went out to a bar in the Reed orbit, encountered a clique that was like “a greaser gang but with estrogen tits and voices”, which feels like setup to a gone too far thing but was really a lot better executed than more mainstream shit that falls well short
also on the ride out my Uber guy said like 1/3 of his rides are to/from a bus or train stop. Which seemed much, and when I asked his driving schedule was particularly commute-focused but still, that I’d never put thought towards that last-leg angle
Anonymous asked: What’s it like being the creepy old dude at a college bar?
It’s a weird bar, you never know what the crowd’s gonna be until you go, sometimes it’s that, sometimes it’s a locals bar, sometimes it’s sports bros, sometimes it’s mean faces and Oklahoma braids
there’s a 3-over-1 (3 stories stick-built residential units over a 1-story concrete retail podium, the new urban mid rise idiom) going up nearby that for a while looked like 2 different buildings, separate foundations with separate fences and separate contractor placards, and only clearly one now that it’s being finished and clad
That’s probably to do with being on uneven ground, but I wonder how much that served to tamp down local resistance to the full-block monolithicness
Why yes, this is the owner of a local hot tub rental place known as a venue for escort sessions paying for ads to blame the death of his girlfriend (shot after a night of strip clubbing by someone who had just come up from California to sell the filed-off-serial revolver) on CIA mind control, why do you ask?
A pair of my friends woke up to a confused complete stranger on their couch today, and after some investigation the situation seems to be that he got shitface drunk at a strip club, drove to a Plaid Pantry (local convenience chain), bought some things, walked off with his car still running in the parking lot, wandered into a neighboring building, climbed three flights of stairs, opened an unlocked door, passed out, and woke up with the sense someone had driven him there to sleep it off but unsure why his car keys were missing
This painting of NWA choking out LAPD chief Daryl Gates against the backdrop of the 1992 “Rodney King” Los Angeles riots was in “my” local bar (cuz it had 5 pinball machines) when I first moved to Portland, a punk club in a historically black neighborhood
Eventually the wreck of a location got gentrified out and the bar tried to relocate quite a distance (bringing the painting along) but the original concept failed with everyone yelling at each other
Anyway as I understand it the pinball operator put up a stake and it’s a pinball bar now but the painting’s still up looking totally incongruous
Oregon might well eliminate its sanctuary state status by initiative and elect a Republican governor to crack down on the homeless this election
Meanwhile the recent developments in Portland city politics are leafy inner eastside neighborhoods getting more NIMBY with growth, development-frontier ones getting more “clean up the streets”, and mayor Ted Wheeler catching national shit for being soft on antifa from Fox News (it doesn’t matter what Arizona retirees think of downtown Portland, tho) and the WSJ (it very much matters what corporations considering locations think of it)
I don’t think this will “turn” the city but the fact that there’s relevant conservative pressure at all is a novelty
Oh also when I was first biking out the other way I went down the new (-ish, by now the twee subsidized yuppie amenity stores are being replaced with real rentpaying “VIP Nails + Sauna” etc.) condo canyon on Division to see what the late night life was
TOTALLY DEAD from like 50th at least to Reel M Inn at 26th, but at one point I passed a guy in a cubby of one condo building and was like – wait, was that dude shirtless wearing his t-shirt as a face mask?
And I looked back and he was, and as I slowed down he started yelling and coming towards me holding something, but then I saw he’d taped a square of cardboard to a wall and I was like “aah, a stencil tagger” and kept going
Still in retrospect it flatters my self image to know that if I come across a stranger on the street after midnight who comes at me aggressively shirtless and masked my instinct is to be like “wait slow down maybe I should be having conflict”
So biking a few blocks on past that church I saw a cat in a front yard and was like “hey kitty!”, cause I politick with local cats to get Nikki elevated to the Heaviside Layer at the next Jellicle Ball
But as I came up closer I was like “oh wait, you’re a dog out on the street at 2:30” and stopped to see if I could check his tags
But as I turned my bike light on him I saw his sharp ears and I was like “oh” and he stood up and that grin, and I was like “no”, he loped off and it was the first coyote I’d seen in Portland and as the owner of an outdoor pet I am concerned
