Alberta Street, Portland, OR

waytoomuchportland:

What’s the next step after jumping the shark? An airport carpet ottoman.

Alberta Street, Portland, OR

What did I tell you?

My parents are visiting so we drove down to Eugene, so I’ve been listening to the radio again.

One of the interesting things about marijuana (I just now notice AutoCorrect suggesting “marihuana”, which is charming) becoming legal is the Top 40 stations immediately and smoothly incorporating it into their vision of normiedom.

Like I just heard one of the chipper DJs teasing an upcoming human interest bit as “weed and ice cream, what could be a better combination? Coming up, we’ll talk to one local woman who’s making marijuana ice cream. Yum!”

@ The Alleyway, Portland, OR

So since the start of July marijuana’s been legal in Oregon now but in the same sense of beer - you can have, consume (but not technically in public, though that’s been basically accepted for both for decades if unobtrusive), give away, and produce it, but sales are to be regulated (under a system that doesn’t exist yet and won’t for maybe a year, though the “medical” dispensaries are apparently going to start selling to the public in October and there are open-access dispensaries across the river in Vancouver).

Which, crossed with Portland’s weird gift economy culture, has made for some disorienting scenes - I’ve been out drinking where a guy just started throwing joints down in front of all the strangers at the bar, I have friends who were stopped at a red light where the randoms in the next car just passed them a loaded bowl through the windows and drove off. Guys at public festivals walking around directly in front of the cops just holding up big bags and asking if anyone wants some. And then there’s shit like this, because of course there is.

In a bar on Alberta, forgot it had been Last Thursday. Highlights:

Guy who looks like a buff Vanilla Ice, is clearly on some good drugs comes out of the bathroom looking like he just returned from an adventure, bursts out laughing. “I thought it had been coming into *me*,” he explains.

Tie-dye hippies out front playing the wood flute and pan pipes… acceptably.

Two cigarette promo girls. Realize it was the first time I’d seen black girls doing it. Start to think, “I wonder what the racial breakdown is, and in similar roles like pharmaceutical company represe…”, realize the brand they’re promoting is Swisher Sweets.

Holy shit just saw an *amazing* stage show stripping down from full spacesuit (to Space Oddity, Schilling’s Major Tom, some Parliament spaceship jam), the helmet only came off at the very end

C Bar, Gladstone St.

waytoomuchportland:

Just a couple of dicks hanging around on 37th & Holgate.  

Dude, your hairline’s gone full Mr. Spacely and you’re still rocking filthy white boy dreadlocks? Like, two and two halves of them?

Dude.

Sitting in a bar, cat walks in through the open door, lazily looks around, flops down on the floor. I catch its eyes, beckon it over, give it scratchies. Hangs around a few minutes longer, lazily heads out.

Someone once said that the best clue to the character of a neighborhood was if the street cats trust people.

Haymarket Martyrs’ Memorial, Fremont Street

(okay NOW I’m just fucking with you)

((I think))

Finally found a decent tortas place, but coming from LA my sense is off in PDX - where there “should” be southern Mexican food there’s northern, where there should be Guatemalan is southern, where there should be Salvadoran is Guatemalan.

Got the Zeta boy - asada, chorizo, and mozzarella. And before you get pissy, ‘dwracu, the Mexicans make 82nd less brutal drugged-up ethnic gangy, displacing the white power methheads.

uhh

…which means Twain would probably fucking hate cauliflower.

Oh hey, weed’s legal here now. I mean, it’s basically been for 40 years, but officially