Who am I?

I am the son of a logger and a school bus driver. I was born in the wettest part of the continental US on the Olympic Peninsula. Though my birth city is Port Angeles, I wasn't living there. That was just the closest town with a hospital big enough to have a baby in. My family actually lived in Forks which in the heart of a temperate rain forest. As I grew we would move to various towns and live in lots of different houses and apartments. Most of my memory of those early days in Washington are blurred. I remember a little bit about an event in Forks when I could not have been very old where my father came home with a deep cut in his knee from a chain saw. Blood everywhere. But I don't know if my memory is real or just an image in my head formed by the stories I heard.

At some point my family moved to another small town, this time in Northern California called Happy Camp. My main memory of Happy Camp is a smell. When I was a kid one of the ways my family entertained ourselves was to load up in the car and go driving through the mountains. When we lived in happy camp we had an old station wagon. (my memory wants to think it was an old Chevy Nomad, but I don't really know.) One day when we were out for a drive a hole in the floorboards allowed mine and my sister's coat rest against the exhaust pipe and start to smolder. I will never forget the smell of a burning winter jacket. That smells like Northern California now. Sorry Happy Camp.

At some point we moved back to Washington. We lived in Everett which is just north of Seattle and in Granite Falls, which is just east of Everett. Granite Falls would one day make it to the cover of Rolling Stone as the meth capital of the US, but when I was living there it was the place where my Grandma and Grandpa had a farm with cows, chickens, and a river to swim in. At our house we had a pig sty and a bunch of woods out back to run around in. We also lived on a road called Crooked Mile Rd with neighbors that had a horse pasture and an electric fence. I ran my hand along that fence for a long way one day before it finally shocked me. It felt like someone punched me in the kidneys.

opinionification?

For what ever reason, I put weird endings to ordinary words lately. It is a kind of baby talk I use with my dog. He gets it. I ask him if we is hungryfied, for example, instead of hungry. I didn't make it up. I remember a character in Salman Rushdie's novel "Midnight's Children" that would do that with her words. I liked it and it stuck with me. Opinionification sound like pontificating on my opinions, and that sounds enough like it came from the department of redundancy department to be right up my street.

I started a blog a little while back that I wanted to use to tell my life story from beginning to end. I soon came to realize that blogs don't really work that way, so I changed gears. I will on occasion tell stories I remember here and there, but the new focus of this blog is opinion, pontification, venting, raving, and reviewing things. I'll do other things too if the mood hits me.

This isn't the first blog I have started, and it won't be the last....but I hope it will be the best. No pressure, it's only a blog.