Checking Into the Morrison Motel

Let's talk about death. There are more death euphemisms than there are for body parts or even sex. Jim Morrison, for example, has been dead for 40 years.. We've been to his grave in Paris four times. Jim's headstones are frequently stolen and the graffiti changes often. The last time we visited a bored Paris cop was watching Jim's grave...They have Jim far enough away from Proust, Oscar Wilde, and Heloise and Abelard that those graves don't get much punk vandalism...Oscar's grave featured a lovely angel with a full set of male genitalia. those organs ended up on the desk of the cemetery superintendent and eventually disappeared...

Jim stole an umbrella from a police car in 1963 while he was a student in Tallahassee at Florida State University. He was drunk at the time and got busted for urinating in the wrong place while holding the wrong umbrella. Jim was born, like me, in 1943. I was also arrested in Tallahassee as a student in 1964. I drove my Harley Davidson at speeds over 100 MPH past the Tallahassee police station at 2 AM...I was drunk on 151 rum at the time...The policeman who arrested me was shaking badly...I remember the judge asking me if I was insane...I pleaded out with the simple military serviceman ID card and paid the $110 fine...

Jim was a roommate of my friends, the West brothers. They played "Strange Days" for me on vinyl and told me that Jim had moved out just before I moved in. You would have thought that Jim would have outlasted me based on his feeble law-breaking attempts at umbrella theft and my own high-speed drunken exploits...Instead, here I am 52 years later having a good time...and Jim, at age 27, is in the great Golf course where we all get a hole in one...Taking a dirt nap...Pushing up the daisies ...Passed on...Deceased...At room temperature...Stone-dead ...Demised ... Ceased to be..No more expired ..Gone to meet his maker ..Stiff ..Bereft of life ..Resting in peace ..Off the twig ..Kicked the bucket ..Shuffled off the mortal coil ..Run down the curtain ..Joined the choir invisible ...That good night ..In a better place.. Six feet under ..Crossed over ..crossed the bar. Crossed the River Styx ....Wandering the Elysian Fields ...Paid Charon's fare...Sleeping with the fishes.. belly up ..bloodless...defunct ..departed..done for.. erased .extinct ..gone ..inanimate.. .late.. .lifeless..liquidated ..mortified ..offed ..perished ..in repose ..rubbed out ..snuffed out ..wasted ..lost ..be taken ..bumped off ..bought it ..cashed in..checked out ..conked ..croaked ..Danced the last dance ..ate it ..finished .Kicked off ...Got a one-way ticket ..Popped off ..Snuffed ..Sprouted wings ..Succumbed..No longer with us ..Ashes to ashes, dust to dust ..Returned to the ground ..With the ancestors. Gave up the ghost ..Wacked. Terminated ..Put down.. going to the big ___(whatever) in the sky"...Wormfood ..Fragged.. Bought a pine condo. Gone into the fertilizer business .....Become living-challenged ...tits up

Jim is definitely done dancing....He checked into the Morrison Motel...Jim's eating at the Rotten Skull Cafe...Jim's gone belly up...He's gone to the last roundup...He went past his "sell-by" date...Jim has left the building...Jim's no longer with us...He's on the unable to breathe list...Jim's permanently out of print...The lizard king is six feet under...Jim is sleeping with the fishes...He's wearing a toe tag...He's in the past people plantation...Been assigned to the Hale Bopp project...Become peasant under grass...He's playing harp duets with Hoffa...

So...Jim was a pretty boy, but, actually, I think I was at least as good looking as Jim. Not only that, but my crimes were more exciting...and I appear to be a much better survivor type...C'mon baby light my fire...As far as Jim goes, he's at room temperature...belly-up....bought a pine condo...ceased to bee...danced the last dance...inanimate...no longer running the human race...pushing daisies...paid Charon's fare...stiff...wandering the Elysian fields...gone into the fertilizer business...worm food....resurrection eligible...kicked the oxygen habit...passed his sell-by date...examining the radishes from below...

Mrs. Phred went into Newport, Oregon to get her hair done yesterday. I took the camera downtown to get pictures of all the seafood processing plants and marine mammals.

I liked this T-shirt. It reminded me of certain degenerate English gambler friends...

Today we passed over the mighty Columbia River to an RV park north of Portland in Vancouver, Washington. We want to see Mount Saint Helen's again. It blew in 1980. The last time we went there was 1992. Looking at the recovery after another 20 years should be interesting.

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Laura came to visit Mrs. Phred back on the Siletz River. Mrs. Phred has her own online life with the women's RV Forum...Personally, my own online activities are at "Second Life", where my avatar is extremely attractive and rich...I spend a lot of time in "dance bubbles" with attractive avatars who claim to be female...Probably most of them are unshaven middle-aged fat men from Cincinnati, fingering keyboards while wearing their "wife-beater" T-shirts and drinking Budweisers...

You Can't Keep the Wild Ones

Sarasota, Florida

Salmon fishing in Oregon is good. We cut though the cool fog on the Pacific Ocean for an hour or so, then catch our limit of six Coho salmon in a couple of hours. We can only keep the hatchery salmon with the clipped adipose fins. We throw the wild ones back.

The Oregon sand dunes extend for miles. The weather is very cool on the coast, even in July.

There seems to be a prevailing wind.

This is called Devil's Churn. You get some strange wave effects as the tide changes.

I have an appointment with the Veteran's Administration this morning. They will provide Mom with a pension to help pay for her care at the assisted living center. The application takes five or six months to grind though the bureaucracy. You have to be a combat veteran or a veteran's spouse to receive this assistance.

This seal is clapping for fish parts. He hangs around where the fishing boats clean fish for the customers.

The "feels like" temperature in Sarasota today will be over 100 degrees.



The Columbia River near where Lewis and Clark spent a dismal winter eating salmon until they were sick of it.

The Columbia a few hundred miles to the east of the ocean.

Sunset.

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun

White Salmon, Washington

The drive here was beautiful. We stopped in a lush forest and picked ripe red raspberries to put in our morning cereal. The road runs right along the banks of the Columbia River.

We're about 200 miles east of the Oregon Coast. The weather was about 50 degrees with very wet fog this morning. We're on the north bank of the Columbia River and the Toyota said it was 107 degrees Fahrenheit when we parked and made a quick run to buy cold white wine and replenish our cash.

This is a creek in Oregon where Lewis and Clark and their 31 men and Sacajawea and Lewis' dog are thought to have spent the winter of 1805-06.

The GPS is set for Mountain Home, Arkansas. We want to see our friends, Paul and Diane, and maybe play some doubles sets with the Mountain Home grandmothers league. Those grandmothers are looking better all the time. It might be an eyesight issue. We can also use Paul's pontoon boat on the big lake if Paul and Diane are too busy to join us some days. On our last visit I spayed three coats of good quality yellow paint on their self-constructed mansion-in-the-woods.

We visited Fort Clatsop in Astoria to see a reproduction of the building that Lewis and Clark built near the mouth of the Columbia to over-winter in their 1805-06 stay. It's surprisingly sophisticated. I checked the reproduction against the sketch in Merriwether Lewis' journal and they have it about right. I bought a book about their journey.

This is a picture of Captain Merriwether Lewis, putting on a new deerskin shoe. The Captain was shot in the butt on the return trip by a hunter with poor eyesight who took him for an elk.

Merriwether seem quite scientific for his time. He measures water temperature and air temperature to calculate the difference needed to fill the "hollows" with fog. He only lost one man out of forty on this incredible journey, from appendicitis.

We drove up to Oysterville on a peninsula in Southern Washington. It is a little historical town where most of the homes were built 40 to 60 years after Lewis and Clark came and went. There are huge piles of oyster shells everywhere.



In my childhood, the Tampa Road Department came along our street and dumped fresh shells on the road about twice a year. The shells were sharp and hard to walk on barefoot. The mosquito control trucks came by almost every night spaying a thick fog of insecticide and motor oil. We loved to chase the slow-moving trucks and cavort in the poisonous billowing smog. Eventually, they ran out of shells and paved the street. They paved paradise and made it a parking lot.

Rafting Hell's Canyon

The Mouth of the Columbia River

I think I have just talked Mrs. Phred into a three-day raft trip on the Snake River though Hell's Canyon. We're waiting for a call back on availability from this outfitter . Just driving up the coast and looking at beautiful beaches and overlooks is beginning to pall. Some Class IV rapids and sleeping in tents at night might on the Snake river might liven things up. The trip begins about an hour west of Portland. We're waiting to hear if they can work us in.

This is the Columbia River. It's so big here that it has waves that break on the shore and sandy beaches.

We did a tour of Fort Stevens today. It was established to thwart the British in the event that they decided to enter the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. On the night of June 21, 1942, Fort Stevens saw its only action when a Japanese submarine (the I-25) fired 5.5 inch shells in the vicinity of the fort. The shelling caused no damage. The Fort Commander refused to allow return fire. The incident made Fort Stevens the only installation (in the Continental US) to be attacked by an enemy since the War of 1812. You could argue that the 9/11 incident was another attack on the continental US, if you feel that a handful of ignorant and mis-guided criminals deserve to be elevated to the serious category of "enemy".

Tomorrow we tour Astoria. They have a number of interesting looking museums and a 14 block river walk that we want to do. Just down the road is a portion of the Lewis and Clark trail that one can hike and imagine exploring an unknown continent.