Location: Roseburg, Oregon. Asking price: $600,000.
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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Haven’t viewed the vid yet. They better unload it as soon as possible, the market is turning. Come spring they’ll be stuck with it, or take a loss.
I hope the market turns. My son et. ux. are having number 2 in a couple of weeks. They need a new place but were really discouraged when the looked last summer.
Not everyone is a seller.
Add a room or 2, maybe remodel a few things, stay where they are, save some money.
Moving is expensive and you never recoup the loss.
Nice try. They are living in a rented condo.
For as long as I can remember I was told that home ownership was part of the American Dream, that I could never be fully a man unless I had a house and everything that went with it: stability, an investment, a place to raise a family, and so on. Every American knows this by heart.
But that dream was never my dream. I never once had the idea or desire to acquire real estate, to “settle down”. The reasons for this are unknown to me. My path was not an ordinary one. Even today at 68 I shudder at the thought of what my life would be like had I been tied down to a piece of land. I would have felt like Gulliver after meeting the Lilliputians.
Of course I can see the beauty in that home, but the beauty I have sought was the beauty of true freedom, of being beholden to none—not even to a woman—of waking up in a tent in a foreign land and having no idea of what the day will bring. My worries were not property taxes, zoning restrictions, fixing the plumbing, or repairing the roof, but rather finding water, locating a decent campsite and—at almost all costs—avoiding the locals and the animals. I didn’t always succeed.
The Opportunity Costs of my path in life have been the obvious ones. I do not lament them.
I’ve been watch EC since the beginning, even before he started this series, and its been fun to see him linked here as well. I will miss seeing him on this house.
Is the housing market really about to turn?
I married my wife, knowing that she wanted to build a house. (I already had a house.) She’d lived in a trailer. She had 10 acres. We moved in two years ago.
Beautiful house and I’ll bet very well constructed knowing & watching this fella.
But I already am regretting my latest move to WA and you couldn’t pay me to live in OR. Any talk of secession by part of the state is fanciful.
Also a house isn’t a home without some leaded glass.
@MMinWA,
Glad you’re here in Washington, which like Oregon contains a lot of us conservatives who are not going to let the fucking lefties in Seattle and Portland run us out of our state. We can do what we can to cause the pendulum to swing back.
Alright, I’ll be the guy to state the obvious: The best part of the Essential Craftsman series isn’t the nice house or the tools that he uses or anything else. The best part of the Essential Craftsman series is the Essential Craftsman himself. Scott Wadsworth could not have hired an actor to play the role of a kind, decent, talented general contractor any better than he himself shows us in his videos. He illustrates the simple joy of doing a manual task and doing it well.
Well put, AZ, and quite true.
I totally agree. Mr. Wadsworth clearly loves his work, those he works with, and where he works. I completely admire his fundamental approach to life as revealed in his videos. In the past 2 years, I’ve built a number of structures here on our homestead and I have referred to his videos on several occasions. Scott has become one of my heroes.
Na, Oregons housing markets red hot. Was thru Roseburg Or,,,,,last week, Calif, plates as far as one could see. Sold my North River fishing boat to a gent from there, a logging community, a Jr College, a larger VA facility, and some killer hunting and fishing areas.
Hwy 138 takes you up to Diamond lake, along the Umpqua River, sadly this past summers fire damage is messy. We had four 20 minute traffic stops, headed to Coos bay, and six, coming home. I already miss the boat.
In Reno, looked at four seat “side by side” side Razors. Hoping to Order tomorrow, we’re told its a crap shoot as to when they arrive, and basically you get whatever color comes in. 34.000 168 hp, and 18 inches of travel which adjusts on the fly.
Rode in my old first Sgts, two seat today. I drove to Virginia City, and we hauled ass, Donny drove home, thought I was gonna die. Which is exactly why I’m getting one, only a four seater. Zero dust on the goat roads right now,
GV, got you on the list for a wild ride!
Dirk