Belmont St.
Portland, OR

MAN, I just went to the nursery/garden center down the street and they’re closing in a month

They have like a half-square-block lot in a developing area so I get it, but I’d been planning to finish up clearing out the yard this year and start planting next, and I’d been thinking I could just walk there and lug stuff back, maybe put a pot on a skateboard

Guess if I give it another few weeks I can get saplings at steep discount, if I don’t mind transplanting in October

ashenspooks:

In Council Crest Park in Portland, Oregon, at the top of the knoll there is a large paved circle enclosed by a short stone wall. The area has a couple of dedications on it, and there is a massive compass of inlaid marble paved into the area, so you know which way you’re looking. Stand on the west compass point and walk over to the wall it is pointing to. Now look at the stones that the wall is made of. Moving south along the wall, count 10 stones along the bottom row and then give the 11th stone a nice hard kick. As you will easily hear, this stone is hollow. The 11th stone is the only hollow one. Something is contained inside.

All the stones are hollow, they’re stone facing on a concrete core. The 11th stone does have an opening for a drainage outlet but it’s not the only one and nothing’s in there.

Man you *hear* about Oregon having this nativist tradition, the Governor in ‘71 (a Mark Twain type who refounded the state as weirdo nature utopia after the mob got cleared out) riffing on the border signs to tell people not to move here…

This ‘80 commercial really makes you feel it, tho

(Just like I’d *heard* about the State of Jefferson but it still weirded me out to see the double-X on flags outside civic buildings and on gas pump weights & measures stamps)

4 and a half hours to the eclipse and it’s eerie silent

This shirt was great enough when I thought it was just the Red Power Ranger but Cyclops really makes it

Like, that’s a real, living religion, guys. Come to Pennsylvania and I can introduce you to some Quakers. (They are the 72-year olds outside the courthouse holding the same anti-war signs they have since Desert Storm).

Walking down the sidewalk, thinking about shotgun shacks “huh it musta been weird having to walk through someone’s room to get to the next one” as the complete strangers living in tents on the side have intense domestic drama while we ignore each other

Random George Clinton show

More rap-rock than PCU, but not that much

sundress weather

was shopping around before I renew earthquake insurance the other day and one of the agents was Old Cascadian enough (dedicated to virtue within their role for no immediate personal gain) to point out that even if my house came through *a bit* damaged, Portland would not have the infrastructure for rehabilitation for *years* afterward (the PNW only has superquakes every few centuries)

Huh!

It’s funnier if you imagine the Jungle Boogie doodely-doos between lines

Quarterworld
Hawthorne Blvd.
Portland, OR

had a bad night where I went out and it was everything intolerable about New Portland

so I went somewhere else and it was just like, Clackamas

caught some of the semifinals tonight, all the girls got their hair did well

overheard: “yeah I’d rather BREED with her, but who’m I gonna EJACULATE in, is the thing”

Speaking of YIMBYs

Just out on the road, saw three pedal bikers, young, stylish in the gay thin way, one had a sign on his back

this road
needs a
DIET

obvs they came from Foster, which for a while there’s been stenciled anti- signs up in the businesses, which are basically all taking advantage of the cheap irregular lots (Foster cuts diagonal to the grid) to serve builders of LMC housing - tile, fixtures, furniture, lumber.

not gonna be LMC housing any more, that’s the point

the more important thing is it’s a commuter route from Clackamas but that can’t last as things build so may as well pull the band-aid and shove them to 205->82 or the MAX already

interesting it’s an obv. outlet for gentrification but unlike Division or Glisan the lots are triangular so that might slow things, in clusters you’re already seeing the twee stores that obviously couldn’t make rent unless developers were subsidizing them as plants

but there’s that cluster of sex businesses at the mouth, the strip club, modeling studio(/brothel), adult store(/scum brothel), they just put in the “sex-positive coffeeshop” and I bet they’re gonna make the developers buy them out DEAR

But oh, the bike YIMBYs. Is that your radical ~activism~? That was what Matt Yglesias made his name on, repeating the Harvard conventional wisdom of 2003, you fucks, somehow you’re worse than Shepard Fairey, worse than Banksy, than fucking Adbusters, fuck you you millennials you found an axis to be worse on than the Boomers, fuck you fuck you fuck you

you killed my heimat you fucks