Portland!

The first thing to know is that I forgot to bring a camera. This post will be much less exciting than I intended it to be.

The second thing is that I'm really bad at planning trips. I had the nights off -- we were there for a VISTA in-service-training -- and could have explored more if I had figured out my doings beforehand. But I didn't.

The first night I was sick-ish and moody. I tried to go somewhere and ended up getting as far from the hotel as a nearby Domino's, buying some cheesy bread and falling asleep.

The second night --

I could tell you about the days. They were long and there were Sessions. Some were more interesting than others and all of it was Helpful.

The second night I was determined to go out. I ate dinner at a table with Portland natives. Upon discovering this I said, with a quiver of desperation in my voice:

"Where is Fun?"

They looked at me confused. "Fun? Is that the name of a place?"

"No...I mean I want to get drunk around people like me."

More confusion, more blank looks, and "What kind of person are you?"

Um. "A damn fine fellow?"

Laughter. But still confusion. How are they not getting it? Isn't Portland the Land of Cool?

"Be more specific," they said. "Do you want to go dancing? Do you want a pub-type atmosphere?"

Ugh. I thought this would be easier. How can I figure out what I want without saying the word "hipster"? "Um....I want to go where..."

How to describe it to them? Images tumbled through my mind of a thousand drunken nighttimes. I seized upon one: "I want to go where the boys wear really tight jeans!"

Suddenly, the table fell quiet.

Okay, fuck it, "Where are all the hipster bars!?" And you don't understand what it took to admit that. I fled to rural Oregon to escape all of that, the Scene and the nonsense. And here I find myself languishing without it, not knowing what to do with myself or who to talk to.

Eventually, I left the hotel and went out into the night with a couple of people I found who were also going out. I drank 10 new Rogue beers. My favorite:

...

...

It turns out I cannot remember the name. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise.

The night ended with me alone in a bar near our hotel. A band was playing some kind of jazz, and I nursed a Fat Tire and smoked maybe 14 cigarettes and fantasized that All My Friends walked in and knew me and sat down to hang out, but they didn't, and I was moody and stumbled angry back to the hotel and passed out.

And that was Portland.

Bright Side: This morning, we visited Powell's Books. That was delightful. I purchased:

Glorianna, by Michael Moorcock;
A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin;
The Order of Things, by Michel Foucault.

The first I've been looking forward to for a while now. The second is comfort food: When I am sad I crave epic nerd fantasy. The third makes up for the second (you can use Foucault to pretty much cancel out every embarrassing book you want to read).

I am back in Roseburg now. Yeah, I've decided to use the town's real name. I suppose it's not a bad place. But part of me would rather be elsewhere...

A Day Without Rain

Ooooooh, that was a trick title. This is actually a post about LINKS!

...Cause if you remember correctly, that is one of this blog's purposes. So let's link to things!

"The Terrorists Still at Ground Zero." This is an article from Counterpunch yesterday by Alexander Cockburn, a very fine if Trotskyish fellow. It begins by telling us this:

Terrorism flourishes brazenly at Ground Zero, in the new 7 World Trade Center building. Here can be found a secretive entity of fabulous wealth and power. Kingdom and corporations alike tremble at its shadow and make haste to pay it tribute.

I refer to Moodys Investor Services, wholly owned subsidiary of Moody's Corporation, which reported $2 billion in revenues in 2006.On January 10 Moody's, in concert with the other main bond rating firm, Standard and Poor's, gave the United States its top AAA credit rating. The terrorist blackmail threat came in the form of a demand by Moody's that the U.S. government "reform" Social Security and Medicare: "In the very long term, the rating could come under pressure if reform of Medicare and Social Security is not carried out as these two programs are the largest threats to the long-term financial health of the United States and to the government's Aaa rating."

...and goes on to tell us even more. Reccomended reading!

Food Insects Dot Com. I wish this site had more information than it did, because this is a very important and interesting topic. It would be a perfectly fine thing I think if we all ate 30 or 50 times as many bugs as we do, and I'm not even talking about shrimp and crabs. There was a good article on Alternet about this the other day, and it talked about other important things too.

Libcom.org. Libcom as in Libertarian Communism. It was here that I recently found and read the full text of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, and maybe you should read it too.

Speaking of books, I like this thing: Good Reads. It is a social-site-thing where you talk about the books you're reading. I started mine for the books I am reading as of 2008. But I tend to read like half a dozen books at the same time so I don't know if it will work (in the last week and a half for example I got myself 20 new books and have started maybe half of them).

Well. That should be enough links to last anyone a long time. Good bye everybody, and Goodbye, Fidel.

How Things Are Going In Oregon

Hello, loyal readers.

I know, it has been a long time. Never fear, your Steve feels your pain. And he is back, with an all-new blog post, called "How Things Are Going In Oregon."

So.

In Oregon, people are different from the people we know. People keep telling me how Eastern I am. For example, in a grant-writing class I was in last week I made some off-handed comment and the middle-aged housewife next to me giggled and touched my arm and said "Oh, you're so Eastern!" This distresses me. I suspect a deep-rooted Orientalism in this culture, and with Mr. Said dead and gone I do not know what to do.

In Oregon, I have moved into an apartment. I have a roommate who is a very fine fellow, my own bathroom (!!), and I am lobbying to be allowed a cat. Right now my place looks like this:



You cannot tell, but that bed (on which I sit at this very moment!) is insanely large. In Oregon, there are frighteningly kind people who give you things like gargantuan beds when you move to town and are in A Merry Corps (as I am).

Also in Oregon, there is a magnificent seacoast! Today, I went with my roommate and two of his friends on a journey westward. First we drove through a country that looks something like this:



...with countless trees and hills. The trees I think are Douglas fir and I don't even know them very well or their uses.

After many miles of these trees, we arrived in the town of Bandon. Most of my photos of Bandon, tragically, did not turn out. So I deleted them. (Or, you might say, I Bandoned them. Hah. Hahah. Yeah.) But it looks something like this:



....all fishing-village-gone-touristy. It is little and exceedingly cute. And it has signs like this!:




.........and you probably can't tell what that says, but it says "Tsunami Evacuation Route." In Oregon they have freaking tsunamis! They didn't have tsunamis in Pennsylvania. (Did they?)

In Bandon we browsed cute old-hippie-run stores which all only sold beads (except one which was a candy store and sold candy, including beer candy, but the beer candy tasted like Miller lite and I didn't like it), and then finally we we arrived upon this:





...and there were even more pictures than this but none of them turned out terribly well.

There were:

Gigantic rocks which looked aged and wise and totally indifferent;

An archway of rock like a mouth through which big white waves crashed;

Great fat starfish clinging to rocks, alongside barnacles and mussels and things that were balls of green slime living inside gross fleshy cups, and at least one sea anemone who closed his spines and tried to eat us, but we weren't fish and he couldn't;

And of course seagulls, all fat and white and arrogant, perching on rooftops and looking disdainfully down at the town and its inhabitants. How I love seagulls. A difference between the beach here and Maryland: No one told me how much they hate seagulls, and how they're just big rats that live in the air, and how dreadful it is that they eat all the food that careless people leave on the beach so that the whole place isn't a mess.

When we arrived at the beach the first thing I did of course was take off my boots, my socks and my coat and run toward the water. The Pacific is so cold! The kind of cold that steals your breath just touching your feet, that is so cold it doesn't even feel like cold anymore. But there were rocks to climb on, so I went on. Before long my jeans were soaked to my knees. And then I was in front of the giant Mouth of rock and there were waves crashing, so I walked forward one step and fell in up to my chest! I gasped and choked and it was so cold I couldn't think as I groped my way toward land.

So then of course I tore off my shirt (which was soaking anyway) and ran forward into the waves and knelt down in the water and fell forward on my face. The rush was like taking a drug, and when I got back to shore my skin was all on freezing-fire and I was high on cold and ran around the beach like a loon.

Then of course after a half hour of this I couldn't feel my feet anymore, my shirt I had lost somewhere among the rocks and in the end it took me about 3 hours to feel anything like warm again.

But it was so good!

The Pacific, the Pacific here on the Oregon coast in winter-- It's so different from the Atlantic. I've never been afraid of the Atlantic. The Pacific is old and giant and capricious, it would kill you and never notice or care.

And I'm back home now, in my giant bed that is like another room all by itself. I'm out of cigarettes and exhausted, and feeling pretty good. Until next time, Anybody!