BONES IN HIS FEET & FLIES IN HIS EYES
July 16, 2007
It has been months since taking the time
to sit down and update this ‘blog’ thing.
( so, just click on the images to make them bigger, then ‘arrow’ back to go on )
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BONES IN HIS FEET AND FLIES IN HIS EYES
He was actually getting to be too !@#$%*! ……………old.
He had always been the “kid”, the “young one”…………. the “boy”.
At least that was the way it had always been before, a while ago.
This memory formed for him through the steamy fog clouds
of the old tub shower in his temporary apartment.
Hot showers are a place of repose and contemplative reflection.
A place of hot muscular relaxation and gravitational extension.
A place of warm unintended human arousal.
But, it was in the shower that he first felt aging.
First felt himself growing old….about 25 years ago.
He felt the individual bones in his feet.
Pressed hard and weighty and grinding against
the white porcelain of the tub floor
as he showered. The tactile surfaces of
NERI’s sculpting put him in mind of it all.
He had mentioned this to a business colleague at work way back in the 1980’s.
This is how he knew he was growing older.
This is how he knew the body of his youth was changing.
The business colleague regarded him oddly, head and glance askew.
And now…..now in this new century…. it was a combo of
FLIES IN THE EYES, bones in the feet, and semi-loose muscle-flesh
vibrating in the wind when he hung his arm out the window of his sports car.
It was not easy.
Though he had joked for over a decade now about being the
AVERAGE WHITE OLD GUY, as the tangible physical changes occurred
it caused him to feel intermittently uneasy.
Now, like his newest 93 year old Mother-In-Law……he had FLIES IN HIS EYES.
Yes, Mable saw flies ….. dark spots moving…..she was afraid they would
settle on her food as she ate it.
He saw them too now,
those flies….those dark spots.
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FLIES IN HIS EYES had been written about before,
in Joseph Heller’s book called CATCH-22. Catch-22 had been a landmark in black humor, but reviewers at the time found plenty to condemn in the book. The book was chaotic, overstuffed and maddeningly repetitive. It introduced 40 characters in as many pages without developing them. The catch itself, the Catch-22, at first specified that “anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”
And the World War Two USA pilot, Orr, was crazy and could be grounded if he asked, but as soon as he asked, he would no longer be crazy,
and would have to fly combat missions again.
Maybe Catch-22 refered to any Mobius strip of illogic in our “culture”. It applied not only to military operations, but to the whole universe of Heller’s novel, where Maj. Major only saw people in his office when he was not in his office, and the character Appleby cannot see the flies in his eyes because he has flies in his eyes.
Funny at first, the joke is spread over 400 pages…..from 4 decades ago.
So now with flies in HIS own eyes, and 6 decades of his own Life having rolled by already……
he remembered old things at the same time that he experienced new things.
He saw and felt them both together at the same time.
It confused him when this had begun to happen,
but like all good humans
he adapted.
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Back a million years ago, remembering the warm taste of then-clean water heated in 1950’s flat-green plastic….
He remembered taking a deep swig on the plastic toy World War II G.I. canteen, a canteen modeled on the ones that emerged from the last ‘good’ war to end up in cut-rate, low-price Army Surplus stores ( sort of like old hardware stores with nothing but Armed Services kits and clothing…..a young boy’s dream )
And even further back,
there was the warmed taste from the garden hose that lay in the hot sun during the summers.
Now, here in this century,
the warm taste from the plastic water SPORTS-bottle made by NIKE.
Identified only by its ’swoosh’ logo, the taste is the same and transports him back into childhood.
But now, in this century, he finds himself working for the
Age and the Youth of the NIKE phenomena.
They are good to work with and for.
The new studio shows good signs of the kind of
types of craziness he has always been fond of.
This morning, before going into function at the studio, he did not do a ‘cool down’ after his work out at the exercise room. The beads of sweat are rolling down his face and neck, being soaked up by his thirsty cotton t-shirt as he sit and begins typing this.
Where to begin? Across the spring, and now into the summer of 2007, he watched as he grew older. It was almost as though he crossed some other sort of international border.
On one side vibrant, energetic to a fault, and solid-strong.
On the other side the previews of Age first flashed on and off,
and then settled into a steady routine showing of the coming attractions.
There were several points in time when he had intended to send out a new version of his BLOGAWOG. Especially when he discovered the old psychological profiling exercise from his mimeographed grade school days back in the early 1960’s.
And then again when the local HR person gave him *new* psychological identifier pages as an optional task this year.
No longer mimeographed, they were digital files now.
He felt better printing them out onto paper in order to respond and to make notes on them. All of this to discover that he pretty much liked who he had become as he aged.
The ratings that one was to give oneself in this century were:
NVI ( not very important ) , SI ( somewhat important ),
I ( important ), and MI ( most important ).
Giving himself these various ratings made him think again how old he was getting.
Hell, he never really thought he was ever going to make it to 30 years old.
But then he did. In fact the year he turned 30 was the same year he acquired his first home mortgage and his first son. About three decades ago now.
For all that plastic-warmed-water under the bridge, he actually began to like the person he had described in these new profiling pages.
And he liked WHERE he was these days too…..
There was a very good mixture of small and big in Portland, Oregon.
Small and big, old and new…….normal and weird.
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And the new building that would be HOME by the end of JULY 2007 was one that caught his attention from the very beginning. Evidentally designed by a Canadian architect who had built similar structures in Vancouver, B.C.
As he asked about things it turns out that ( ironically? ) many of the materials for the building were brought into Portland from Vancouver, B.C., Canada……..and then they put a USA flag on top of the building when the work was done ( or almost done ).
Again things turned out differently than expected. The “pole” that now holds the USA flag was actually meant to be a Deco-like Spire at the very top of the building……………but the architect crashed his private plane and died, leaving the “flag” decision to the financing developer, a proud and patriotic local entrepreneur in Portland.
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The mix of old and new is what caught him…..that and the design that called for a constant flow of the world’s most precious resource, so plentiful up here in the Pacific North West. Water. The water will flow from the high south side down under part of the building toward a sitting area at the lower north end of the building, next to a ‘new’ BENSON BUBBLER fountain next to the sitting area. This had been the site of the family home of the old-time Portland entrepreneur, but they moved the old family home a few blocks away on the campus of the university……and built this BENSON TOWER on the old site, right across the street from the OLD CHURCH that the Simon Benson family used to walk across the street to attend.
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The somewhat old, and the this-century new……and all right next to the SOUTH PARK BLOCKS.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=travel&res=9903E1DD1238F935A25756C0A964948260
The South Park Blocks, a strip of greenery 12 blocks long, are pleasant for a walk and will bring one to the Portland Art Museum (1219 Southwest Park Avenue), a 1932 building by Pietro Belluschi. Its Northwest Indian art collection is excellent.
Across the Park Blocks is the Oregon Historical Center (1230 Southwest Park Avenue). The Old Church, a wood Gothic structure dating to 1882, is a few blocks away at 11th Avenue and Clay Street directly across from the new BENSON TOWER residence.
The Saturday Market, an open-air fair of food and artifacts, is a continuing attraction. Operating both Saturdays and Sundays for fresh produce within walking distance.
He had day-dreamed about casually strolling the treed blocks with his new Canadian wife,
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and now the time had finally come…..in the last days of summer 2007. He was happy. Not that he resented the small temporary apartment that he had stayed and worked and slept in for a year and a half………..
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…..but it really had served its purpose and the time HAD come to leave it behind.
The time to book the moving trucks, set up all the utility accounts, and maybe even get rid of the old DIAL-UP he had been using since 1981.
( he had promised his sons he would get a cell phone when they had video, and he would get hi-speed broadband when he had a HOME again )
In some ways, the building reminded him of the kind of building HE would have designed way back in his old ART DIRECTOR-SET DESIGNER work days……something about the asymmetry he thought…..and that flowing water under the front entrance door, maybe. But yes……the excitement was growing. To be in a HOME again. And to really stop all of this insane flying back and forth too. Not that he and she did not have wonderful experiences during their travels……..toronto, ottawa, florida, montreal, and more……but flying was certainly not what it used to be.
( what was, really? )
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They both learned much about ‘traveling’, especially by air.
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And each time he went to see her in Toronto, he wanted to stay.
They both loved their place in the Distillery District,
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even though he had only been able to stay in it for 6 weeks before the new animation studio opportunity in Portland happened.
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So, they traveled. They traveled alot. They traveled so much they even watched planes evolve during this time.
Bigger planes, more people, more advanced digital entertainment.
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Now if they would just find a way to avoid having to take your shoes off in the airports.
Maybe it was all the traveling, or maybe it truly was about six decades of Living……..but he was looking and feeling older.
He stopped to think about what was about to happen next.
About loading trucks and cars with boxes to transplant again.
About finishing the first LAIKA movie within the next year.
About starting three more movies at LAIKA that would begin in temporary buildings, but find their way to the new animation campus buildings south of the city in 2010.
About leaving behind the comfortable little temporary apartment and the winding treed road that was so much fun to drive on each day.
About going to Toronto one more time in late August to help his wife pack up and relocate in a new country, far from Toronto, Ontario, and even farther from Sydney Pier in Nova Scotia.
About this new woman he loves coming to join him at last for new Pacific North West adventures.
About the fact that whenever he is near her, they both act and feel like they are about eleven years old.
About the fact that BOTH of his young sons are about to be married in the next year or so.
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About the fact that the whole PHILIPS family seems to be headed to a small lake in central Michigan for a 4th of July reunion next year.
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About the love and happiness he feels at long last.
In spite of the bones in his feet and the flies in his eyes, LIFE is coming!
(end)
