Discussion:
Washington County 10/16/2019: The Way Things Ought To Be (Joke Intended)
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j***@gmail.com
2019-10-16 13:12:56 UTC
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Washington County 10/16/2019: The Way Things Ought To Be (Joke Intended)

Yesterday I posted some comments on a ‘perceived’ situation in Portland; today I will offer comments on Washington County, where I have (very) primarily lived since 1986. Yes; if people thought ‘suburbanites’ couldn’t be insane hipster radicals, they were wrong, and if you work at it hard enough long enough people notice.

More seriously, though, we as people can always set ourselves limits. We can set *ourselves* limits, that is to say others Have Ideas About What We Should Do and they may be a bit… ‘constrictive’ but it is available to us to * choose * to have things we refrain from doing. ‘Like, um, not having ultra-casual sex?’ Actually, I’ll go with it at this point in *my* life. Also ‘not going where we’re not wanted’, including to the city of Portland if there is no major ‘destination’ you ought to hit up.

Still, not everything is on one particular individual; there is no sense in which they can be responsible for everything everyone else does as a ‘response’ to their own actions, for many of those responses would in the end not even be chosen by the people who ‘just had to’ execute them and in the meantime *many others* would not have them at all. Life may be a ‘carnival of idiocy’ compared to your excellent self, but if *your own* actions transgress the bounds of ‘common sentiment’ or the ability of any particular individual to tolerate your ‘reasons’ for doing them it’d be ‘on you’, not One Particular Fool. This ‘goes around’; personally I sometimes get up to saying “That’s a ‘me too’ and a ‘you too’,” but you might put it differently.

More seriously still: strange to say, a place called “Washington County” is in the United States of America and subject to Federal law. I do not primarily mean this to reflect on the county authorities of various kinds, but perhaps more completely on certain types of Visitors to ‘these shores’. There is kind of no way to dress it up: if you came to Oregon ‘in short order’, and to a part of Oregon which is nice enough but has no inherent ‘star quality’, questions may indeed be asked about your motives in doing so and the ‘locals’ of all kinds may not really want to get Hip to the Jive of more exciting and expensive places. (Gunfire would add little appeal to the equation, though it boggles the mind a bit to add the extra comment.)

‘Oh, don’t you know that...’ That the sheriff’s office and police departments are busy ‘prosecuting’ their normal business? Yes, but interstate travel for the purposes of criminal anything *isn’t* their normal business so if anyone thought they were going to write you a ‘variance’ for that sort of thing (under the watchful eye of what could be called ‘Various Agencies’, as they actually always are various) you might have been… mistaken. You could say ‘delusional’. (A particular individual, let us say *me*, might have ‘problems’ but that wouldn’t be their problem.) That also ‘goes around’. ‘Oh, don’t you know that…’ Said agencies (let us say, for the purpose of impressing Superior Minds, the CIA, though of course the people to ‘worry about’ are other ones) have limited powers and goals; it might be smart not to ask them for ‘favors’ they can’t grant, or to claim that they granted you them.

If this all ‘seems strange’, that’s great; the normal business of life is probably always a ‘going thing’. Still, it is never a plan to *assume* or force others to assume that everyone else is ‘on the level’. Not in 2019, or at any other point in your life. That cannot be the basis for a ‘life plan’, whatever abilities or disabilities an individual does or *does not* have. Believe recognizing this pays off even for the ‘extravagant’ and it’s probably a Good Idea to grant that other people might ‘get’ it as well. (Other than that, as a person I always ‘get’ as little as possible but also somehow lack the ability to ‘understand’ things that aren’t so, such as a strange comment once added in the legal record that I arrived in Oregon in 1987. Whether I had reached the ‘age of reason’ by first grade or not, the 1986-87 school year was spent at Hiteon.)

Even Famous Weirdos sometimes understand there are actually things you *don’t do*, pretty much ‘period’, no matter what’s happening or what you’re trying to accomplish. In remarks such as I am making a ‘statement of personal intent’ would be inappropriate, whereas in other cases it might be highly ‘exigent’; still, on account of my one police contact in several years, I will say something. I was almost charged with ‘offensive littering’ for dropping a smoke on the ground: a practice I have engaged in, for better or worse, for twenty-five years in the area. This is ‘in point of legal fact’ a legitimate charge, though it indeed had not been leveled during said twenty-five years. However, I’m not sure Oregon ‘sophisticates’ properly understand the offensive littering statute is a bit more extensive in purpose than merely to quash Smoking Loons.

It would indeed be fair to say that someone trying to ‘cut a political figure’ ought not to show disrespect to the area by engaging in that practice (though I must say that a man who is *neither* ‘Castro’ nor Michel Foucault might have other purposes in living by age forty, and other ‘figures’ may be waiting in the wings to better serve your needs in that respect). It would also be fair to say that, for example, a mattress left on 185th would improve the area rather little as well; the point is ‘quite general’, as legal ones are. Civil society is sort of by definition not a ‘war of all against all’, so if you like to have little ‘contests’ with people along various lines you might not expect the General Public to be too excited. (That’s a “you too and a me too”.)

I personally intend to, ‘by and large’, obey state and Federal law. Maybe that *is* a ‘life plan’.

Sincerely,
Jeffrey Rubard
j***@gmail.com
2019-10-16 13:47:37 UTC
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Upon looking at it I see one error in the above text: in fact there was at least one other 'interview' with the police (and perhaps others I don't remember, but that is not the point). I will not expand upon the matter discussed or what *I* could have been charged with, but it is a matter of legal fact that I was not booked, charged, or 'hospitalized'. "You shall, you surely shall." I'm not sure that type of person understands how life works: it's 'tautologous' to say what's done is done, that everything that happened on 10/15/2019 or previously cannot be 'undone' in a fairly simple way. This includes the fact that a "Jeffrey Rubard" hasn't been arrested or hospitalized for 'mental illness' for many years, even if you would have it otherwise.

If you know me (and I am usually quite different than I am sometimes 'got up' to be) you know I don't 'bat a thousand'. However, it's also true that something I say (throughout my life, "BTW") is "You saw who you saw and you know what you know". Life can be interesting, very interesting, and that's usually a good feeling; however, meeting people and 'hearing things' definitely doesn't exhaust *all* of life. If you had never 'heard' that I was a published writer (we will 'suppose' they are fairly tangible things, not blog posts or even magazine articles) or that I had a number of children conceived through the, um, obvious method it might still be so: the 'evidence' you had against that might be more limited than people thought, or simply said.

That is what 'rationality' seems to me to be: not 'superior' people riding herd on everyone else because they simply have to have their way, but accepting that things are as they are and they largely can't be improved: including, it must be said, by 'picking people's brains', so to speak, when there are more interesting things wholly outside their supposedly damaged skulls.

Jeffrey Rubard
j***@gmail.com
2019-10-16 14:18:48 UTC
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"Final Thought":

Quite seriously, a lot of what I say in certain situations is 'by the book' (*pro forma* would be more correct to say, except when it isn't); certain ways of doing things can't be different, even if I or anyone else would have it that way. That being said, there are other *similar* principles that govern things other than conduct.

For example, I live simply, so that I may simply live. However, of course I have a number of objects in my apartment, various types of things. The 'provenance' (history of origin) of those objects is not really totally up to you, however sophisticated you may reckon yourself; the history of the 'composition' of the books there or anything else was what it was, irrespective of our 'personal goals' for the day. It would be quite crazy to think otherwise, whether you felt 'credentialed' to do so or not.

Something I do say as a 'political theorist' (not necessarily in the form of a "curb-servin' practitioner of *Staatslehre*") about the United States is "We are everybody, but we're not everything". Of course any kind of person is welcome in the United States, but not every practice 'current' around the world is; there are things which are 'practically permitted' in other countries, though they may not be strictly legal there either, which are strictly *Verboten* by the laws of the United States whoever you are. That's a fact whether any 'minds' in state government like it or not; it's a Great Big Fact, which can cost US citizens a bunch if they don't pay attention.

When it's 'just us' qua any ethnicity, we can say things that are "All-American": they may not quite sound right to the foreign ear, but sure, it's a plan to know how to appeal to your fellow American. One thing I will say, which I think doesn't require too much defense as a general principle, is "Being a deadbeat dad never gets fresh." Perhaps I myself did somehow not properly appreciate this; however, I will also say that certain things (like, for example, living people) cannot really be 'wished and willed' in and out of existence. Legal chicanery certainly ought to have its limits.

For anybody, I think I have the trite saying "You can read what you want to read, hear what you want to hear" (in 2019, the younger people might need to be told this is a 'reference' to an old song). "Intelligent People" in bookstores, libraries, the few remaining record stores or anywhere *may* be able to offer you useful information about cultural products but it's far from a 'sure thing'; unfortunately, some 'tips' are less than useful, I shall say. There are codes of conduct that have governed the library, for example, for at least a long time and if you don't like the idea that you *just shouldn't bother* people there *at all* -- not even in a 'clever' way by making gestures at them, 'stepping' to them in a threatening way, or 'turning out' books you think 'significant', that might still be the way it should be.

Jeff Rubard
Jeffrey Rubard
2021-12-07 07:08:54 UTC
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Post by j***@gmail.com
Quite seriously, a lot of what I say in certain situations is 'by the book' (*pro forma* would be more correct to say, except when it isn't); certain ways of doing things can't be different, even if I or anyone else would have it that way. That being said, there are other *similar* principles that govern things other than conduct.
For example, I live simply, so that I may simply live. However, of course I have a number of objects in my apartment, various types of things. The 'provenance' (history of origin) of those objects is not really totally up to you, however sophisticated you may reckon yourself; the history of the 'composition' of the books there or anything else was what it was, irrespective of our 'personal goals' for the day. It would be quite crazy to think otherwise, whether you felt 'credentialed' to do so or not.
Something I do say as a 'political theorist' (not necessarily in the form of a "curb-servin' practitioner of *Staatslehre*") about the United States is "We are everybody, but we're not everything". Of course any kind of person is welcome in the United States, but not every practice 'current' around the world is; there are things which are 'practically permitted' in other countries, though they may not be strictly legal there either, which are strictly *Verboten* by the laws of the United States whoever you are. That's a fact whether any 'minds' in state government like it or not; it's a Great Big Fact, which can cost US citizens a bunch if they don't pay attention.
When it's 'just us' qua any ethnicity, we can say things that are "All-American": they may not quite sound right to the foreign ear, but sure, it's a plan to know how to appeal to your fellow American. One thing I will say, which I think doesn't require too much defense as a general principle, is "Being a deadbeat dad never gets fresh." Perhaps I myself did somehow not properly appreciate this; however, I will also say that certain things (like, for example, living people) cannot really be 'wished and willed' in and out of existence. Legal chicanery certainly ought to have its limits.
For anybody, I think I have the trite saying "You can read what you want to read, hear what you want to hear" (in 2019, the younger people might need to be told this is a 'reference' to an old song). "Intelligent People" in bookstores, libraries, the few remaining record stores or anywhere *may* be able to offer you useful information about cultural products but it's far from a 'sure thing'; unfortunately, some 'tips' are less than useful, I shall say. There are codes of conduct that have governed the library, for example, for at least a long time and if you don't like the idea that you *just shouldn't bother* people there *at all* -- not even in a 'clever' way by making gestures at them, 'stepping' to them in a threatening way, or 'turning out' books you think 'significant', that might still be the way it should be.
Jeff Rubard
How's Pat Garrett these days?
Not "choking" on ICE's normal standards?

(I kid, people.)

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