An Actual Bag of Turds
I was out on my bike today and I found an actual bag of turds. It felt sort of like a metaphor for my entire week.
I was tooling along the Springwater Corridor, which runs eastwards along a former train right-of-way out past Gresham, and is home to a lot of Portland’s homeless population. The homeless people who live out along the Corridor tend to be older than the ones you find downtown — they’re middle-aged or older, a lot of them evidently Vietnam vets, and they tend to collect around the picnic benches and in camps back behind the blackberry brambles, where I assume they can feel a semblance of privacy. For the most part they’re just there, no more a nuisance than the teenyboppers who tend to ride tiny BMXes very slowly near the Gresham City Park, or the careless drivers who tend to miss the stopsigns near the rural road crossings. But now and again, you find an actual bag of turds in the middle of the pavement. That’s what happened today. I saw a plastic bag, spilled over, and some stuff coming out of it. As I approached it became clear that the stuff had some kind of human smell. And as I rode by the bag, I understood that the smell was that of shit. Let there be no more graphic description than that. It smelled bad. There were flies.
It seemed a fitting way to cap off a week in which I injured myself while out running, came down with a runny nose and a fever, had my car broken into for the second time in the last six months, and came home late three straight nights to find that my neighbors had parked so poorly that I couldn’t fit my car in the parking lot out in front of my building, necessitating a grueling, 30-step climb up vertiginous stairs from the alley behind. Oh, and my deductible on my car insurance is $500, meaning that I’ll be paying for all but $90 of the repair, thank you very much. For the second straight time, the assholes couldn’t find anything to steal.* They might as well have mugged me, forced me to withdraw $500 from an ATM, and then set the money on fire as I watched.
*UPDATE: My brother tells me that this was part of a window-smashing spree by an unhinged local vandal. The cops caught him, I’m told. So at least there’s that. Not that that makes any real difference to me.
Meanwhile, all the wrong teams lost in the baseball playoffs, I grew increasingly lame in my right arm and leg from walking with a cane, I suffered several indignities as a result of not being very good with said cane (viz stubbed toes, barked shins, pitying looks from strangers), and my mood has swooned because it’s hard to exercise. I finally got out on the bike today because the ankle isn’t as bad as it was (still swollen, though) and the doctor said low-impact stuff should be okay. That was how I came to be riding my bike down the Springwater Corridor when I found the actual bag of turds.
Now it’s raining. I’m worried about the pending winter. Winters in Portland are generally grim, with days that last less than 8 hours at their shortest and often feel nonexistent, because the sun is hidden behind miles of dark cloudcover.
Maybe I should move to Australia. I hear it’s nice there.