My Crazy Korean Radio

I have a Korean Bluetooth radio that goes crazy whenever there is a power outage. It doesn’t reboot the way a radio should. It goes into shock. It becomes deranged. It assumes the regal enigmas of all things glinting and supernatural and dead. The settings revel in mayhem. It turns on randomly at all hours of the day and wallows in blatant anarchy. It turns itself inside out and insinuates fish. It grows tentacles. The tentacles wrap themselves around my ears and tickle my brain with Beatles' songs. “I’d like to be under the sea / In an octopus’ garden in the shade.”

When the radio goes nuts I have to reset everything. The day, the time of day, the time of day I would like to be awakened and the kind of talk or music that I would like to awaken me. Every day has its own geography and the morning are the mountains of that geography.

I mean that literally because the sun rises over the Cascades to the east in these parts.

The Cascades are called Cascades because they loomed above the Cascades Rapids in the Columbia River Gorge. It was Lewis and Clark who named the rapids, but the populations that lived there, the Clackamas, Kathlamet, Multnomah, Wasco-Wishrams and Tualatin had other names. The Sahaptin word for the Columbia was “Nch’i-Wana,” the Great River. I will have to look for the other many names. Naming things is a uniquely pleasurable thing to do in this life.

The poet Ted Joans and I used to complain about the name of Washington State. Why such a boring name? They could’ve chosen from so many. They could’ve called it wawtkáwaas, which is Sahaptin for “camping place,” or lawilatlá , which means volcano.

I like what the French call ‘appetizers.’ Hors d’oeuvre, which means “outside the work.” This caramelized onion and goat cheese bread we’re making available for you before dinner is an epiphenomenon, it’s a secondary effect, a byproduct that arose from the kitchen that is not causally related to the meal we’re preparing, the items we will be placing on the table more formally, more ceremoniously, a little later, when it’s officially time to eat.

Because eating is weird. And like anything weird, it needs a ceremony to make it seem less weird. Less upsetting. Let’s face it. Putting things in our mouths that were once living organisms can be a little distressing at times. Some people extricate themselves from this dilemma by becoming vegans. Good on them. But some of us can’t sign on to that. The motivation is there, but the will lags behind. It’s exhausted by the Sisyphean task of day-to-day living, the endless treadmill of making a living.

Making a living: what a strange phrase. As if life required a table saw and a hammer, a 60-volt drill and a bag of nails. I’ve never been particularly good at it. Living, in and of itself, has absorbed most of my attention. I have a set of skills that are better suited for philosophizing and poetry. It takes time to find even a modicum of equilibrium and meaning in your life. It’s a matter of great focus, of great sensitivity and integration. It takes work and concentration. It takes patience and nerve. It’s like adjusting the focus on a telescopic lens. Like walking a high-wire 1,000 feet above the ground without a net. Like delivering a breech calf in a howling blizzard in a smelly barn in Nebraska. Like performing a surgery in a nightgown with nothing but an almanac and a toothpick. Like renegotiating the settings on a crazy Korean radio.