Don’t recall if I mentioned finding a little used video shop here or not. I found one. It’s in this little strip center called Brookfield plaza, I have to think real hard to remember that and not call it Eastgate. There are a lot of places in this country and Canada I know real well, but not the way I know PDX. When I was a kid Brookfield plaza was hardly a strip center; it was an A & P grocery store and a five and dime.
A&P used to be a chain, I think, here in Yankee land. The intials stood for Atlantic & Pacific. As far as I know It was a chain all the hell over the place, sure had a grandiose enough name for it. I crossed the Atlantic a few times before I ever crossed the Mississippi, but the first time I crossed the Mississippi I also crossed the Missouri, the Colorado, the Snake and set foot on the Pacific. Um, maybe not the snake, maybe the Rio Grande. The first time I saw the Pacific I was fourteen and it was either Santa Monica or Venice. Venice has all these concrete empty waterways, I think they had intended it to look like Venice Italy.
I’d been to Venice Italy before Venice CA. I like Venice CA better. Odd as it sounds, Venice CA smells better. It sounds odd because of all it’s charms (arguably one could say, double Tee Eff, Venice CA has charms?) smelling good wouldn’t be near the top of anyones list. Venice CA smells like salt, reefer and exhaust. Venice Italy smells like sewage and dead things.
So, I found this little used video store in the place the A&P used to be, and I picked up a bunch of used videos. Among them was something I expected to suck, but it was cheap and it was something I’d never heard of before and I’ve spent money on dumber things. I expected it to suck because it had a picture of a colt on the cover and on the back of the jacket in the PR synopsis I think it said God at least three times. Um, the picture of the Colt went with the title; The Colt. If it had Disney or any one of Disneys million splinter studios I wouldn’t have picked it up, but I expected it to be Disney-ish anyhow.
Several years back I picked up a rental of a football movie at a blockbusters, I think, maybe Hollywood, one of those two was owned by the Mormons, I can’t remember which, but if you looked real hard you’d notice you weren’t finding anything titillating and, well, you’d get the idea that the buyer for the store had an agenda. The back jacket said god on it three times, I can’t remember the movie. Sports movies always have someone praying in them, maybe not the longest yard, but, you know. That movie was a sappy piece of orthodox propaganda. I kind of thought the colt might be too.
I ran out of other things to watch so I watched it. I’m not going to call it sappy, but I wouldn’t bitch slap you if you did. And not just cause I like you, but, you know, it might be a valid opinion. Things don’t really work out well and the religious stuff was not gratitious and sort of humble. It’s a civil war movie and this Union Calvarymans horse foals a colt, actually runs off in the middle of skirmish and foals in the woods. The immediate reaction of the sergent and the captain is to kill it. I’m not going to spoil the movie just in case you can find it and want to watch it. Nothing really turns out for the best but it’s not a gruesome movie about good and evil either, the closet they come to anything like that is one character, a rebel, who is actually a coward.
For all I know it was written during the civil war, it’s got the flavor of the red badge of courage, I mean in language and, um, taste. The red badge of courage was a little sappy, but it had to be, it wasn’t historical, I think it was published while the war was still going on.
Mankind has done shit like that through recorded history, minstrels, authors, town criers, movie makers all make the good guys nobel if the conflict is still going on. In the 1968 reprint of Johnny Get Your Gun there’s an intro by the author, Dalton Trumbo, who explains the history of the book and why so many short printings and recalls. It got taken off the shelves everytime the US got into a conflict. If you haven’t read it I’m not going to spoil it at all, you should probably read it, though, given how long we’ve been at war this time it might not currently be in print. They made a movie of it too, late sixties maybe early seventies. I liked the movie for reasons of my own; you should read the book. Ok, I liked the movie because most of the book is exposition and in the protagonists head.
The Colt probably wasn’t written in the last millennium though. With the exception of the coward both Union and Rebels were, I don’t know, just guys, tired, dirty guys a bit lost near the end of the war. The only part of the movie where I said “Fucking Christ, you’ve got to be shitting me” is when the guy broke down at this farm in Virginia because the farmers wife was asking about dudes home. He was from Michigan and as he was describing it he started crying and shit.
Ok, I was homesick for Michigan I first moved out west. Sort of, I was homesick for the proximity to lifelong friends and family. The longest I ever spent in Alaska at one time was six weeks. I still get homesickness like pangs for the land there, especially the little green valley that Palmer sits in. Shit I get more homesick for LA than I did for Michigan. And as I’m typing I realize the problem I had with the speech and with homesickness. There are parts of Michigan with more natural beauty and fury than anywhere on earth. Just like some of the worst shitholes in the world are in LA, or, like a lot of people when they think kindly on California aren’t thinking of any of the cities at all.
Inch for inch it’s my humble opinion that there is no invisible boundaries that contain as much beauty as Oregon, and I do mean the whole state. Portland is just a city, a very small piece of the state; it’s prettier than some, uglier than some, it’s a city in a place that was probably a whole lot prettier before there was a city there. I don’t know, a lot of Michigan has been tamed for far too long, the wildness leeched from it before the idea of this colony separating from the Queen Mother even smelled like a good idea, let alone a possible one.
I’m losing momentum. I’m a shitty prosebox friend. I ramble on without going anywhere, and I rarely note anybody or participate in any reindeer games. Brookfield Plaza. The colt. Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Get Your Gun.
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