no lost love

I was stumbling through the late afternoon NE Portland heat, tipping, James Brown’s “Get On the Good Foot” pouring out from the android. My son Spenser and I had had a long talk, one of our talks that swirl in and out of common sense and outrageous loopiness – the new laptop, his pin, his password, why someone who lives in Portland was living with all them in Idaho and her parents would come and visit but it’s all cool, dad, and trying to spell the word “Throne” over and over to me, me repeatedly saying “Ghone” is not a word known anywhere in the solar system, cracking up, nevermind the Northwest or close by the Snake River.

The conversation ended, sweat rolling down my back and arms, with Spenser telling me that after he and Marion and Mabel and Asher (the PDX/Idaho/PDX girl) exited the movie “Minions” he listened to two songs on his phone – “8675309” (Tommy Tutone) and “Electric Avenue” (Eddie Grant). I howled, I’m pretty sure, with joy because I love both those songs so much and told my son so, and I said Eddie Grant was a Rastafarian and Spenser said, “A what?” and I said check the video on YouTube on your new laptop and he said it’s on my phone. Dad.

Then I found my way down and over to the Brazee Street bench that’s become sacred and played Harold Melvin and Lou Rawls and stumbled my way a few more blocks home, all mine this week with the landlords up in the San Juan Islands, and I checked the zillion plants I’m watering for them and got to sit on their porch and read more Pelecanos and then drop back into this below ground coolness, and bang this out.

It’s a blogger thing.