May 11, 2008 by Linda Bergeron.

by Linda Bergeron

       Here’s an if-then question, folks. If the catch phrase blog comes from the miniaturization of the phrase Web Log, then let us imagine that the original phrase coined had been, instead, any of the following: Web Journal, Web Annal, Web Record, or Web Chronicle.      

       If you use your brain while twisting your lips around a bit you can see immediately that trying to let something like bbb-chronicle drop out of your mouth simply does not work, so that one could be elim-inated, no question.      

       Now bannal (which my MicrosoftWord program insists I am not spelling correctly), if pronounced in the same way that one would say annal with that assertive ah start to it, just doesn’t quite draw up an image of fast words sent off on a keyboard, and would not have worked well either.      

       The truth is that saying the phrase blog forces one’s mouth to drop open – for an extended moment even – in order to say it out loud, suggesting similar phrasings, sounds and meanings such as the blahs, bloppy, and various non-word, unofficial sounds that generally communicate boredom or a ho-hum, super-casual attitude and…[Excuse me, my spelling error just brought up attidude which completely distracted my train of thought.]…well, one can probably think of some other possibilities. Mouthing blog truly does suggest an element of mild surprise or maybe feeling aghast. (Are we in fact amazed at our-selves for writing a Dear Diary without a lock and key?)       

       Brecord is a stretch. As a weird combination of a puff of breath - said with a determined accent as in brec’ord – it can be suggestive of haughtiness inherent in the Queen’s multi-shire version of English. Brecord. Not once does it make one think of writing up one’s thoughts or hard-earned opinions, and posting them in a public, unlegislated place for absolutely anyone on the planet to view while in their slippers at home, sitting straight at work, or tilting the monitor away from the next cubby at the library.  

       Now the offspring of ‘Web Journal’ – and I’m suggesting bjrnl, here – has a whole lot going for it. With European tennis players and unconventional female singers adding to the world cultural fund, most of the word-pronouncers of the literate English-speaking world no longer have any problem wrapping their flexible lips around anything beginning with ‘bj—.’ It’s slightly tricky getting the hard b and the leggy y to be friends but most of us can do it with minor practice, so this suggested short phrase of bjrnl (which is a second-degree short form of bjournal of course) might really have worked.       

       Blog is it, though. Some will not want to spend even a synapse’s handshake between brain hemis-pheres over this kind of what-if playfulness, let alone a half-hour of their Sunday afternoon (as I just have). But, sometimes one can’t help the ideas that surface and demand a little attention, which simply will not stay still until one does something with them.      

       As for me, I don’t have time or exhibitionism enough to blog. What do you think memoirs are for?

Linda Bergeron writes poetry, autobiographical essays and has been a freelance correspondent for the HELLS CANYON JOURNAL for ten years.

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May 11, 2008 by Clair Button.

Have you started the “Big Read” Project, Amy Tan’s “Joy Luck Club?” When I read something that doesn’t fit within the limitations of style or content of the things I know I like, then my reading is always tentative. Until I find value, a message that speaks to me, I am always ready to put the book down and do something else. It helps when a book is well written, and thoughts expressed with character, but what would a Chinese immigrant woman have to say to me?

She could relate history perhaps, since she lived through the Japanese invasion of China, but that was a tale of misery she was reluctant to speak of, even to her daughter. From the cover description, I can see that is not to be the subject. The “deep connection” between mothers and daughters, now there is a subject fraught with the potential to make any guy run for the last project abandoned in his wood-shop. In my experience, every daughter seems to fear becoming her mother. Enough said about that. I have to sand a drawer front on that desk I was making last summer.

Yet in the first twelve pages of “Joy Luck,” I found three little gems that make me think I am going to enjoy this book. The first was the description of four women having a celebratory party in the midst of the anguishing misery of war as an affirmation of the value of living. The second was the snippet of history merged into the cultural jolt of adapting from life in China to the new world of America, complete with going to a Baptist church because it was a duty incurred to repay charity. And the third was a bit of the promised wit, folk wisdom so practical to life. Of course, if the purpose of a club is to gamble and experience true “luck,” then the skill of card-playing defeats the purpose, because some players will always win and some will always lose. What more perfect decision than to put the pot into the stock market so they can all gamble and win and lose equally? “There’s no skill in that” so of course it is the purest expression of gambling and good or bad luck when they succeed or fail.

I hope others will read this book and share here what they like or not about it.

Clair Button is the current President of WGEO who hopes he will find the luck to get other writers and audience involved, and perhaps even so lucky as to find a new volunteer for the office of President next year.

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April 10, 2008 by Clair Button.

Winters End

Russian drudge
sullen soul of angry serf
leaden brow, dirty gray clothes
stands outside the door of the master
who has freed him, in dumb silence, unthinking
Useless fool let the garden die
In the way, just go!
I’ll tend my garden by myself

We want our members and friends to show they are active and writing. It doesn’t take much. We want you to write and contribute. With all the great poets in our group, why would you wait for someone like me to start a new category on the blog? Well, here it is, poets “A Poem for Your Thoughts” is here for you to publish.

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April 5, 2008 by Clair Button.

Despite the historic rise in fuel prices and transportation fares, my family recently gathered to pay due respect to the family matriarch, now 90 years young. Luckily, I had gotten over my nasty chest cold before going, and my dear wife has an immune system which gives her powers akin to quack-grass resisting puny herbicides.

However, by day three of our visit, the sunshine state representatives of the family showed up with Mom’s granddaughter. All members of that family branch either sounded like terminal emphysema patients or had severe nasal drip. How could they not come to granny’s 90th birthday party?

On the day we returned, my ears would no longer pop when the airplane descended, a bad sign indeed. Miserable, slimy, cold! We called back to Mom, only to confirm that she had also received the curse, as had my sister and brother-in-law. All lay like miserable sloths in a cage, unable to expend the energy to go outside.

I spent a week in isolation, unwilling to pass this Florida import to my friends, but finally with ear still under pressure, went out to the doctor for antibiotics . A second week passed. The infection grudgingly released me, and I prepared to resume normal life.

Then I noticed my wife dosing herself repeatedly with her herbalist magic, only to succumb to the coughing misery. No amount of magic or faith can deny the reality of evolution when it can enable a virus to penetrate the code of her combination lock. To think this evil bit of germ plasm and DNA is now loose in Oregon is frightening, but how could we not attend that family obligation?

Thus the next tragic flu virus, or bacteria will spread throughout the earth. But no, that is not how the world ends. No, my wife just invented the cure. Ah, yes! The cure! A jalapeño chowder, so spicy, the term “volcanic” is an understatement. And I, having the misfortune of having been raised in a Midwestern household with bland eating habits, must also undergo this cure, because only fools do not eat what is put before them by the hand of a willing spouse. Sweat running from my scalp to soak my shirt. My eyeballs are sweating! Even she admits it is a little spicy, going back to get a second helping.

Oh, but wait for tomorrow. Apocalypse!

Clair Button is the author of the Thomas Kreuger Mystery Series, and occasionally makes attempts at humor.

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April 5, 2008 by Linda Bergeron.

April 5, 2008, by Linda Bergeron

I’ve been thinking it was just me, a long-time office worker with a penchant for invoice details and getting papers into the right file, but I’ve come to believe that the necessity of a home office really has very little to do with a PC now in most homes and everything to do with the Great Records Shirk that has been on the increase for several decades.

This monster that few mention – the best I’ve been able to figure - is the result of small businesses, the federal government and other agencies, insurance companies (auto, home, medical, all of them) and the whole gamut of organizations and retailers who have come to require that consumers complete, renew, re-apply for, document, and – basically keep tabs on – a wide assortment of records.

Most days of the week I thank my lucky stars that I have office and general bookkeeping skills as a valuable endowment so I know enough to save receipts, mark bills paid, keep track of upcoming renewals, which medical bills occurred before or after the deductible…remembering to ask the question, Do I get to pay 80 percent now instead of 100 on that last visit?

Right now my desk, shelves and carpeted floor in the assigned small bedroom house the following:

* a pile of medical receipts (which needed several organizing file folders) that include original bills, the notification that the original bill is still the same amount due from the patient but in a pending status because the insurance company claims “requested report not received from physician or provider” yet - and meanwhile I keep track who I’ve seen, and when, and why, and whether or not, or how much, I’ve already paid;

* a thickening folder for auto insurance receipts including the old rig that was suspended while it was parked in deep snow all winter, which is now running (under reactivated coverage) yet parked out front behind a red-lettered FOR SALE sign on the dashboard (and somewhere I know I’ve got a record of when the tags expire next just in case that fact helps be a plus on the pick-up’s asking price);

* all the orthodontic receipts from my son’s office visits over the past two-and-a-half years just in case there’s some end note discrepancy about that $5,000 smiling adventure;

* three two-drawer files that are getting harder to wedge this month’s papers into that are holding all the rest of the chronicle of me and mine in these times.

I think this GRS (remember, Great Records Shirk) began one day in an office when the general manager said to the Human Resource director, “Hey, let’s have the client fill out the form so we can use a temp clerk instead of hiring another office gal.”

(He was trying hard not to use the four-letter “girl” word; and yes, he was probably a he.)

This time last year I had no health insurance. Life was considerably simpler, although my home office was still an active place. In truth, I was postponing medical attention here and there on this and that (mostly the that, because it was more expensive.).

If they – you know them, the dutiful members of Congress, the hard-at-the-bit gang of political go-getters, and those who truly care about and are wracking their college-educated brains over what to do about the dying-state-of-the-American-health-care-system – if they would only ask me and other hard-working home-office workers our opinion on where to save money on this Gargantuan system – and doesn’t it bring out the “Grrs” in your suppressed Angerphile? - I’d suggest this: let me pay for the service, you look it up in your multi-volume that explains what was or is a ‘pre-existing’ condition (which I’m sure does not have a footnote on genetics). If my designated plan is covered, make a decision that day – oh, my Gosh! - and mail me the results in seven to ten business days. You pay me back, or I pay the balance. If they keep all the paper generated from one office visit in their office, floating from pending pile to pending pile, sitting on this clerk’s desk until s/he is back from vacation or training (on that multi-volume text, you know), waiting on the poor physician who’s desperately trying to read her/his own handwriting from three months ago about the visit in question and getting swamped in his own home office of tall medical journal stacks….well, you can see where this is going. Home offices are on the increase; the paperless office idea talked about in the late 1980s is certainly mobilizing upward the recycling industry for the sons of the old timber boys, and most people are still not getting paid what inflation suggests they should be. Especially those of us with papers at home to file.

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March 29, 2008 by Linda Bergeron.

Politics is “the art and science of political governance,” that is, of citizens. Even in their own home. Observe the resident cat.

We have three. This morning our trio’s main spokesman, Nubbins, declared to me in his most able and annoying voice, while I was in the kitchen filling the dishwasher with last night’s dishes, that it had really been too long since I scrambled a raw egg for the three of them. It was true, so I complied. Sure, one high-priced omega-3 brown egg for the furred bunch to keep them glossy, happy and whisker-licking for awhile.

I hadn’t thought about him as a ‘spokesperson’ for the family felines before, although I have distinct opinions about this fellow whom I have been known to refer to in affection as adjectively catzoid, and to (less affectionately) send him off my lap with “Hey! Go! I don’t sit in your lap when you’re eating.”

Would the others get extras if it weren’t for Nubbins? Jetter, the speedy, tortoise-shell gorgeous princess, wouldn’t say a word, just crawl and rub close enough for her big winsome eyes to melt you, at which point you’d pet her and start chatting her up but she’d dart for the door once again ever eager to check in on the yard bird action. Draco, the queen, is super picky and does not even bother to ask for anything; one simply has to keep making the effort to please her, or appease her with a long (and repeated) head-to-tail-tip stroke as she gains your attention from on high – as from your dresser top, the knick-knack- and other delicates-studded buffet top, the porch rails, etc. She’ll accept brother Nubbins’ successful requests for appropriations, but never ask herself.

They are so bossy, so demanding, so absolutely full of themselves, and so among the beautiful people of creatures that one takes them in innocently when they are in their prime (five weeks and fluffy, and 150 percent endearing) in the full belief that you will “take care of them.”

No, as soon as they’re full-grown, able to leap tall bounds, their heart of hearts will lock into an armor of personality that deceives you through ardor. They will tell you when you need to be in bed; will find nasty, smelly ways to inform you that the litter box is definitely not fit for use; will not give a second thought to lingering at the open door to check the weather conditions while you know the 22-degree outside temperature is sucking out the house heat with every breath; will find your lap when you’re upset and look so deeply into your eyes that you will wonder why you could ever possibly dislike or not appreciate them; will make clear that their personal weakness is any of the following - a stack of papers for diving onto or checking claw strength, or an empty or not-empty box, a freshly laundered bedspread that they simply must personally scent for you, or your dark fleece vest so they can divest themselves of loose white hairs.

You come home from hours away – working, shopping, driving a distance and back, a meeting – and they arise from their slumbers awaiting your next gift. Have I never said out loud, although I wanted to, “You guys don’t even know what work is! You don’t know what I do when I leave!”

They rule outrageously. They talk us into working on their behalf. They keep our feet warm under the bedcovers, but they also thoughtlessly wake us at three a.m. when we accidentally left them out and a windstorm brews. They whine for attention and when you say you can’t, they stay close by, and turn their heads away from you as if they’re meditating on an object in the corner.

They govern terribly! And I don’t remember voting. All that I recall is how unbearably cute they were six years ago, and how long it’s been too cold and of too little sun to be able to bask in their presence and still smile.

Linda Bergeron, a freelance correspondent for the Hell’s Canyon Journal, writes poetry, autobiographical sketches, and regional history, and has been published in the Tinker’s Shop, In Context magazine and Rain magazine.

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March 21, 2008 by Clair Button.

On Sex, Gender, and Moral Superiority
One need only observe nature to understand that the female gender is morally superior to the male, and that the latter sex, being subject to the vicissitudes of severe hormonal imbalance, is prone to senseless violence and destructive impulses. On this point, I agree entirely with Ronald Reagan, although I have not spoken to him lately to determine if he has changed his opinion.

Whether or not such mindless behavior, being controlled by bodily processes other than the intellect, can be considered moral, or rather immoral behavior, is beside the point. One need only consider the result. For example, we planted some lovely young willows into our yard, anticipating that within a few years, they would become beautiful, mature specimens of rust and yellow hued branches, gracefully arching overhead and providing dappled shade. Realizing quite fully that we share our neighborhood with a significant number of wild deer that come regularly to inspect our flower beds, we anticipated some opportunity to observe the gentle creatures nibbling on the branches. And certainly, were we to rise sufficiently early on a winter or spring morning, we could count on seeing at least one doe with her fawn sampling the dormant buds if not more. Yet willows sprout vigorously, and are quite well adapted to occasional browsing by wildlife. So my wife and I were not adverse to the idea of sharing the bounty of our sweet pussy willows.

However, in the dark of night, as all shameful villains and vandals are wont to enjoy the cover of darkness, the male of the species has left his mark. Not satisfied that we have left these delectable treats unfenced for his gustatory pleasure, he has seemingly determined that since he could not eat it all, he would destroy what he could not eat, leaving none for others in his herd unless they picked it up from the ground before it dried and turned black. No, this year there will be no tall waving branches or shade, only the grotesque, malformed remnants of his unreasoning brutal presence.

Should I be so fortunate as to find that devil in the forest later this fall and legally put an end to his malicious activities, I do know that there shall be no “once and for all” to it. As these things tend to go, the miscreant has no doubt already had time to procreate and pass along all the miserable, self-indulgent, and evil aspects of his character so deeply encoded in his genes. Or if not, his evil twin, or father, or uncle is out there somewhere, making sure there will be no end to mischief. After all, he got those behavioral traits somewhere.

Clair Button is the author of the Thomas Kreuger Mystery Series, and occasionally makes attempts at humor.

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February 21, 2008 by Linda Bergeron.

Newly organized home office – ah, at last. The poems have finally landed in an alpha file of standard folders (instead of the latest one loosely tucked in the front of an assigned notebook). I’ll be checking into the next entry deadline this morning.

The writing table went from obscurity under papers in the middle of a crowded room to a deserved place in front of the window-with-a-view. (Why did I wait so long?)

And the hardest task, but most rewarding when done right: reining in the obstinate self from a litany of diversions and distractions to the important work – facing the white page.

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February 20, 2008 by Clair Button.

What are BISAC codes?

As I was working with one member of our Writers Guild of Eastern Oregon to design her website as a standard and model for our group, she asked the question, “What are BISAC codes?” It was one piece of information I believed we should include in the data about her books. Why? Because my first publisher told me that was industry standard data, and necessary.

When I self published later (don’t even ask about that #@*&% subsidy press publisher), I continued to follow that advice because I did a little research and discovered the purpose of the codes.

BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) codes are a “standard used by many companies throughout the supply chain to categorize books based on topical content.”

The codes are often required for participation in many publishing industry databases, which may seem obscure to those of us involved only in writing. However, you can understand it more clearly if you realize that those codes provide your local bookstore manager a means to categorize, store, and decide how to display your book. Without your knowing it, those codes may be incorporated in the bar code on the book cover.

BISAC codes are established and controlled by the Book Industry Study Group, Inc. (BISG), the industry’s leading trade association for policy, standards and research. Membership consists of publishers, manufacturers, suppliers, wholesalers, retailers, librarians and others engaged in the business of print and electronic media. The BISG mission “is to create a more informed, empowered, and efficient industry supply chain.”

When you think about participating in the book industry as a publisher, recognize that electronic standards, efficiency, and reducing the operating costs of your suppliers, distributors, and retail outlets are part of your mission, too. Take the time to look up and list your own BISAC codes. http://www.bisg.org/standards/bisac_subject/index.html

Article by Clair Button, Writers Guild of Eastern Oregon, www.wgeo.org

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February 14, 2008 by Glenda Carter.

I am Glenda M. Carter, author of Sacred Shadow, Sacred Ground: A Vietnam War Widow’s Journey Through Unresolved Grief.

I currently live, work and play in eastern Oregon.

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