SF Chronicle

In the 1980s I spent a year in Bend, living on grant money, house-sitting for a friend, and writing two plays (one commissioned, about Moliere, another inspired by the nearby Rajneesh comedy) and it was there I started reading the Chronicle. Why? Because it was everywhere! It was easier to find than The Oregonian. I got the idea Bend was a bedroom community for San Francisco.

Now, decades later, the Chronicle once again is my daily paper. I also look at the LA Times lite, a free version. I never read an Oregon paper, which tells you something. The Oregonian fired their best writers and their digital version is a disaster. Fortunately Barry Johnson started Arts Watch, then hired Bob Hicks, to provide the best arts coverage and writing the area has ever known. (Now they need an app!)

In other words, I live here but not entirely. My wife won't move so I'm resigned to staying and the university has made this easy, the only place in Pdx that feels like home. (In the 80s the entire city felt like home.) But soon I will leave PSU, so I wonder what I'll call home locally then.

Well, as a song I wrote half a century ago says, "the inside of my head is my country." I'm like a turtle and carry home with me.