oh OF COURSE the strip clubs are full of couples, it’s Valentine’s Day!

for like $40 wow

Best Known Overtures

@ Hawthorne Hideaway
Portland, OR

Mad Hanna
Portland, OR

How did a meatfriend introduce me to Babymetal before you memefucks?

welp

Today’s aesthetic: torn, wind-whipped American flag out front of the Fraternal Order of Eagles’ Aerie.

(picture by a friend)

The Know
Alberta Street
Portland

PDX Airport

@ C Bar, Gladstone Street

Look like a goddamn wreck in this photo, but made a friend.

The piñata store next to the charity pinball arcade closed :(

So I took ownership of my first house this week. Portland real estate is ridiculous but it needs everything but the bones fixed and for how close in it is it’s still bordering roughness (in Portland that means white people with script neck tattoos, the charming local term is “Felony Flats”) so I got a deal.

I realized I was starting to think as a homeowner - thinking of how I could improve my property value by improving it, and with startling ease extending the thought to the neighborhood, in a way that’s basically the motive force of gentrification and enclosure et cetera - and was startled by how smoothly and suddenly that came on. (Moneycat went through a phase fixating on the term “house-proud” and that kept coming back to me.)

Then sometime in the last week someone got into the house and extracted the (incongruously nice-ish) washer and dryer, ripping several doors off their hinges along the way, and now I never have to feel bad about that again.

Just saw a dude in red/black lumberjack plaid with beard and matching plaid keffiyeh.

nostalgebraist:

Health Goth is an aesthetic revolving around biotechnology, monochrome sportswear, fetish culture, extreme cleanliness, and rendered environments.

I didn’t know that “health goth” was actually a “thing” as opposed to an absurdist tumblr joke and so far the Wikipedia page is only increasing my confusion

Health Goth started out as some Portlanders making a joke; unfortunately Portland is the capital of both the outdoor/sportswear industry and aestheticblogging and it went too far.

Portland Public Schools in search of more black teachers recruits woman from Atlanta. Black woman from Atlanta completely at sea in Portland culture of SWPL passive-aggression. Money quote:

My doctor decided I needed to go see a counselor. I was having a mini-breakdown from—I’m just going to say it—dealing with so many white adults. So they sent me to therapy for it. In Portland, there’s therapy for that, and apparently the counselor I had had a good caseload. So there are a lot of people going to it.

I’m house-hunting now. Haven’t found anything yet but it’s been fascinating walking into all sorts of strange homes all around town. High points:

1) Some of these houses built as early as the 1910s have been upgraded by their owners in unusual and ad-hoc ways along the line. Having a bathroom with bathtub/shower directly off the kitchen is odd but I suppose might make sense if you had an older resident who had problems with stairs and wanted to put a full bath on the first floor, near existing water lines. Putting a shower stall directly in the kitchen right next to the sink, though, that’s just bizarre. Saw one house with the stairs to the second floor starting in a bedroom closet.

2) Walked into a house that would be amazing in mint condition. Some floors were tilted by up to 10 degrees, went into the basement and the house was kept on the foundation by bailing wire and hope. My realtor said it was the worst thing she’d seen in a decade and took pictures to show around the office. Upstairs in the kitchen was evidence that someone had tried to flip it - there was the nameplate of a bottom-feeding financing company, and of anything in the house to attempt to fix, they had ripped out the cabinets and counters and replaced them with like the second-cheapest option from Home Depot. With the lean of the house, all the doors were hanging open.

3) Saw one house where some old grandmother had lived for a while, every surface in the house was covered with the most ‘70s treatment you could imagine, it was AMAZING. Busy floral print wallpaper, fake wood paneling, Harvest Gold tile, shag carpeting in different colors in each room - green, white, multicolored hexagonal patterns, brown/orange/red splotches. If a set designer told you to make a place scream “‘70s” and you came back with this she would tell you to dial it down by like 200%.

4) Most depressing house I toured, it was being sold by the owners because they were divorcing. And I walk up to the thing and it’s really colorful, like really playful but nice-looking red/yellow scheme on the house, and a hammock surrounded by these cool exotic plants out front, really fun sensibility, go up to the door and I notice this handmade sign hanging from the porch roof, like “Welcome to [Dave] and [Diana]’s Home”, and I remember the backstory and I’m like “…aw.”

And I go in and they’re still living in it so there’s evidence of their lives, like there are two adult-sized motorcycle helmets by the door and all their kids’ toys, and I can tell what sports they play, and the playful design sensibility continues, and there are two orange canvasases with all the family’s handprints on them in white, and I’m like “…aww.”

And I check out the bedrooms, and in the master bedroom one wall’s like this medley of pictures of them all together being an intact and happy and contented and happy-and-contented-for-being-intact family, and I check the kids’ room and it’s like this wonderland with bunk beds and a “space” theme and handmade wooden toys that don’t go too far into eat-your-vegetables hippiness, and I’m like “…awwwwww”

And then I go into the kitchen and on the counter propped up against like a bottle of vitamins is this note written by one of the kids in blue crayon, like

DadDY I

[big, red crayon heart]

YoU!

and I was like “Oh, come the fuck on.”

Truckful of Mexican guys just knocked on the door, offered to trim our oak trees for free if they could take the branches to sell as Halloween decorations. That’s a clever angle.

“to know”

Painfully dead-on.

In our defense, when New York does a sketch comedy show, the underlying message is “look how superior we are to everyone else”. “I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not”, etc.

When LA does reality shows (which are just sketch drama with improv elements), the underlying message is “look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me affirm me”

And when Portland does a sketch comedy show? The underlying message is “Are we being ridiculous? I’m a little concerned we’re being ridiculous.”

(I was going to start “when Canada does a sketch comedy show…”, but most sketch comedy shows are actually Canadian in disguise.)

Bonus Cascadian sketch comedy: Bill Nye saves the Space Needle by speedwalking