Best songs of 2012: 01 - 12

Oops, the end of December waylayed me with virus. Still not firing on all cylinders, but here are my top 10 favorite songs of 2012.


1. Frank Ocean - Bad Religion

The real genius of this song, for me, is that such a personal song became so ubiquitous. For me, Ocean's song sounds exactly like what I felt 10 years ago -- 19, desperately wishing I weren't gay, but desperately wishing my bad news girl interest love me back. I, too, felt like I had three lives balanced on my head like steak knives. I never could make her love me. (See also: this live version)

2. Usher and Diplo - Climax

This is my most-listened to song of 2012 -- addictive, beautiful and pessimistic. The four minutes tell the story of whole months of my 2012. Usher's voice has never sounded better, and Diplo distills dubstep into its greatest pop potential.

3. Kendrick Lamar - Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst

I could happily pick any song from Lamar's album to fill this spot. But "Sing About Me" stands out because of its message (that stories have power, that telling THIS story is his calling), its rhymes (In pajamas and Dun-ta-duns / when thunder comes it rains cats and dogs), its rhythms (that pause after "I'll wait" !) He's saying big things here, but comes out so easy. For me, no one has painted such a perfect ethnography since Nas's "Illmatic."

4. Earl Sweatshirt - Chum
Earl raps more bars with longer, more tongue-twisting lines than any other artist right now. That's apparent in "Oldie." Here, his verses are shorter but no less complex. (Mama often was offering peace offerings / think, wheeze cough, scoffing and he's off again) There are traces of the rambunctious young gun of OFWGKTA that first introduced him to the world, but this is a different Earl. Sensitive, open and earnest.

5. Schoolboy Q f/ Kendrick Lamar - Blessed

I love the way the aggressive, contemplative lines lay over the dream-pop beat. This was the first song of the year that showed me that rap could return to the form I once loved, that rap could still be ABOUT something. Plus, that Kendrick Lamar verse has the craziest cadence.

6. Miguel - The Thrill

His voice sounds so good. I just want to drive around all night listening to this song.

7. Frank Ocean - Summer Remains

The music bloggers can have their "Pyramid" love. For me, the other best Frank Ocean song of the year is the one he made "just f**** around" with his Macbook one night.
This song has some of my favorite lyrics of the year (The tide stole my youth / the creases in my brow ain't tanlines / saltwater swole my eyes / the sun burned me back and blue / too cold this side of June)

8. Stay Calm - Let Me Clear My Throat

I love how the beat charges ahead, how Claudia Meza's voice sounds with Zac Pennington's. And I love the line "Broke both legs but I'll be just fine." I can't stand to listen to it only once.

9. Bat for Lashes - Laura

Her voice is so good, and in this sparse piece, you can really hear the vulnerability it holds.

10. Japandroids - The House That Heaven Built

Like everyone, I feel about 17 and unstoppable when I hear this song.

Best songs: 2012

I've made lists of my favorite songs, books and movies of the year since I first had a geocities blog -- white background, courier new font, zero pictures -- in high school. I like going back to see what moved me in particular years. Sometime I find out later that the real best song of the year was one I never heard (see: entire Avett Brothers album I and Love and You). Anyway, here is all but the top 10. I'll post those later this week with a little write-up on each on why it made my 2012. Links to YouTube on all of them; I asterisked ones that have really good videos.

**11. Kendrick Lamar - Swimming Pools (Drank)
12. First Aid Kit - Emmylou
13. Heartless Bastards - Low, Low, Low
14. Frank Ocean f/ Earl Sweatshirt - Super Rich Kids (love this tongue-twisting rap from Earl)
**15. Solange - Losing You
**16. Perfume Genius - Hood
17. Fiona Apple - Werewolf
18. Purse Candy - Fire Fight (free download)
19. The xx - Angels
20. Miguel - Adorn

21. Hot Chip - Look At Where We Are
**22. Grimes - Oblivion
23. The Walkmen - The Love You Love
24. Kendrick Lamar - Collect Calls
25. The xx - Chained
26. How to Dress Well - Ocean Floor for Everything
27. Chromatics - Back from the Grave
28. Mystikal - Hit Me
29. Alabama Shakes - Hold On
30. Waxahatchee - Be Good

31. Solange - Sleeping in the Park (Twin Shadow remix)
32. Just Friends - Avalanche
33. Azealia Banks - Jumanji
34. Damien Jurado - Museum of Flight
35. The Walkmen - We Can't Be Beat
36. Blood Diamonds f/ Grimes - Phone Sex
37. Miguel - How Many Drinks?
38. Chairlift - I Belong in Your Arms
39. Sky Ferreira - Everything is Embarrassing
40. The Killers - Runaways

**41. Odd Future - Oldie
42. Hodgy Beats - Cookie Coma
43. Kanye West - White Dress
**44. Danny Brown - Grown Up
45. Rihanna - Diamonds
46. Angel Haze - Werkin Girls
47. Summer Camp - Life
48. How to Dress Well - & It Was You
49. THEESatisfaction - QueenS
50. Rhye - The Fall

when a song ends in a minor key

Washington, DC

But I'll admit I provided a full moon

Taking stock of a year:

This one will last forever. The nights with you, that is. First huddled over heartbreak and hamburgers in the coldest, worst restaurant we ever visited together. Plenty of spins after that -- me turning in the same wrong direction, again, again -- but every place seemed to settle back at you.

This day last year, it was just a twinkling, a want-to-write-you-back-now-but-why. But this year I know: I hope every whirl around this axis is with you.

She had been 8 for a hundred years. She was 34 for seven minutes.

Poverty Point
Delhi, La.

Your term is not commuted. It lingers without a sound.

Outside the abandoned swimming pool
Delhi, La.

Remember vividly how them victory points had hurt me

The boys of Chatham Street: The 9-year-old on the right knows how to dribble. The 10-year-old at the left says he can dunk. The middle is the straight-shooter, never-miss but never-risk. Thirteen years old in a town of 2,900 where half the graduates go to college, but few keep attending past that first semester. But right now, damn it's cold. Pass him the ball.

Delhi, La.

and it wasn't because I knew you or coveted your leathers

Epps, La.

Nothing moved fast, even the daylight was slow to fade

My cousin Chris is working on a score for the documentary. We spent the last week or so at a cabin in Delhi on the Poverty Point Reservoir.

Un de ces quatre, nous tomberons ensemble

On the way to Delhi, La. to work on our documentary, we stopped in Gibsland. Boots Hinton was five months old when his dad shot and killed Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow a few miles away. Hinton's dad was a Dallas sheriff's deputy then. The youngest in the posse of deputies who chased the bank robbers.

Hinton lived his whole life in Texas until he retired seven years ago. Then he relocated to Gibsland, opened the Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum and started hunting FBI files. He was playing solitaire in a room full of cigarette smoke when we met him.

Turn the wind to gravel roads

I gave up a life of crime. I gave it to a friend of mine. Something else was on my mind.

Caldwell, Idaho

Hell Street

Hell Street from Amorphous Films on Vimeo.

The street Roy Hudgins grew up on is called Chatham Street. But Delhi residents know it by another name. Check out this short video vignette featuring Delhi characters for a glimpse at Hell Street.

"A lot of unpleasant things went on up there," the late town historian Dorothy Bradley told us in 2010. "Rowdy. I don't mean they killed anybody. Well, maybe they did."

The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done.

Diary of a Misfit

Who was Roy Hudgins? from Amorphous Films on Vimeo.

Nearly 10 years ago, I sat across a tiny wooden table from my grandmother. My grandmother fumbled with a pack of Virginia Slims. I touched my hand to my hair, which I had had cut into a close crop the week before. I had just graduated high school. We were not close.

"When I was a little girl, I lived across the street from a woman who dressed like a man," she said suddenly. "Her name was Roy."

Any TV show or book or history lesson would tell you Louisiana in the mid-1900s was not the kind of place where you would have wanted to be a woman living your life as a man. Even now, people there have a word for people like that: Hesheit. If you slur it just right, the phrase sounds like heshit, which is what people called the local cross-dresser in Monroe, Louisiana, where I went to junior high school. There, gender roles are specific: Women wear make-up and dresses, do womanly things. Men are masculine, given to hunting and sports-watching. If you are something in-between, people make fun of you. A heshit, they say, is not something God intended.

Delhi, just thirty miles east of Monroe, isn't much different. That's where my grandmother Louise grew up. But my grandma never felt that way. In 1952, Louise already knew something was different about Roy. He wasn't shaped like other males. His voice was a little higher.

But Louise was only 12 then. She knew nothing of the world. And when she first met Roy, what struck her was not his shape or his voice, but the banjo he held in his hand.

That day at the table, my grandma told me the first details in a story that I've spent a decade trying to unravel. At times, I've thought I'd never learn any real truths about Roy's life. But I'm closer.

Aubree Bernier-Clarke and I launched a Kickstarter today. We're hoping to raise $10,000 so we can go to Louisiana and Arkansas several times in the next year to finish the movie.

The video above is the first trailer we have released. Filmmaker Aaron Wong and musician Christopher Johnson also contributed.

If you feel like donating to the Kickstarter, here's the link: Diary of a Misfit: The Roy Hudgins Documentary Project.

This is not a song; it's an outburst

Most of what I've been writing or making has been forgettable lately. I don't have the foundations laid down for anything spectacular soon, either. I hate this time after a story, when the next one feels so far away. Here's a tiny something I made this week. It's not any good, but I do think Asha has the cutest smile. I love injera but had no idea how it was made.

Otherwise, I've been toiling away on my documentary (we're launching a Kickstarter next week), obsessing over the new Kendrick Lamar album and re-reading "Random Family," wishing I could one day day write something even 1/100 as good. Alas, not any time soon.

Asha Gebibo Makes Injera from Casey Parks on Vimeo.

From the turnbuckle pt. 2

Here is part II of the story I wrote about Mean Mike Miller. Also, here is an amazing video shot and produced by Rob Finch. We worked on this project about Mean Mike together.

Mean Mike Miller's Last Match from Oregonian News on Vimeo.

They came to see the mean man.

The crowd of hundreds may not have been the mob the Portland Armory drew when Portland Wrestling peaked in the 1980s, but for the Blue Collar wrestling league, last week's matches played before a packed house.

Mean Mike Miller had come out of retirement. The fans had come to relive wrestling's glory days. Remember the time you turned on your tag-team partner? they asked. And what about the cage match? The famous elbow drop?

So many people came, Miller barely had time to talk to the one fan who mattered. The one who had never seen him fight.

Yolanda Montero, 31, never watched wrestling. She didn't care for violence, scripted or otherwise. But Sunday night she stood ringside for the match: her first, her father's last.


Connections
Mean Mike Miller lost his daughter 27 years ago, just as he became a star in the Portland Wrestling Circuit. He tried off and on through the decades to look for his daughter but never found her.

Then last year Yolanda, who had been looking for her dad for years, too, found an online video of him wrestling. Her brother posted a comment -- "Anyone know how or where to find him?" That was all it took. A Portland wrestler saw it, and father and daughter reunited.

She soon moved to Portland from Florida to be with her dad. They rented an apartment together. They stayed up late talking every night.

Neither was proud of the way they spent much of their lives. Miller had remarried and had other kids. But the wrestling life was a fast-paced one -- "sex, drugs and rock and roll," he said -- and some of his kids resented him for choosing wrestling over them.

"I haven't felt this way in a long time," Miller said. "I haven't felt like a father. And she's made me feel like a father."

The talks would never replace the years, though. Thousands of Portland Wrestling fans had followed Mean Mike's career, watched him saunter to the ring as George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone" rattled their seats. All Yolanda had was videos.

One morning over coffee, Miller asked his daughter, "What if you saw your daddy wrestle now?"

A week ago Sunday at North Portland's Eagles Lodge, fans clamored for Miller. They brought homemade signs and t-shirts, angled for an autograph. We thought we'd never see you wrestle again, they said.

Yolanda said, "I thought I'd never see him at all."

Her dad's fight against Psycho Sailor was the night's main event. When the bell rang, signaling the end of the third match, Miller tied a Harley Davidson bandana around Yolanda's curly hair.

He ducked into the bathroom to change into his wrestling clothes -- a black denim vest, chains and a black leather cap. He stepped out, flexed, then laughed at himself. It was his 61st birthday. His arms weren't quite the 19-inch behemoths they were when he made a name pile-driving and suplexing opponents.

He handed Yolanda his 2x4 -- named Lucille -- the one he once used against opponents. She would carry it to the ring then hold it on the sidelines.

The only time Yolanda had ever been in the spotlight was a track meet once. She wanted to throw up then, but this was worse.

She twirled the 2x4. She swatted at the air. But the board was heavier than it looked. It slipped, knocking against her new high-heel boots.

"How should I walk to the ring, Daddy?" she asked. "Should I strut?"

The bell rang again. The fourth match was over. Theirs would start soon. Mean Mike didn't want to enter the common way, so he and his daughter waited outside the lodge, in the rain, until they could crash through the front door.

The first notes of Bad to the Bone pounded the lodge. Yolanda took a sip of rum and coke to calm her nerves. Her dad waited, letting the first dozen bars play out as the crowd went crazy with anticipation.

They walked around the ring, shaking hands, hugging the fans who came to relive Portland's good ol' days. The saxophone solo that closes out "Bad to the Bone" had reached its peak before the duo ever made it halfway around the lodge.

Miller swung into the ring. Yolanda, holding Lucille and looking unsteady on the boots, stepped up to the ropes. But the spotlight no longer made her nervous.

"That's my daddy," she screamed.

Miller poked his opponent in the eyes, swung a few fists. He took a turnbuckle to the head then threw Psycho Sailor into the ropes and over his shoulders.

The match ended quickly. The mean man never hit the mat. With Sailor still dizzy from the spill, Miller grabbed Lucille from his daughter.

He clocked Sailor in the chin. The pin was quick and easy. Ringside, Yolanda did the funky chicken.

The bell rang. They hugged across the ropes. Then she stepped through, into the ring with her daddy.

-- Casey Parks

From the turnbuckle

Rob Finch and I have spent the last month or two working on a multi-part story about a former wrestling star who lost track of his baby daughter nearly three decades ago. Here's the first part. I'll post the second and Rob's amazing video in the next few days.



No one boos Mean Mike Miller anymore.

In the days when Portland Wrestling packed thousands into arenas every Saturday night, Miller was the villain everyone loved to hate. He sauntered to the ring to the tune of George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone," his shoulder-length hair waving behind him. Fans threw lit cigarettes at him. Ringside girls -- the Rosies -- cursed his name.

The fights ran in prime time every week for 38 years. The scene is Portland lore -- wrestlers became stars; kids clamored for autographs. Then, two decades ago, it ended, when the steroid-inflated soap opera of the World Wrestling Federation edged Portland's show out of the market.

Miller lost the jeers when Portland lost wrestling.

But now, after a few failed restart attempts and decades of quiet gyms, Portland wrestling is in the middle of something like a comeback. New leagues like Blue Collar Wrestling and DOA host regular matches. Rowdy Roddy Piper plans to debut an in-studio revamp of the old company this month on KPTV. Portland is ready, some say, for a return of the good, the evil, the suplexes and the pins that kids still imitate at home.

And Mike Miller? He's been out of the ring for a while, but he's back too, teaching the young generation of wrestlers how to body-slam, hip-toss and take a chair to the back of the head.

Even better, he will slip through the ropes one last time this Sunday night. And when he does, he won't be doing it for the boos -- though they once gave him the only rush that mattered. Mean Mike will do it for love.

A Tennessee boy
James Michael Hillman had 35 bucks in his pocket the day he became Mike Miller.

Like most boys who grew up in Whiteville, Tenn., he had few prospects. He never dreamed of being anything because no one he knew was anything. After high school, he drove a truck for the local factory.

In 1978, a promoter spotted him -- 6-foot-2 and barrel-chested, but otherwise physically insignificant -- and offered him a spot in a yard brawl. Back then, you didn't have to be special to wrestle. You just had to be willing.

The promoter changed his name to Mike Miller. The "Mean" came later.

He worked his way up through the Southern towns, fighting for $800 a weekend. He met a girl in New Orleans. They married. When she gave birth to an 8-pound baby girl, Yolanda, he knew he wanted to make an even better life for the family.

Back then, every little town had its own wrestling dynasty. Portland promoter Don Owen built Portland Wrestling into one of the most renowned. Superstars such as Andre the Giant, Ric Flair and Jesse "The Body" Ventura performed in front of thousands in the Portland Sports Arena.

Mike Miller didn't cuss, had never taken so much as a sip of whiskey, but the league needed more bad guys to add to a roster that included Playboy Buddy Rose and Rowdy Roddy Piper.

Miller grew his hair long, plastered a pair of black tights over his now muscular thighs and set his face into a permanent grimace.

"It was the dark side of me," he said. "I'd grown up such a Southern Baptist kid, so nice, so afraid of Hell. Now I could play it out."

Other wrestlers were faster, more athletic. Mean Mike brooded around the ring, a brute with a heavy fist. He stayed off the turnbuckle, wearing down opponents with grueling headlocks and arm twists. He painted an old 2x4 black, wrapped it in a chain and named it Lucille.

"He doesn't wrestle too scientifically," Dutch Savage said in 1982, "but he gets the work done in the ring."

Miller's career had finally taken off by 1983. But in a Centralia fight, his foot awkwardly caught an opponent's leg. The impact sounded like a tree thudding against the earth.

He couldn't wrestle, and the money dried up. Things turned. Miller's wife took Yolanda and headed back South. By the time he healed, he had lost track of his family. His wife moved on, changed her daughter's last name and never mentioned Mike Miller again.

Yolanda begged, but her mom refused to reveal her dad's stage name. "His name was James Hillman. He's a rolling stone, and he's gone," the mother said.

In the decade he wrestled in Portland, Miller busted his collarbone, broke his nose and separated his shoulder. Nightclubs held tables for him. Women went after him.

"The first time I ever seen him, I just fell in love with his hair," said Marion Martin, a fan who once stole his bloody shirt from a little girl. "They said he was mean, but with hair like that, he could do no wrong."

Miller remarried, raised a son and daughter and settled in for the good life.

The fight turns
Portland Wrestling aired its last match a week after Christmas 1991. Mean Mike rolled his opponent into a Boston Crab but lost when Ricky Martel wrapped him in a small package. Referee Sandy Barr slammed his palm against the mat. "One. Two. Three!" Miller stumbled through the Memorial Coliseum, and the crowd booed.

Some Portland stars went to the WWF. But Mean Mike didn't have the right bodybuilder, heartthrob look. He went back to driving trucks, moved logs off Mt. Hood. He worked as a bouncer and a prison guard. Finally, he went back to being nobody James Hillman and left for Tennessee.

"It was worse than a death," he said. "I didn't want to watch wrestling. Even if the TV was on, and wrestling was on, I cut it off, it hurt so bad."

But the WWF, now known as World Wrestling Entertainment, just kept growing. About 850,000 people bought Wrestlemania, its biggest event, on pay-per-view this year.

That hasn't been lost on local promoters. So last year, they launched an effort to rekindle Portland's famed wrestling spirit here. Blue Collar Wrestling began holding matches at the North Lombard Eagles Lodge.

The Blue Collar Wrestlers work the West Coast to take home a few hundred bucks a weekend. But the young fighters were reared on WWF wrestling -- off-the-rope acrobatics with little attention to story, said Blue Collar Wrestling co-owner Tex Thompson. They needed to work out storylines. They needed better choreography. They needed Mike Miller.

James Hillman returned to Portland in 2011. And as one of the Blue Collar wrestlers trolled YouTube for old fighting videos of his new mentor, he noticed a comment.

"Does anyone know how or where to find (Miller)," it read. "I have some important news to tell him about his daughter he had back in '81."

Reunions
That was all it took. They found each other, and Yolanda Montero and her wrestler dad talked every night for three hours. She had lived in New Orleans until she was 20. Nothing in her life ever seemed to work out quite right. She made regular trips to the library, searching the Internet for her father.

Two months ago she came to Oregon, where she and her dad now share a Gresham apartment. In the videos Miller shows her of his heyday, she can see for herself the way the crowds loved to hate him.

"But I do get mad," she said. "Everybody's telling me what he did. All the wrestlers here have stories about seeing him. And I just wish I could have been there."

A month ago, over their morning coffee, Miller asked his daughter, "What if you saw your daddy wrestle now?"

Miller still wears all black, but he keeps his hair cropped close now. His notoriously long frame is hunched slightly. A walk that once looked broody now looks like taking it easy. But he has no trouble getting in and out of the ring.

He began planning the story for his last fight a month ago. The nighttime security job he works wouldn't let him off one Sunday night, so he missed that night's matches. Psycho Sailor -- a bad guy whose raspy bark sounds like Popeye -- took the absence as a chance to mock the old man. He played "Bad to the Bone" and marched around, declaring himself meaner than Miller.

Last Sunday, Miller refereed Sailor's match. The Eagles Lodge draws crowds of about 40 now, but the place felt packed. Mean Mike emerged, and the opening guitar chords of "Bad to the Bone" shook the lodge. He handed Lucille to an old lady and started Sailor's fight.

Back and forth, Psycho Sailor and his opponents bloodied each other, while Miller kept an eye on them. Sailor bent a baking sheet over Cowboy Tex Thompson's head. Miller rushed in to keep the peace. Fans raced around the ring to stay with the action.

One of Sailor's minions stole Lucille from the old lady and rushed Miller with a menacing yowl. Sailor grabbed Miller and pinned his arms back.

Miller looked ready to take a face shot like in the '80s. But he ducked, yanked back Lucille and ran Sailor and his minions off like a pack of raccoons.

"Get on now," he hollered. "You want some of this? I'll see you in the ring next Sunday."

The whole charade took maybe 10 minutes. No one booed. The cheers, in fact, were deafening.

-- Casey Parks

Postcards from tiny islands

My brother once harbored a turtle. I hid frogs in the bra I didn't yet need. All we wanted for Christmas was a hermit crab. These days, I see a bug, and I run.

Between the click of the light and the start of a dream

I believe newspapers should introduce you to the people you might refuse to see -- either by accident, choice or habit. In Oregon, attendants pump your gas for you. I usually use that time to sneak a few pages of a book, text a friend or scribble something in a notebook. Thank god I have a job that allowed me to stop and meet the workers instead.

Here's a story I wrote that ran last week:


Gas across the street is 19 cents cheaper. But Donald Bateman and Tom Machen have built up a loyal following in the 12 years they’ve worked the pumps at the Shell Station in North Portland.

Together, they earn less than $20 an hour. They don’t get free gas. They don’t accrue vacation. They just believe the gas station at North Lombard Street and North Portsmouth Avenue fills an important spot in a community.

Even the most modern, on-the-go lives must stop, refuel. When Machen and Bateman talk about a decade of pumping gas, they don’t talk about making cars go. They talk about the moments in-between, when life pauses and offers a chance to connect.

They’re taciturn, the kind of guys you’d take for rough-necks as they filled your tank if you just sat there eating an apple and texting, as one woman did. But roll that window down further, longer, and you’ll meet men as sensitive and fervent as they are wisecracking.

In the breakroom, a sign hangs over the pot of Folgers that Bateman brewed when he unlocked the station at 5:45 a.m. that reads: “Even your most loyal customers have a choice about where to take their business.” It’s his guiding principle, Bateman says.

One September morning, a little old lady driving a mid-80s Chevrolet Celebrity pulled in. Machen slipped on his gloves — pumping gives him calluses — as Bateman went to meet her.

“This gal’s gonna be a fill V-power (premium gas) cash,” Machen said. And sure enough, she was.

The lady comes by once a week, always in the morning. Before he died, her husband told her that’s when you get the best deal, she said.

The surrounding two-mile stretch of Lombard has five stations. About 17,000 cars hit that pavement at 35 miles per hour or more every day, according to state records. Machen and Bateman distinguish themselves with what they call “person-to-person contact.” They remember names and fueling preferences. They wash every window. They celebrate birthdays.

Few drivers tip, though sometimes the pumpers take home about seven bucks a day. At Christmas Eve, they take home nearly $50.

When they talk about the station now, they sound like men talking about a noble cause. But neither dreamed of this life.

Machen, 49, was newly divorced with a child support payment due when he started in 2000. The station was a Texaco then, and when Machen asked about the help wanted sign in the window, the manager put him to work right away. Three days later, she had a car accident, and he became the supervisor. He hired Bateman, now 42, two years later. That job had three finalists, and he chose Bateman because he had driven from Carlton for the interview. Anyone willing to drive an hour for an interview to pump gas would be a loyal, hard worker, he figured.

They hit it off, and as the decade passed, they began to spend more time together. Machen comes to work an hour early just to talk the pre-dawn quiet away. On the Saturdays when Bateman isn’t out of town for a bowling tournament and Machen isn’t away at a wrestling match, they meet in the breakroom for a cup of Folgers.

“He’s the only person I really get along with,” Machen said. “Him and my tag-team wrestling partner.”

Out at the pumps, Machen looks like he’d get along with anybody. He trades school pictures of his daughter for snapshots of customers’ kids. He once got in trouble for dancing between the aisles. He smiles through a thick goatee when he talks about The Joker, a 40-something man who used to bring them donuts when he pulled in for his daily $7 top-off.

But the pumpers grow quiet remembering the day another customer — Grandpa — stopped bringing his Buick LeSabre in for his twice-a-week fill.

Grandpa’s daughter showed a week later with news that a semi-truck crashed into the LeSabre as Grandpa tried to make a left on North Columbia Boulevard. Grandpa did not survive.

“It’s tough,” Bateman said. “You get to know the regulars. Then one day, they just don’t show up.”

“After Grandpa, I didn’t even want to get to know customers for a while,” Machen added. “It’s just too hard to lose them.”

The Shell keeps a reader board up for community announcements. They memorialized Grandpa, and other regulars, there. Every few days, drivers see a new rest in peace, happy birthday or dinner special announcement. Once, a man proposed to his wife on the sign. A family welcomed home an Iraq veteran there, too.

But plenty of people ignore the board and ignore the pumpers. While Machen washes their windows, some avoid contact. Others push cash through only a barely cracked window.

Machen jokes that if he ever writes a book, he’ll call it “STUPID PEOPLE: It’s just common sense.”

Over that first cup of Folgers, sometimes the pumpers shake their heads talking about the guy who urinated in the car wash or the truck drivers who use the parking lot as a u-turn hub. Customers want to pump their own gas. They complain about the price.

Machen has an answer for that.

“‘I don’t make it,’ I tell them,” Machen said. “ ‘I just pump it,’¤”

Life is Elsewhere

Coming soon to a tiny, computer theater near you: A short goodbye, Katie moving through the fields and into whatever life is out there.

as if the syllables were made out of tin

Sometimes I work off my own whims. Like last week, I saw it was picture day at one of the schools in the area I cover. I stopped in, took some pictures and wrote up this little dispatch.

Ms. Bussey doesn’t want to see any bad pictures. The Rosa Parks Elementary School kindergarten teacher spent picture day buttoning top buttons, fixing collars and wiping lint off 5-year-olds' shirts.

As Brennan Bachelor prepared to memorialize his first year of school with a prominent smear of chocolate above his lip, Daphne Bussey rushed into the frame.

“Just give me a little spit,” she said, holding up the cuff of his shirt. “Come on, just lick your shirt, let’s get that off there.”

One picture, just 10 seconds in front of a pre-positioned camera, can last a lifetime. You could have picked fights, drawn pictures, eaten mud or captured a turtle, but that one picture will tell the story of the whole school year.

Ms. Bussey urged the kids to make that moment a good one. “Show teeth, baby,” she said. “Oh, yeah, dimples, we love to see those.”


Read the rest on Oregonlive.

The barlife strays along your street

More from Needful Things



l: Casey Parks; r: Amanda Allen

Who shook the Valley of the Shadow

Wrestling was never about the fights, though, yes, I flying suplexed my brother any time I could climb on to the couch without anyone noticing. Wrestling was Macho Man Randy Savage's wedding in the ring. It was Sting going bad, Lex Luger going good. It was Cactus Jack gone missing and proof that, yes, life was really all good and evil. At 8 or 9 or even 12, I did not believe in a subtle in between. God didn't teach that and neither did wrestling.

When the pay-per-view fights rolled around, our lack of subscription didn't stop me. Sure, I longed for the kind of money that would make the screen come to life. What's $39.99 to a kid?

But my parents couldn't afford to rent The Royal Rumble, so my little brother and I crawled close as we could to the TV, laid flat with our ears flush against the speakers. The screen snowed white, but I could see the whole story in my head.

I am shy, but you can reach me

Spent the weekend at the beach with C, watching the last light fade off summer.







Look for me another day.
I feel that I could change,
I feel that I could change.
There's a sudden joy that's like
a fish, a moving light;
I thought I saw it
-- Innocence Mission, "Lakes of Canada"

Object of affection

l: Amanda Allen, r: Casey Parks

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to loosen and untie

Another slice of Needful Things:



l: Amanda Allen, r: Casey Parks

awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed

The second installment of Needful Things, my summer iPhone project with Amanda, has wrapped up. Here's a preview.



l: Amanda Allen, r: Casey Parks

What solid is

in the interval called slam clicker, Realm of Pacific

Tastes like being poor and small and popsicles in the summer

I am working harder and happier than I ever have. I think I'm still a year away from producing something really good, but every day I wake up excited to try, to push toward some eventual good piece. I've been thinking a lot about the pieces that inform who I am as a journalist. I'll never produce anything as good as these, but they are what I'm aiming to make. That is, they tell the story I want to tell in the ways I wish I could.

Jay-z - "99 Problems"
Matt Eich - Sin and Salvation in Baptist Town
Neko Case - "Red Bells"
Katherine Boo - The Marriage Cure
Walt Harrington - A Narrow World Made Wide
Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run
Bombay Beach
50 Cent - Hate it Or Love It
Radio Diaries - Claressa Shields
Natasha Tretheway - Native Guard

Haters going down for the count

Pictures from the AU / Starfucker / Girl Talk concert Saturday night. My feet still hurt even though I was wearing my orthopedics. We arrived early to be near the front, but the rowdy young crowd went a few steps too far with me (one boy actively shoved me), at which point we declared ourselves to old to be close then retreated to the back.

And then you take off, your name aloft

All my lies are always wishes

I toss and turn, you understand. Then we learn to synchronize, tirade provoke and inside jokes.

Amanda and I are about to start our second-annual "Needful Things" project. I've been thinking back to a year ago when we first started the text-picture conversation, when we were still fresh off the boat from Orcas Island:

But when I turn up the tone

More photos from the "Trouble" shoot.

He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet, and then he landed

More scenes from the video project I shot with Ryan based on Matthew Dickman's poem "Trouble."