Brian Hines' writings

About five years ago, around the age of 65, I dived into senior citizen longboarding, land paddling variety -- where the (longish) skateboard is pushed with a stick, rather than a foot. Here's a video of me doing my thing at a 2013 Open Streets event in Salem.

For many years my wife and I were part-owners of a Camp Sherman cabin in central Oregon on Forest Service land. I'd look at the cold river -- it's spring fed, from Cascades snow melt, I believe -- and have memories of inner tubing on the Kaweah River in California, where I grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills town of Three Rivers. One summer I got some tubes for me, my daughter and her husband, and my granddaughter to use on a Metolius River float. Fun! Some beer made the water feel not quite so cold. 

Oregon legalized marijuana in 2014, with early sales beginning at the end of 2015, when I celebrated the occasion via a 3-minute public comment period at the beginning of a Salem City Council meeting. I made a video of what I said from the CCTV recording. Marijuana was a big part of my college life, along with stronger psychedelics like LSD and mescaline. It's been great to have legal marijuana be part of my senior citizen life. Mayor Anna Peterson, a conservative shown at the beginning of the video, detested marijuana, so that added to my public comment pleasure.

One of my proudest citizen activist accomplishments was saving Salem, Oregon taxpayers $20 million by campaigning against a ridiculously overpriced $82 million police facility bond measure. I led the fight against the measure. We had much less money than those urging a "yes" vote, but we prevailed because we had better arguments.

After the election, Salem's Mayor questioned whether voters knew what they were doing when they rejected the bond measure. I made this video to show what we opponents did to inform the public. The next year, voters approved a $62 million bond for the police facility, a $20 million reduction.