Here in P-Town
Trip Start
Jul 01, 2004
1
29
68
Trip End
Ongoing
Portland,
Oregon,
United States
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
I decided to stay in tonight and not go to "the show" (there are so many of them here!) and listen to the salsa band practice across the street. I'm sitting on the porch, the weather is super warm, the sun is going down, there's a nice breeze and I'm craving some vegan baked goods that I'm too lazy to make...
Getting across the border was difficult. Never had such a hard time. I am now in the system for fucks sake. I am not happy about this. It makes crossing the border even more doggy.
The train ride down was pretty sweet - lots of neat scenery and strange places to have smoke breaks. In Havre Montana the border patrol came on board
chicago
! I was walking straight towards one of them. I was making eye contact with him. He said hello and was going to start his speech about why he was on board... I just kept walking... he ended up directing his communication to the old guy behind me. I got off the train and to stretch and just walked as far away as I could from them. White skin has it's privleges. If I were a person of color they would for SURE have questioned me and who knows what else. Still can't understand what they were doing THERE. We didn't seem to be THAT close to the Canadian border... I survived on dried soups, choco chips, trailmix, cereal and soymilk (yeah for tetrapacks!) soynut butter and homemade spelt bread. I didn't need much food because I didn't get any exercise! It was two days of walking to the lookout car (where I spent most of my time) and my seat. Sleeping was entirely hellish, even with the special seats that pull out. I would have liked to have cut off my legs from the knees down. Even taking up two seats I was cramped as hell...
The house here is made up of older zinester punk rock types. We are in an ungentrified neighborhood, I think maybe the only one left in inner city PDX. There is an unfortunate hiway right in front of the house (#5) but the Max (the rapid transit) is just down the street and so is the old innerstate 5 which has all these cool old neon signs..
Montana 1
. Joe and Alex are married and formed Microcosm a few years back. It's grown really fast, really big. There's like 5 people who make their living from it. Books, zines, t-shirts, patches, buttons all political/counter culture in nature. Webly is Alex's little sister who is an architect. She is the one who set me up in this rad house. She's got a fucking cute cockerspaniel named Coda and her boyfriend Brian also lives in the house. He's this super tall sometimes sarcastic guy who's apparently really shy and that's why we haven't had much conversation. He also works for Microcosm. Joel is an electric music dude who works translating things into Asian languages. It's more complicated than that but I've forgotten ;) He's moving out in Sept. so there will just be 5 of us. There is so much to do here it is crazy. There are so many people like me... well... at least 1/2 like me ;) (I'm such a misfit!) One problem is that there is no single place to find out what's happening. In some cases there are very FEW places to find out what's going on. You go to punk shows after picking up flyers from a previous one. You go to other things because your friend tells you about them. I'm seriously thinking of starting some kind of webpage where DIY events can be listed. It would make ME a happier camper, that's for sure. Today there was at least THREE potential cool shows I could have went to!
Montana 2
On a Tuesday! It's already a little tiring...On my second day here I went to a show in an IWW space that was pretty cool. Chad, a Columbia MO dude circa 1998, was in a band that played. Also Chad from Food Fight was there. I also met a really cool girl Emily from Vancouver who is in town working a three week job. We've been hanging out and planning adventures together. I've also bumped into internet acquantences at the Fleas and Lice show (Jon and I had our bikes hooked up to the same pole; Saxon from the Happy Bastards in Eugene must have recognized me from my punknet picture; Gut was at the show apparently but we didn't see each other). Marc works at the Community Bike Collective, lives just around the corner, and who I've known since his days in Buffalo...
I've got an appointment to go to the Oregon Historical Society on Friday. I really hope they let me do some volunteer film archiving. It seems like the film archiving section is really restricted but for krist sakes people would potentially PAY me to do that job! Case in point:
The day before I left they posted probably the ONLY film archiving job I could get in Ontario..
Montana 3
. maybe all of Canada... I can't fucking believe it. I'm so pissed. I just sent them my resume. But I'm not happy about it. I just got here. I'm really enjoying it and feel nearly settled and it's only been a week. I don't want to go back to Toronto right now. I've been extremely depressed these... well this whole fucking year! After what I've seen this week going back now would be even more difficult. But I'm not thinking about it much, it makes me too miserable...Portland is a very contientious and proud place. The transit system has supposidly been rated number one in the country. Bikes are super important here. Bike lanes everywhere. You can take your bike on any bus and any Max line. And it's really simple. It made me realize that you can't DO that in T.O! It never really sunk in until I got here... If something is made here you will find out about it. People always think about what's grown locally, what's produced in the city. There's a fast food chain that opitimizes PDX - they use mostly locally grown food -a fast food company for krist sakes!
Vegan food is everywhere. I haven't even really ate out except the day I got here we got a wicked tofu scramble at the new "hip hop" restaurant that opened up around the corner. I guess it's a club at night... We went to Voodoo Donuts - open from 10pm to 10am - which has an abudance of finely crafted deep fried goodness. Fruit Loops, Chiko-Stick, marshmallows sprinkled on top of sparkling icing. There are vegan version as well, but only the cake kind. This needs to be changed...
Biking is a challenge, not being from a city that is known for hills
Montana 4
. (Ahh St. Clair. Take that hill and duplicate it 15 times). There is no known way to avoid them coming back home. I made the mistake of taking the interstate 5 back after Fleas and Lice and had to walk my bike up a long hill for like 5 minutes. Ow my knee It will take me a long while to figure out biking here. Joe says you can often take roads that will give you two hills when there is a flat street near by. This is also the city of bridges (aka City of Roses, Stumptown, PDX, P-Town) which is both fun and annoying. From a distance I think Portland is very ugly with the handful of bridges and shipping ports - but up close it is very beautiful. There are blackberries (which some people are really trying to eradicate as they are not indeginous), cherry trees, fig trees, apple trees, walnut trees all over the place. Some of the roads aren't paved with ashfalt and it really is beautiful to see. There's something very homey about it. There's all kinds of neat houses, bikes and cars, people think individuality is good! Down the street it looks like some people are living in an old school bus... Apparently, Portland once had the highest unemployment rate. I asked Webly if she thought it was maybe because of the young kids that move here into punk/artists houses and just don't work and she thought that might be the case. Up until recently rent was really cheap - it was easy to find $200 rooms
PDX Pink Sky
. So who needed to work full time? But things are changing. My room is super cheap - $175 but it is now common to pay $3-400. I didn't know this. Portland is also supposidly in the top 3 of expensive places to live. I haven't really seen that yet. I mean the prices for food are similar to Toronto, but there are tons and tons of good deals and tricks and so forth. Apparently Food not Bombs serves like 4 or 5 days a week! There is no sales tax here but I guess property tax is where the city gets it's money. So it's expensive for home owners. The transit is reasonable - 1.40 gets you mosty everywhere for 2 hours. Film is something I haven't even looked into yet. I saw a screening put on by the Northwest Film Center which was held at the Art Gallery. It was highly annoying that I had to check my water bottle and then go through this maze of people to get to the theatre which had pretty much just people who knew the filmmaker. Her work was pretty decent tho - she uses traditional animation. Three cheers for stop motion! Marc was saying that there really isn't a place to see good indie/experimental work. No squeeky wheel or pleasuredome. Perhaps this is niche that is crying for our attention. We'll see. I need to see some George Eastman House type film soon! It's been way to long since I had that nice cosy feeling of lots of good film projections to choose from...
Activist life is most likely vibrant but I've been too exhausted to venture there yet. I'm still working on getting a bed. Once that's here I can get my room together and I will be nicely settled and happy.
So that's about it. That's a lot of reading to do - if you stuck with it good for you! I'm really getting peckish now I'll see what I can find to eat in the fridge. I'll put some (bad) pictures up shortly... Hope you are all well and at least somewhat enjoying the searing heat over there... Miss you all...
