. I don’t want to be a certain type of person or be part of anything going on. I used to fancy myself to be this or that. Now my identity feels as nebulous and nameless as my gender-identity does- a land unto itself with its own natural laws, separate from any place in the world and traveled to only by mysterious means. A world unto itself, overlaid on the world around me and touching the ground where the ocean inside me meets the ocean outside, both as cold and silent and salty as love.

Am I happy, am I depressed? I can't tell the difference. I just know I move with a sensual laziness these days that is half despondent, half lovesick. The world! A dream around my dream. I think this may be what therapists call "feelings of unreality." I call it existentialism. Part of my existentialist process: kind of slow, bitter, resigned, sadness about the nonsensical and meaningless nature of reality combined with utter acceptance of and wonder at life. Am I getting old? I don't try so hard. I work and feel and write and love.

Land Ho! Part 6

After swashbuckling one must always drink something soothing, like sassafras tea or hard liquor. Jane and I, still clad in our hiking boots and wool sweaters stuck through with twigs and leaves, made our way to The Muse. Thursday night at The Muse Pub in Port Willamette was the best night I’ve had at any bar, ever. It was that night that made me feel all-the-way right about moving to the Olympic Peninsula.

There are four open-mic nights a week in Port Willamette, all at different venues. Far be it from me to attend the open mic nights in the town I live in now. Every melodramatic straight white college boy in town has to get up there and share his underdeveloped artistry with a room full of overly appreciative stoned hippy-girls. I am so nauseated by the layers of cliché in the work and in the room that I can scarcely stand to be a part of it, let alone share my writing. When I heard there were that many open mic nights a week in a town populated by only 7,000 or so persons, I envisioned a tiny town loaded with overly self-involved mediocre artists, writers, and musicians.

I was annoyed, but I also was not expecting to really relate to what ever community I live in. At this point my alienation is one of my prized possessions and I have little urge for “Community” with a capital C. (A word too often said with a snotty sense of virtuousness possessable only by the college-educated.) My intent has been to move somewhere more desirable in which to live out the rest of my alienated years in sweet freedom. Somewhere a little closer to a major metropolitan area than my current isolated province. Somewhere where I can go watch beautiful gay men walk up and down the streets. Somewhere where I can go to literary events now and then, as well as decent music and where I can get a steady supply of Asian ingredients for my kitchen. Somewhere close yet far away. I just want what everyone wants. I maintain there’s nothing radical about my lifestyle.

The Muse is an upstairs bar, with French doors that open onto a balcony overlooking the oft-moonlit Puget Sound. Despite the fact that the walls were beautifully painted, the lighting was subtle and warm, and the clam chowder was excellent, this was not a yuppie establishment. There were no identifiable tourists in the room and the locals are not known for their upward mobility. The crowd was not only exceptionally good looking on the whole, with a healthy and open look in their faces, but they had the grit and glory about them of the working class. When people must endure the blows of capitalism unshielded by privilege they often take on a certain lovely, heart-breaking bitterness, to which I relate, and by which I am very much moved, especially when drinking whisky.

A bluegrass band was playing. The lead was a tall, thin, clean shaven man with glasses and a black cowboy hat. Even though it was Thursday night at 11, the room was packed and people were tossing down drinks like they didn’t have to work in the morning. Since Port Willamette is not a college town, there was a refreshing absence of a college scene. The crowd was populated by people my age and older, not the other way around. How I love crows-feet and flecks of grey hair. How I love smile-lines and the dark shine in the eyes of mothers. The music seemed familiar yet foreign, and it came down through me while I looked at the living painting of the world before me. I then realized that the band was playing a bluegrass version of the Violent Femme’s “Add It Up.” My joy was for once complete and unreserved.

A curvaceous grey haired lady in a hippy-floral print skirt made her way over to the blue grass man’s table after he played. Next act was a smoky-voiced jazz singer, easily in her seventies, wearing a very tight sexy dress. She sang a few haunting and flirtatious standards while I watched the grey-haired woman Jane and I named “Our Favorite Woman” entwine her arms around the body of the bluegrass man, despite the obvious difference in their ages. I blushed and took a cigarette outside, where I immediately blushed again to see two beautiful young gay men in a tight embrace against the balcony railing. Their slow kissing was punctuated by long, loving looks into each other’s eyes. I tried to be causal and lit my cigarette, wondering how I could maneuver myself in such a way as to watch without making them uncomfortable. Could this really be a small, rural town? Ecstasy! The boys were on it, and I was in it.

The night was a victory for art, in our art-hating, art-commodifying world. As talent after talent took the stage, I felt I must be somewhere else in the world, maybe Central America or Europe, where I have never been but where I imagine local culture has not been so decimated by mass culture. The word community could almost be used to describe that night at the Muse without making me ill. I would rather avoid that all together, though, and simply say that here was a little untelevised, home-made beauty for the weary, tucked away in a small seam of the world, as private as a kiss.