In a bar, listening to a guy talk about how he finally got an office job after years since college being a kitchen monkey, telling horror stories and his friend’s like “guess you’re glad to be away from that”.

And he’s like “wellll… you know, I’d work with felons, and people drunk on the job, and we’d just constantly tear into each other, the most offensive shit, but then when the shift was over they’d be like ‘wanna get a beer?’ and we’d talk about what was going wrong in our lives”

And at the office everyone says the right words and talks positive but when he goes up to them and code-shifts into happy talk asking for something he needs they’ll just be ‘mmm, nope’ cuz nothing in it for them and it’s all calculation and every attempt to engage his actual self is transparently manipulative, ~*~activities~*~ (you can hear the punctuation) to make him a loyal worker or people trying to feel him out for office politics or reciting their recreational resumes at him to find an overlap for networking

But he’s gotta pay the loans for that film degree somehow

UPDATE: while I composed this he’s moved on to telling his friends, with far more enthusiasm than they, about all these fascinating troubled genius cooks he’s known and how you know when his dad or uncles had a car problem or an electrical problem they’d FIGURE IT OUT, you know, maybe ask someone better or go to the library for a guide but they’d figure it out, you know

BEING FROM 1995 WON’T SAVE YOU

Cheap fake blood is too viscous to just drip off you, so if you aren’t going to wear clothes to soak it up moisten your body beforehand to dilute it

When I got to this house I realized I had a regular mail carrier who looked like a really Swedish version of Harry Anderson, and when I was out working the lawn when he came by we’d chat briefly and he’d crack jokes that were like 1/3 of the way to corny and 1/3 of the way to dirty but never really made it to either one

It was this weird kind of sitcom domestic normality and I really liked it and for the past few weeks I’ve noticed new different carriers doing his route each day and I hope he’s just on vacation or something.

Rob Zombie’s Spookshow International

the flow and material design of the playfield is worse than the most coked-out 80s Gottleib, but it’s impressive it exists at all. Decent toys tho.

Quarterworld
Hawthorne Blvd.
Portland, OR

(that’s a musical tesla coil)

Quarterworld
Hawthorne St.
Portland, OR

ngl looked it up mostly for Scrabble potential

Just hit up a dispensary in the AirBnB district on SE Division

Packed with whitehairs in Talbots and golf shorts patiently waiting to be explained the sativa/indica distinction

That picture reminds me, I’ve now gone far enough into the warm season to see what all the plants in the yard look like in bloom, and all 3 trees and a bunch of the bushes have these kinda koosh-ball flowers in various tropical pastels

Not my thing, also the trees kinda have leaves like pea pods and I’d prefer something broader for the shade, also they seem to constantly be shedding something or other onto the sidewalk

Also there are roses which are kind of a bitch especially when the yard was left to seed for years, those things require constant pruning to keep shape and they’re just a mess now

Because they’ve been bred for flower appearance and not, like, in any other way constituting a functional plant

Portland’s the “Rose City”, we have gardens and a parade every year, apparently a city founder kept a rose garden in his yard with a set of clippers chained to the fence inviting people to take and transplant them

A lot of it is as a frontier town Portland lacked for luxuries (famously settled by overland caravan, East Coast and European crafts required the difficult transit around South America [or portage in Panama] until its connection to transcontinental rail in 1880) and roses filled in as an available signifier of refinement - demanding regular fussy care and yielding no product, but otherwise easily transportable and requiring only dirt, rain, and sun.

This is similar to the identification of Texas with the yellow rose, basically identical to the Rose Parade and Bowl of Pasadena, which began (like Palm Beach) as a “society” resort before becoming the “cultured” suburb of oil-boom LA, the kind of place that contained old money and new money but exclusively people who were aware of the distinction

The Lutz
Woodstock Boulevard
Portland, OR

I’ve seen this car driving around in previous years’ livery but finally I get a pic and the lighting’s all wack

Bare Bones
SE Belmont
Portland, OR

Interesting article, but I say that coming in knowing the context. If you didn’t, I suspect the fact that a famously liberal American city is in 2016 proudly trying to maintain designated schools for black students seems a little underexplained.

Okay. So in the 1960s Portland moved to desegregate its schools. Like other cities, it attempted to create rough parity among schools’ racial makeup despite huge residential segregation by busing students to schools far from their home neighborhoods. Like other cities, there was serious resistance from parents and the program proved politically unsustainable, collapsing by the late ‘70s.

So far so America, but the novel thing here is it was the black parents taking the lead in resisting bussing and returning to neighborhood schools.

For one, with the black population representing a sliver of the district’s total (a resource extraction economy isolated from Dixie, with a white nationalist “free soil/free labor” heritage, Portland missed out on the manufacturing-driven Great Migration and remains the whitest major city in the US) and concentrated in the redlined Albina neighborhood, their children were disproportionately the ones being dragged on hourlong commutes across town.

For another, well, integration proved unsatisfying. After years of seeing their children spread so thinly they represented a critical mass nowhere, under a district making a point of giving them the same education it gave white students, the black community began to appreciate the virtues of black schools embedded in black neighborhoods under the influence of black parents where black teachers-cum-role-models taught students amid an atmosphere of proud and enthusiastic blackness.

(Similar desires on behalf of black Brooklynites turned into a huge shitshow a decade earlier in New York - after attempts to set up schools under autonomous black neighborhood control, the United Federation of Teachers went on a devastating and successful months-long strike in defense of the prerogatives of its (heavily Jewish) membership, shattering the city’s black-Jewish-labor social democratic coalition just in time for the ‘70s debt crisis and ultimately spurring the development of neoconservatism.)

So, a bit over a decade after black Portland’s leadership pushed for school integration under the NAACP, it ended up pushing black schools for black kids, this time under the Black United Front. A great example of the contemporary turn in black activism from equal rights and civic inclusion to black pride and nationalism, tbh.

And as far as I can tell people seemed more or less satisfied with the outcome and no one particularly wanted to tear the system down and it’s continued like that since, and now you know.

the slice window turned late-night pizza delivery service run by like, the second-chillest strip club dwarf in Portland, that used to be (and probably still is) pretty indie rock but has been getting weirdly Ethiopian

One of the best things about Tinder is learning that everyone you would see but never talk to is exactly what you’d assume on appearances

bustin’ makes me feel good

Quarterworld
Hawthorne St.
Portland, OR

Watching a hard-faced but unrepulsive 47-something woman shepherd 2 30-something mooks around the supermarket and it’s time for Foster-Powell’s favorite game: Polyamorous Relationship or Halfway House?

So this is what Portland’s up to these days