Hansen Motors was the auto dealer in Roseburg that my father dealt with, almost exclusively, during my childhood. Don’t know why. Dad was a quirky fellow, who disliked people for unknown, random reasons, and distrusted people he did like. He seemed to be always ready to be let down, and that worldview echoes through my consciousness daily, like a behavioral earworm that I can’t banish, no matter what. It has made me resistant to sales pitches.
Earlier this year I was wandering around downtown, which remains close to the same form that I remember from my childhood and youth. The programming has changed. Storefronts are occupied by thrift stores, facilities of the community college, and vacancies. Typical 21st century situation. Thankfully, the capitol it takes to build on spec, raze old buildings, and pave the way for “progress” is in short supply, and focused on sprawl.
Oregon itself is weirdly conservative, in that the Democratic establishment located in the feared and hated Portland/Salem population complex, and rigorously adheres to its principles, which are resented by the people in small towns that comprise 30 percent of the population, spread out on the vast areas not comprising the Willamette Valley. The isolation and remoteness breed an oppositional mindset, and that is where I come from. Long conversations with my brother revealed a complicated worldview, reactionary in some ways, conventional in others. He observes what is happening in his community, some of which he approves of, or at least accepts. Other things he does not accept, like the homeless camps, and the decrees from state government he is very suspicious of.
This is my heritage. Working class, descended from fringe dwellers that view outsiders with suspicion, part of a clan of loners who value kinship and solitude. Whose door is always open for the family you are related to by blood, and the folk you have adopted as family. Even banishment to the tenements, or fleeing across the ocean to the new world couldn’t quiet the bonds that trauma attempted to obliterate. Try as you may, humans can not be controlled. They can pretend to be controlled, or volunteer to be controlled, but we can desert at any time. That is what the overseers live in fear of. The unruly mob. The promise, often broken, of the NEW WORLD.
The door to the cage was unlocked the whole time. Get on I-5, the freedomway.
BALLOT RESULT
You have to wonder what is being voted on, right? The whole process is “rigged,” in a way that resonates with the downtrodden, which, in oligarchic times, is pretty much all of us. The message being delivered by a clownish, orange oligarch is the ironic truth of unreal times. Everything is set up like a show, except no one tells. Deep down people know that nothing is real, but the willing suspension of disbelief is similar to a viewers approach to a superhero movie. Except that there are real world consequences to this show. But hey, as long as it happens downstream, right? If only people remembered their lines.
Lots of creeks in the mountains of the Umpqua watershed. I remember legends emerging from the logging roads up the canyons that you didn’t go up without permission. Timberlands that used to be deer hunting grounds were treacherous booby trapped weed patches. Or, so said the legends. It could have been true. Or it could be propaganda designed to keep people from looking.
Distrust of the authorities runs deep up here anyway. The forest rangers inspired a lot of epithets from indie loggers, and the scale masters and weigh stations were barely tolerated. The steady stream of logs down to Coos Bay, and endless trailers of wood chips, both headed overseas to be turned into cheap furniture and various other consumer doo-dads shipped back to the homeland continued all through the go-go Reaganeighties. It was an interesting time to be alive.
In the naughty nineties, the corporations had all directed loggers ire away from their closing of sawmills left and right towards the spotted owl, inspiring even more distrust of the outsiders from the big cities telling “us” how to live “our” lives. And on it goes. Better not go up that road. And watch out for black helicopters over Ruby Ridge.
A lot of LETS GO BRANDON flags in the hinterlands.
TOWN CLOTHES
Mom and Dad loved to drive. And loved going to the store. And we patronized them all. Back then, there were lots of indie grocery stores, and we made a circuit of all of them. Drive And Save Market, Goves Market, Neilsons Market, Marks Market on Harvard. Saturday trips to town were a hallowed event, a combination of diversion and necessity. Downtown Roseburg was big time for a kid, and I knew the stores by heart. We looked forward to it. My siblings grew up in Roseburg, but by the time I arrived, we were on our way to the hinterlands. I’m glad I got to see small town retail in it’s glory, before the big box invasion, using the mathematics of scale lay waste to downtowns everywhere. Not alone, mind you. And not just Roseburg, everywhere. People moving between choices, making decisions, practical decisions, based on pragmatic restrictions like stretching a budget, and a paycheck, you know, LIVING. This is not new. And this arrangement is not eternal. The world changes. Circumstances. The pendulum of time swinging back and forth. Things are contracting again. But people adapt. They always do. People are the reason for retail, and people have more purpose than being a consumer. The relationship is not top down, not really. It’s a temporary agreement, subject to change. Towns without a reason don’t exist forever.
Just like us.
Previously on YOU WONT WIN
I wouldn’t say I was inspired this weekend, but I was motivated by heat and smoke to take my temperature, and explore what it was like to have a weekend that didn’t end, that were days like any other day.
SUNDAY SCARIES
It’s not scary anymore. The days seem much the same to me. Ms. Rs workweek starts on Thursday, and runs through Wednesday. It has changed since I retired. It’s just another day.
Sunday Scary is a term Ms. R coined to describe the feeling of dread that Monday at school or work produced in the household all through the school and work years. Even now, when the work week (for Ms.R) begins on Thursdays, there are still vestigial patterns I feel, that become increasingly remote the longer I remain retired. Sad, I know. </s>
Mondays coming like a jail on wheels.
AND, IN HONOR OF 100 POSTS ON YWW
Here lies a post from a year ago, more ruminations from a simpler, more complex time. August 2025!
Sixty Nickel
I had a vision, in a dream, that I would live until 2049, a hundred years after my brother Jim was born. It’s like seeing your expiration date, but like the dates they put on foodstuffs it’s only a guide.
See you all soon.