overcast. drizzling. marc's uncle harvey (the second harvey in ten days!!! not that exciting whatever.) would be coming in from san francisco and staying with marc's parents. so we had to pack our hobo sacks and move over to marc's sister's house. they live two neighborhoods over. also, great, i woke up with my throat giving me an undulating warning that something crappy was growing inside of it. oh please god don't let me get a cold in the middle of travels. or just give me a little one that i can sleep off in a day. it didn't matter what i was hoping for, portland wouldn't wait for me.
we told everyone that we would be going to portland on wednesday and you know how families are. plans plans plans. gotta stick to yer plan, man. m's parents let us use their tom tom device. do you know what this is? a tom tom is a hand held device that figures out where you are and where you want to go. it's funny, when we were in portland and i was being ill and achy, the tom tom found us a rite aid within seconds and we got there five minutes later. meanwhile, two days later in keizer, all we wanted was a toy store and it kept re-routing us to best buy. you piece of shit, if i ever get re-routed to best buy again, i'm going to make you navigate a route across the country.
portland! oh, portland, it's like we've met before. the weather was significantly less shitty than salem weather. and by less shitty i mean still shitty. just less suicide inducing. PORTLAND: less suicide inducing than you would expect! yeah! in all truths, i loved it. my body was fucked from being sick but it's one of those cities that gets under your skin. i didn't even know it would do that to me! there's hills but nothing like san fran. and there are more cyclists, walkers and runners than actual car drivers on the street. cool. and the leaves are constantly falling onto your windshield. and arms. and hair. and when it drizzles, they stick to your shoes. red and orange feuilles de papier falling and spinning around. it made the gray day more tolerable.
and yea, before i forget, look at the photo above. we went to the art museum. BLAH! blech. after san francisco's moma i kinda had extremely high hopes for a LIFE CHANGING experience and DIDN'T GET IT. marc dragged me into the minimalism floors. minimalism is not my taste but somehow i could handle the mini in san francisco. in sf, there was advice painted on the wall to help you understand color choice and shape in 50 words or less. but in portland, i felt like i had wandered into somebody's personal walmart framed print collection. i only silently cried so as to not disturb m and the 3rd grade class there. i hate that i can't be as patient with marc's interests as he is with mine. please wait. self-loathing for the next several minutes.
but minimalism for two hours?! fuck. additionally, the portland art museum values quantity over quality. somewhere among the minimalism were over 500 framed weird pieces of shit. maybe i just don't understand art from the 90s so please somebody explain what a black and white oil painting of captain planet means to me!
after two hours of wasted nonesense, i.e. letting marc do what he wanted, i was too grumpy to look at the rest of the exhibits. and the worst part is that i missed what would have been my favorite exhibit, the ancient religious artwork painted on wood. damn damn. marc, as soon as we get back to albuquerque together i swear to god i'm going to take you on a two hour shopping trip to forever 21 and NO SITTING DOWN.
afterwards we looked for a place to drink beer. portland has over 15 microbreweries. maybe over 30. marc told me "just type 'they have a lot. a lot a lot a lot.'" and marc chose the 'hipster' neighborhood to stalk through. i'm beginning to see how we only did what marc wanted to do. so ah ha, that's why i was so prickly and crabby that day. man, i'm a tool sometimes. sorry, marc.
great great microbrew. marc had the 'guest brew: pabst' and i had the ruby. it was raspberry ale. i realized how fun it is talking about our friends back home in another city. feels very sophisticated. in reality we sounded like dbags. six pints later and a basket of tater tots, we threw our coats back on and went window shopping.
we were in a yuppie neighborhood. awesome $5000 strollers. $40 bars of soap. you know how worthless sacks like to spend money.
ok. so this is where shit gets weird. we were using tom tom to drive back to salem and missed the interstate, which put us in the center of downtown portland. followed fate. turned the tom tom off and decided to look for either a dive bar or hipster bar and stay in the city for a couple more hours afterall, it was only 7pm. we went to bailey's room for a few more brews and played scrabble. the bars were very empty and occasionally a lesbian couple would walk in and get their growler filled. we walked over to the atm and then to mary's club. the #1 strip club within 100 feet of where we were staggering. and the rest is kind of a drunkard's daydream. we drank grayhounds and snapped $1 bills into the strippers' lingerie. it was an all nude club and we were the only ones there for the first 45 minutes. kind of just sat there bored and slurring to each other how old each stripper was for a couple more hours. we left to walk back to the car but forgot where it was and just decided to go back to mary's club. four hours later we were back in salem.
the next morning was thanksgiving and we really had no choice but to wake up around 9:30 to get ready for family time. m's sister told us she heard us get in around 4am but who knows we were both beyond tired and you know. additionally, i had a stack of magazines called 'exotica' packed into my bag. i would have just recycled them but marc put them to good use.
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