Dry Ice Factory

Or as we say on LiveJournal, Happy birthday, don_fitch. Hope you're enjoying your new accommodations. Please don't tell me you've been living there for five years already!

I post things on Facebook that in the past I would have posted here, so let me share this one for those of you who haven't seen it already:

Thanks to Elonna Marci and her daughter Sophia (aka the Neighbors) for serving a lovely birthday dinner to me and Denys last night. We ate on their back porch just like old times, and the elders talked about movies that were made before new high schooler Sophia was born, because that's what adults do, right?

Today I'm 56 years old. It's hard not to feel that birthdays have become some kind of perverse countdown now, but I'll try to be good and see it as a countdown to ecstasy -- reelin' in the years and all that. It doesn't help that because of phone transition adventures, the Seahawks game, and dinner yesterday I didn't make it to my scheduled blood draw, so now I have to start my birthday with that. It was supposed to be on the 19th anyway, until I tried to change it, so I guess it's fate. Curse you, fate!

I think I'm turning 53, I think I'm turning 53, I really think so. Name that tune!

It's my birthday tomorrow. Thank you, thank you. I've had some odd thoughts about aging percolating through my beady brain recently, kicked off by the experience of buying a new pair of jeans last week only to discover that my memory of how much my waist has shrunk in the past year was off by two inches. Let me tell you, it was quite a shocker when I put the jeans on and they were way too small. Wuh-hut?! I'd been joking for months that I was probably never going to get back to my old jean size, which was two inches smaller than that, feeling smug that I'd even made it down to the size I thought I had.

This made me think about how all summer I was feeling all buff and shapely and probably exposing more of my skin that was completely appropriate as I worked on the back of the house in the hot sunshine. I blame these randy feelings on the fact that I'm in better shape than I have been for a decade but still haven't really digested the reality that I'm, well, almost 53 years old, with a paunch that's somewhat reduced now but isn't really ever going to go away again. Oh, the vanity!

It has helped a little, in an odd way, to watch a couple of Luis Buñuel movies in the past week: Belle de Jour and Tristana. Both of them are about the impossible dreams of desire, and about the masochistic pleasures of being denied one's desires. Buñuel almost makes the world I live in make sense. Or at least he has a nice sense of humor about the fact that the world makes less sense the older you get. How can it be that I was so much smarter when I was younger?

Well, I continue to hope that I can find a way to age gracefully. First step: don't wear those dream pants!

So the party on Saturday was a blast. I'm actually not sure how to write about it. In many ways it went exactly as I expected, so it doesn't seem that there's much to say about it, and yet of course like all large parties (there were 60+ people there) it was a complex cross-section of the world that presents a lot to think about. Haven't gotten my head wrapped around it yet.

How did I spend my day? I was expecting to be awakened at o'dark thirty to help my brother put the pig on the fire, but when I got up on my own initiative around 6am, I discovered that my dad and sister-in-law had already helped him with that task. So I spent most of the rest of the morning and early afternoon sitting by the roasting pit with my brother, shooting the breeze. My eldest nephew had brought back a bottle of absinthe from Italy and had sworn the night before that we would start drinking it first thing in the morning. Sanity prevailed, and we didn't actually sample it until around 2pm. We tapped the keg of HUB's Crosstown Pale shortly thereafter, and guests started arriving at the announced starting time of 3pm.

This party was mostly for my dad's 80th and my 50th birthdays, with my nephew's 20th also in the mix. (We had a 60-30-0 party the year he was born.) There were several different groups of people at the party who tended to cluster together. There was family, including (surprisingly) my dad's sister and brother-in-law, whom I didn't expect to see because they are very conservative, plain-clothes Mennonites and there was going to be drinking going on. There were friends of my parents from Crooked River in Central Oregon, where they live. There were my friends from Seattle and Portland. There were a few of my nephew's friends. There was also a scattering of friends of my brother and sister-in-law and of the family in general. A few people I hadn't seen for decades, and a few others I hadn't seen for a few years.

I mostly hung out with my friends, but I did wander around now and again to say hello and chat with this or that cousin or uncle or old family friend. I guess the thing about such a party and such a group of old acquaintances is that it inevitably stirs up memories going all the way back to the beginning. My aunt Myrna reminisced (as she does whenever I see her) about what a bundle of energy I was at nine months old. There is something enormously comforting about being around people who have known me since I was born. We've been in this thing together, well, forever from my point of view. And it keeps going on. My niece is pregnant, and everybody is looking forward to her child. Another member of the family starting the long journey.

The friends of mine who made it were an interesting mix of people who have been my good friends for decades, people who were good friends decades ago but whom I don't see much of anymore, and people I've been getting to know better in the past decade. My friends stayed the longest of all the guests, aside from a couple of my nephew's friends who stayed overnight. When almost everybody else had left, my brother started a big fire, which was sure to keep juliebata enthralled. But eventually she and holyoutlaw left, and kate_schaefer and Glenn, and Andy & Carrie, and Paul and Katherine, and Dan & Lynn Steffan (who gave me a bottle of single malt and the original artwork for Dan's splendid Corflu Zed logo). Denys, whose birthday it also was, had left a little earlier. I watched the Oregon-Arizona State football game with my niece and her husband, and the Duckies hung on to win the game. I tried my best to finish the keg, but I really could have used Martin Smith's help, may he rest in peace. I hung out with my nephew and his friend Kayla, who was a real sweetheart, full of dreams and plans for the future. The kids are all right. I'm liking the next generation.

Finally I went to bed, and slept only fitfully under the influence of a very full day and too much beer. Denys and I drove back to Seattle yesterday, taking turns driving because we were both pretty zonked. It was a great party. A nice affirmation of family, friends, and community and of the stages of life. My dad kept telling everybody that the party was my idea and it was for me, but I could tell he was really enjoying himself too. It was all good. And so on.

As I mentioned a while back, we're having a pig roast for my dad's 80th birthday and my 50th on September 25th at my brother's place in Corvallis, Oregon. Invitations were sent out yesterday to a list of likely suspects. If you didn't get one and want one, let me know. I didn't have e-mail addresses for some likely suspects. I'll screen comments so you can reply here if you want.

Thanks to all for the birthday wishes. I had a very nice day, which began once again with breakfast at Roxy's.

I managed to find time before the big game to watch Mothra (Mosura, 1961), which it turns out I had somehow never seen as a kid. What a sweet monster movie! Shades of Miyazaki in that Mothra is a kind of nature god protecting the noble savages from the greedy exploitation of civilized humans. I was amused to see that Mothra's mysterious island home may be somewhere in the "Carolinas" (according to the subtitles) -- that is, the Caroline Islands, which is a chain in Micronesia that includes Yap. Radiation is once again a force to be reckoned with, although it's unclear what effect it has actually had on the island, which was an atomic weapon test site. Unlike Godzilla, Mothra does not seem to be a product of the radiation. The songs sung by the Peanuts are great. Is there a soundtrack? Anyway, very reminiscent of King Kong in a lot of ways, including the brownface natives (referred to as Polynesians in the subtitles) doing goofy faux-ritual dances. Also, evil Americans! (Although called Rosilicans or Ruritanians or something like that.) Great kid-movie fantasy fun, with Toho's typically awesome miniature work.

After that was the UO-Utah game, which was once again nerve-wracking, but ended up well largely thanks to great defensive play. Good win for the Ducks against a ranked team, but the tough games continue next week with 8th-ranked California.

As if that wasn't enough of a birthday present, I then discovered that Steve Stiles had e-mailed the cover arwork for the next issue of Chunga. He claimed he didn't know it was my birthday, so that was some pretty good synchronicity right there. The issue is slowly taking shape, and I'm meeting with the boys later today.

To cap the day off, Scott K and carl braved the Fremont Oktoberfest traffic and brought some of Scott's private reserve of beer over. We started with a bottle of Snoqualmie Brewery's grand cru, Spring Fever, which I had been aging only since the spring. Still seems like a disappointing vintage compared to past batches. After that was a terrific "Belgian wild ale" called It's Alive! by a brewer named Mikkeller, who apparently travels around the world brewing in different places every year. Amazing stuff, slightly sour, similar to the grand cru but much more complex. Then a bottle of Survival 7-Grain Stout by the Hopworks Urban Brewery of Portland. The seven grains are barley, wheat, oats, amaranth, quinoa (?), spelt, and kamut (?). Nice stuff, and a nice break (at only 5.3% ABV) between big beers. The next was another completely amazing beer, the Consecration from Russian River Brewing Company -- "ale aged in oak barrels with currants added". Extremely sour, and reminding me that very sour beers often taste salty to me for some reason. The oak and currants were very subtle aftertastes. This one and the Mikkeller were definitely the brilliant high points of the evening. To finish off what brain cells we had left, I pulled out a bottle of the 2007 Old Wooly barleywine from the Big Time Brewing Company. Two years of aging have definitely smoothed it out, although I may have to leave the other bottle of 2007 for another two years.

So an excellent day all around, with many good gifts. 49 is off to a good start.

Denys and I are planning to celebrate our birthdays at Mashiko's next weekend, either on Friday the 18th or Saturday the 19th (my actual birthday). I believe holyoutlaw and juliebata are interested in joining us. If you'd also be interested in joining us, please let me know in the next few days. Mashiko's has allegedly gone to a sustainable sushi menu (e.g., no unagi and no bluefin tuna), so I'll be curious to see what it looks like.