short term rental

Gary’s upstart crow who hangs out with the gulls at the creek is front and center. Behind is a juvenile and a nearly adult gull. One juvenile gull is still weep-weeping to be fed every morning as we walk north.

Rebecca Solnit has a new essay about the false-fairness strategy of trying to meet bigoted, science-denying, narrow, and Trump-won-the-election fantasy halfway. “On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway: Why Is It So Hard for Democrats to Act Like They Actually Won?” Patience and kindness are one thing; pretending that we can find reasonable compromise with a dangerous minority, maybe not so much. Especially since only the left—the majority that won the White House—even tries.

There is no reasonable halfway between truth and bogus claims. We should stop pretending that there is such a place. Sometimes, however much some people want believe it, a lie is just a lie.

(I used to think that accusations of “Nazi” were overblown and unfair. Then I paid more attention to the signs, actions, and words of Proud Boys and other white supremacist groups. Are cries of “Nazi” unreasonable? No, they aren’t.)

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just complained that “you can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. Now it’s considered bigotry.” This is a standard complaint of the right: the real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim of his racism, the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to oppress. And of course Alito is disingenuous; you can say that stuff against marriage equality (and he did). Then other people can call you a bigot, because they get to have opinions too, but in his scheme such dissent is intolerable, which is fun coming from a member of the party whose devotees wore “fuck your feelings” shirts at its rallies and popularized the term “snowflake.”
Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
—Rebecca Solnit

It is worse to be racist than to be called a racist. It is worse to be a misogynist than to be called out for sexism. It is worse to experience bigotry than to point a finger at the persons doing the oppressing. And climate change is happening whether we want to admit it or not. Truth is truth; fact is fact.

It’s a simple concept.

In the mean time, the State of Oregon has forbidden meetings of more than six people and two households and forbidden unnecessary travel, particularly out of state. There are five cars with out-of-state plates and more than ten people in the rental north of us. The last time I contacted the owners directly, they called me an f—ing b—. (Except that it was said many times without euphemism. Even after I tried to be “nice.”) The last time I went directly to the people offending (big beach fire during a high fire-danger burn ban) I got chewed out over the phone for that too. (From my point of view it was their job to apologize to me for failing to run their business according to law regarding short term rentals in my residential neighborhood.) I’ll get in trouble for complaining to the source.

But should I do as I was told: “shut up and go in your house” and pretend that this is okay? That they have a reasonable position that I should try to understand? Unless I want to be threatened, I should be quiet because their money trumps my community? I should pretend that laws apply only to other people rather than to them and only when those laws are convenient, because since they are Americans and do not consider themselves criminals, they get to do whatever they like?

Is that any way to live? Or is it just another lie of convenience and elitism over fact?

But I am not alone in my confusion.

“We [historians] pride ourselves in saying, ‘Don’t worry, this has happened before,’ or, ‘Worry, this has happened before,’ ” said Jeffrey A. Engel, the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. “Right now, if all your historians can say is, ‘We are in entirely uncharted waters,’ I don’t even know how the rest of that sentence ends.”
—The Washington Post

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When we planted a rose the other day, we accidentally dug up this person. We let the salamander rest in the birdbath while I ran for my camera. Northwestern salamanders (Ambystoma gracile) can reach 10″ and like cool, wet places. We put her under the rosemary and trust she is well.

I quit Facebook last month, and my teaching job once I’d handed in grades last week. On the beach this morning I found four small pieces of seaglass. I have painted the floor in the entry and hall a dark blue-green. Now I am sitting in the atrium, waiting for paint to dry, reading aloud to my husband, and sipping wine too early in the day.

Our upstairs tenant has vacated after lending out the place to at least 16 people, and we plan to be more assertive about how future tenants use the place. There is a lot of “wear and tear” type damage, and we have painting to do there as well. I patched a couple of dozen holes, repairs a split in a door, and Gary must wash the rest of the cobwebs and dust out of the room before I can paint. I have already done my painting for the day. (Not really. I must put on the second coat before I go to bed.)

We think we might furnish the little apartment, first built in 1934 and remodeled completely in 1989. It is an idyllic location for a writer or for anyone looking for peace and quiet. It has a clear view west to the Pacific Ocean from bedroom, living, and breakfast nook. The kitchen looks east. My grandfather rented it out by the night, and Genevieve did the same right into the 1970s. We have always looked for longterm renters, but that has not always gone well. There is a burn in a counter from a tenant who lied about not smoking.

In any event, it would be fun to furnish. It might be fun to rent to writers. Or I might be kidding myself.

Yesterday we were busy with housekeeping chores—new door for the apartment, repairs to the stairs in our house, re-siding the west elevation that is sandblasted right down dangerously close to nothing, and the deck has holes. I emptied a room and painted the floor. Two coats. Gary worked under the apartment. We kept right on going and Gary did not want to talk about doing anything today.

Maybe two walks on the beach. Maybe I will paint a couple of walls. A ceiling.