St. Paddy's Day Montage

This time of year is a slog: bad weather, five-day work weeks, no football or baseball, the busyness of a new semester. And then--out of nowhere--college basketball's March Madness emerges. Immediately afterward, Spring Break. We exhale, and the sun returns.

--I'm headed back to Canada in three days. Like migratory geese, my buddies and I must go north when spring comes. Back to the good people of Kelowna, to the snowy peaks of Big White and Silver Star, to warm bowls of poutine. This year, I'm vowing to take long runs on the proud shores of Lake Okanagan. I long to glide along those Canadian waters, to feel the northern wind in my beard. I hunger and thirst for this trip.

--I'm currently swallowing several Prednisone tablets a day. This is another rite of spring. I don't know where the yearly rash comes from, but I'm accustomed to breaking out in some horrible skin infection and having a confused doctor pump me full of over-the-counter steroids. It seems to work. This year, galaxies of tiny red bumps are swirling over my arms and hands, chest and legs. In a few days, they should be gone. If not, I'll take advantage of Canada's universal health care and soldier on.

--Ron Rash is a tremendous writer. He's from the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and his stories reflect the history, landscape, and inhabitants of his home. Rash's novels are dramatic morality plays, echoing Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy. They're effective and pointed. Philip Roth once said that Bernard Malamud was a writer of "severe morality," in that Malamud's characters often paid for their sins. I think Roth meant it as a slight, but I like Malamud's perspective and I see that "morality" amplified in Rash's work. Check out the novels One Foot in Eden or The World Made Straight, or read "The Ascent", his story in this year's Best American Short Stories.

--I'm no Catholic, but for Lent, I stopped eating meat. I love meat, and yet avoiding it for a week now hasn't been as taxing as I imagined. To clarify, I'm not a vegan: I eat dairy products and eggs. However, I don't eat fish. I never understood "vegetarians" that ate fish. How is a fish less of an animal than a pig, cow, or chicken? How does a trout have less humanity than a farm animal? Look into the pleading eyes of gasping salmon, tired from its long journey home, and tell me that they have less of a soul than a steer, you false, fish-eating "vegetarians."

--OSU just opened another enormous climbing wall, in the McAlexander Fieldhouse. There are dozens of new routes, for both rope-climbing and bouldering. It's brand-new and expertly designed, and it evenly distributes the climbers that would normally use the old wall at Dixon. I can get a reasonably priced, semester-long community pass, and enjoy both walls. This last semester, I went three times a week. The wall is another feather in the cap of Oregon State University, and when my friend Kevin first visited the new facility, he immediately wondered what kind of idiot would go to the U of O and slum around on their campus, when they could have the McAlexander Rock Wall. It was a good question, and I had no answer as I hitched on my harness and aimed for the nearest 5.9.

--Waka Flocka Flame is probably the dumbest rapper I've heard since the heyday of J-Kwon and Trick Daddy. His hit "Hard in da Paint" has absolutely no artistic merit or positive message. And yet, tonight at the Cheldelin Middle School track, on my iPod, there was no other song I wanted to pump me up for that last lap than Waka Flocka's brainless, yet strangely empowering, single.

--My college basketball bracket, three games into the tournament, lost a team that I had pegged in the Final Four. We learn to roll with these setbacks, us life-long sports gamblers. Last year, I had early disappointments and then won two brackets. I made about 13o dollars. Just because Louisville can't muster up the gumption to get past Morehead State (Morehead State!), that doesn't mean that I can't enjoy the most magical sporting event of the year.

--Last week a writer came to OSU to discuss point-of-view. It was an good lecture on the subject ("point-of-view is the precondition for story"), but what interested me the most was that it came out that the writer's first novel is loosely based on the life story of Francis Bean Cobain, Kurt's daughter. Today I picked up the book, Lady Lazarus, from the library. I'm excited to read it but a little worried. Don't let me down, Andrew Altschul. Nirvana fans are still looking for that accurate portrayal, and we've been disappointed before.

--I'm endlessly happy that Bridget lives with me again.

--The Beaver baseball team beat the Ducks. This was a long, long time coming. Beaver Nation can look to the future again, can see an orange glow in the west.

--And so on, and so on. I try to run or climb every day. I'm reading three novels that I'm teaching. I need to grade three class sets of essays. I need to pack the car, to file my taxes, to extend my longest weekend run. All around, the Oregon spring weather floods and rages. But on this St. Patrick's Day, those of us that are part Irish take time to sit still and think on ascending trajectory of our busy little lives.