No, but I’m definitely tasting the wildfire when I breathe

Just saw a dad-with-kid wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a body pillow with a sexy anime girl on in it and I need a second

Something interesting I’ve noticed is that at this point the famed Pacific Northwest coffee culture is really two distinct cultures - the sit-down coffeehouses and the drive-thru “shacks”

It’s not exactly a class divide or a red tribe/blue tribe thing, tho it probably comes from how one customer base is bobos posting up outside the workplace at 3PM and one is Git-R-Done types driving on dispatch or commuting

The sit-downs have recently trended from overstuffed estate sale couches to that retro-austere look and hire post-hipster baristas to set a tone; the shacks are utilitarian but universally seem to hire flirty, attractive young women to the point of specialized topless or bikini sites

The sit-downs increasingly focus on terroir with tasting notes for specific strains of bean and elaborate preparatory methods to bring the inherent flavors out; the shacks have syrups and sugar and more artificial flavorings than a vape shop

It’s not even an avant-garde/normie thing, more like distinct avant-gardes. The coffeehouses will have vegan baristas and lemongrass shot add-ons, but the shacks will have CrossFit girls serving drinks for a ketogenic diet

In a bar with the flower of Clackamas and it’s like there’s this thing in the voice, not quite a southern tang but a bit of husk I don’t hear from the old PNW farmers (w/ Swedish/Scottish/Norwegian Pride) who came of age before the Cyrus-McGraw-Twain NASCAR dads era

bit of Canadian chime, too

Just recently discovered a new place in an area where vacant lots and beat up 1-story light industrial have been turned into 4story res+1 retails, but it had that scrappy cool shoestring Portland vibe that I’ve been seeing less and less of every year

So I was like hey maybe this’ll work out, maybe like they say in DC and Seattle you can just build enough that the “cool” that was really a function of low rent has a chance to stay

Then I talked to the owner and his backstory was he was a skate punk who opened another place in the building back before the neighborhood changed – a burrito shop (kinda slow for the quality, tbh) that probably played off the local skate punk bars and lunch trade from the light industrial

And I realize that the landlord probably stands to make more off capital gains the more the neighborhood becomes an amenity-full destination than from squeezing every drop of rent

And on leaving I notice the first floor of one of the adjacent newbuilds is a Chipotle, so 🙃

Now that all the stock of early-20th cen bungalows has been gentrified and urban frontiersmen have to move on to ranch houses, I’ve been seeing all these Pinterests and supermarket magazine aisles pushing renovation ideas along this mid-century modern “atomic ranch” style that owes more to The B-52s and the ‘90s swing revival than either the style’s original Eames-and-Lloyd-Wright (or Monsanto House of the Future) aspirations or its actual contemporary busy-wallpaper-floral-print-couch-Sacred-Heart-of-Jesus-painting implementations

“Millennials don’t care about country clubs”, man one of my pinball bars has been getting increasingly wood-paneled and goblet-drinked as property owners come in floral sundresses and shawls and striped junior analyst shirts for weekend brunch and dinner with the gang, I dunno what you thought a country club was

Picked up the local strip club circular, honestly a lot of Portland’s out-of-era mystique is that they know more primitive shit and can hold up in a crisis, let’s see if that works with SESTA

well this is the first Uber I’ve gotten into to play unapologetic Christian rock

Just filled out my primary ballot (all Oregon elections are by mail). Takeaways:

This was the worst laid-out voter information packet I ever saw, they’re usually decent

Two judicial candidates were married but the only clue is their biographies both mentioned having 14 children (12 adopted in China).

A consequence of Oregon recognizing a nonbinary gender is party precinct committees are selected from separate lists of committeemen, committeewomen, and committeepersons (vote for 22 of each, there is a total of one man running.)

An open city council position – at large, they all are – has enough candidates to go to top 2 in the general. The two frontrunners are black women, which would be novel. The one the papers endorsed as “the angry black woman Portland needs” is an ex-legislator repping the neglected Far East Side; the other a more part-of-the-system staffer.

But the dark horse is a white guy architect running as essentially the nice liberal downtown anti-growth NIMBY, sent out a mailer message was “the homeless tents are coming for your street and I’ll save you”. Talks about solutions, did oppose the shelter down the street. Interesting check of where Portland’s at to see if he makes it into the next round, more interesting in the general if he does.

just had an old weathered prospector guy walk past me with a boxing glove on

and he was walking across the street and I asked “hey what’s up with the boxing glove?”

he answered some Boomhauer shit aw fuxnawsbeet and that’s why he’s takin this shoppin cart and awbdag

Yeah, good eighths are going for like $25 these days, it’s pretty nuts

For 2 months Uber offered a deal where for $5/mo all your trips would have their cost between $5 and $25 waived

I took it, and now they’re not offering anymore and I could swear the regular prices have been cranked since I was last exposed but it’s not glaringly obvious to cut into my brand inertia yet

(it was starting to, but then yesterday they started running discounts for Visa cardholders and I’m good again)

Guy in here with a Good Night White Pride shirt on a date with a girl in a faux native-print top who’s talking about how much the music of Sheryl Crow means to her