I walked a neighbor’s distinguished rescue dog from Texas and talked to him and squirrels.

I ate a piece of bread and half an apple.

I posted a blog about a toaster.

I watched the proceedings on television with my father.

I made my father a tuna fish sandwich.

I bought a new car battery and installed it.

I went to a hardware store and bought a screw.

I drank a dark beer at an outdoor table of a dive bar.

I read a magazine at the table while drinking the beer.

I cleaned out a vehicle that carried three umbrellas.

I refiled an unemployment claim.

I listened to sports talk radio for a few minutes.

I talked on the phone.

Oh you wondrous silver and black machine!

Oh you analog Black and Decker beauty!

Hail to your immortal simplicity!

Hail to your compact size!

Hail to your unchanged design since 1977!

Hail to your one knob and one lever!

You cost only $29.99!

No LED, no beeps, no WI-Fi. I don’t want to talk to my damn toaster! I want it to toast!

And I want to turn more knobs and depress more levers in my life, in reality and metaphor. There’s nothing like tuning in something with a knob to gain better clarity and the joy of depressing a lever to engage something to begin operating.

The bread went in, I turned the knob, I depressed the lever.

Wires crackled, wires glowed red.

In short order the toast popped up

and I was slathering butter and grape jelly on the toast toasted

on my first new toaster in 30 years.

Delicious!

A maskless transient rode a one-speed kid’s bike with a banana seat down the middle of a side street and stared at pedestrians wearing masks and said to them: “I don’t believe in masks.”

A mated pair of bald eagles perched in the branches of a denuded oak tree overlooking a wetlands in the middle of the city.

A homeless encampment of approximately 200 tents and tarps and whatever along NE Halsey Avenue in Hollywood looked like several mortar rounds had scored a direct hit.

A street library with a vintage edition of A Red Badge of Courage.

A transient on a scooter with a propane tank strapped to the scooter.

Two adult men drank beer at an outdoor picnic table play on their phones the entire time. They barely said a word to each other.

Three small children held umbrellas and chased chickens.

Squirrels the size of coyotes.

Dozens and dozens of outdoor basketball hoops gone to seed.

A long line for sushi.

A grocery clerk explained how much she detested the song, “Walking on Sunshine” (it was playing) but danced to it nonetheless.

Lots of yoga pants in rain.

The other day I was driving around when I was stopped at a light and looked around at some fellow drivers. To my right, up ahead, was a man driving a later model pickup truck, a big one. He had his left hand on the steering wheel and his right arm around . . . a woman. She was right up next to him.

The sight braced me. I hadn’t seen it for what seemed like decades. Once it was pretty common on the Oregon streets and roads I drove, in all areas, urban, suburban and rural. American men threw their arms around their wives and sweethearts in pickup trucks (I never saw the reverse) for two generations because trucks had bench seats and there was nothing to separate them. So she slid next to him on her own or he asked her over and they went about their driving like this until they stopped.

I was charmed by this throwback sight. I wondered if something truly wonderful has been lost between partners in pickup trucks with the introduction of bucket seats in trucks (now probably standard in every model), along with bulky consoles for cups, phones and whatnot. It was like truck manufacturers unwittingly or purposefully ended a simple and intimate way to hang out with someone while riding around.

Those bucket seats and consoles also mostly ended another extracurricular driving activity between people and I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure out what that was.

The light changed and the traffic began moving. I couldn’t determine the couple’s age from my vantage point but the truck was a mid 90s Ford F-150, two tone.

I never have put my arm around a woman while driving around. I think I missed out on something.

I made vegetable soup.

I watched the spectacle on television with my father. He called the Republican Senators who raised objections to outcome of the election “lower than a snake’s belt buckle.”

I drank a gin and tonic.

I took a walk.

I listened to morons on sports talk radio talk about sports while a mob was trying to overthrow the government.

I got my first haircut since the pandemic hit.

I ordered a supper of fried chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy for my father.

I read the 25^th Amendment aloud to my father and wondered if Pence has the ball to invoke it.

I talked to friends on the phone.

I read on social media that the mob was actually a group of Antifa thugs.

I read a sign a man carried around at the attack that said: “Make America’s Penis Hard Again.”

I watched an episode of the Rockford Files with my father.

I wrote in my journal.

I watched the Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day Lewis sprinting in every other scene

I was driving in Portland. Rain fell. Gray and black reigned over the landscape. A new year held out potential for a better year, but not a return to normalcy. If I hear the word “normalcy” again I might kill myself. It ranks as one of the worst words ever concocted in American English. Thank you Warren Harding or more likely his campaign manager.

A vehicle appeared ahead of me. It was a mid-size pickup from the 90s puttering along five miles under the speed limit. I drew closer and beheld a Chevrolet painted very much in the ecstatic style of William Blake’s art. Indeed, Blake’s quote “Exuberance is Beauty” was lettered on the tail gate.

I had read this immortal line from Blake, a mad poet who often sat naked with his naked wife in his backyard, drinking porter and reading Shakespeare to her, but never really understood it until I saw it painted on a tail gate while rain fell in Oregon on a morning the antithesis of color of everything Blake painted.