Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

I’m confused why this place was called ‘Country Bills’ since I don’t usually associate red leather pin-cushioned banquettes with rural America. Maybe I’ve been missing out. Further evidence to support the misleading name theory is the picture of the CB mascot (pictured second from bottom), a ragtime dandy with spats and strange hair. This a far cry from Cracker Barrel fake-country. But maybe not, because the food was pretty much the same and everybody here was nine hundred years old. I have to credit Jeremy with suggesting CBs and finding it in the first place.
Country Bills has inspired me to start my own Zagats-style restaurant reviews, but my twist is that I’m not going to say anything at all about the food. I’m starting to find the food to be an obstacle to good dining. Take for instance the nasty Chinese restaurant by my house. It has an amazing gigantic neon sign and the interior makes it seem like Jack Lemon and brunette Shirley MacLaine could walk in any second and order chop suey. The grossness of the food is not a problem, only a no camera policy is a problem. Therefore, I need some suggestions. If anyone is reading this in the Pacific Northwest, your information could help save lives.
So that’s my plan. I’m showing my pork chops today because of Megan’s fascination over the choice between American and French fries on the menu (I voted American because it came with gravy).

More of the same from yesterday. The only thing here that I really feel like I need in this pile of stuff is the big yellow sign that says ‘Jeff’ with the ominous CBS eye and, of course, the card catalogs.

First of all, I’m not even going to say where this is. If you know, good, if not, tough. I’m just too paranoid that rich stalkers who look at this site are going to buy everything pictured here, which is rightfully mine because I really want it and feel a strong sense of entitlement.
We went to X last Saturday when Patrick and Kelly were here and we were trying to show off Portland’s superior thrift scene. Shockingly, this is only the tip of the ice burg in this store!

More pictures from the desparately re-tread quasi victory at Beulahland. Dan Maloney shows up tomorrow!

I can’t believe I got scooped on Country Bills Steakhouse by Patrick. Apparently, he didn’t read the fine print of his agreement that all Portland visitors must sign about not reporting on any cool restaurants/signs before I do. Alas. I guess it’s my own fault for not taking my film to the lab yet. I intend to make Country Bills and Grandma’s my new hot spots and plan to shoot the music video there for my (as yet unwritten and unrecorded) hit single ‘Not Too Proud To Cry’.

I’m also kinda excited about the new Wes Anderson movie, even though it’s about Bill Murray wanting to kill a shark and Open Water traumatized me beyond belief on Saturday (thanks again, Patrick… I just wanted to see Without A Paddle).

Katherine and I took Patrick and Kelly to Sloans when they first got here from Austin. Our waitress was the daughter of the owners and seemed perplexed when I asked if I could take pictures, but then graciously let me go crazy. My first Sloans photoshoot suffered from a camera malfunction, so I’m glad I got the chance to go back and document some of the other stuff I liked.

From last week’s trivia night at Beulahland, where we tore the place up with Kelly and Patrick. We rode on Kelly’s coat tails all the way to second place. I think out of forty-something questions, she answered almost all of them without difficulty while the rest of us threw in a stray (often incorrect) answer here and there. Our team’s name was ‘McGreevey’s Boys’.

The second place prize was a bunch of pirate accessories (?) and these Special Edition (I love ‘Special Ed.’ foods) Pringles that had really simple trivia questions printed on them. One example was: How do you play a kazoo? The ingredients stated that the ink for the questions was something called ‘Blue No. 2′, which I’ll just assume is a ‘healthy’ ingredient. But we had a lot of fun quizzing each other and then eating the chips and everybody was kicking themselves for not thinking of this idea and wondering what else besides trivia questions could be made edible.

So on Tuesday, I went to have dinner at Goose Hollow Inn, which is a really nice place to eat and drink. They have a huge covered deck/terrace out front where you can sit in the shade. I was at one of the tables towards the front when Jeremy or Stephen pointed out that someone was repeatedly crashing into my car…
I was parallel parked along the curb right beside the deck and you could see the back of a white Jeep repeatedly hitting the front of my car. In memory, it seems like we watched this go on for a while - aghast - before the car tried to pull away while literally dragging my car behind it.
Jeremy popped out of his seat in the packed restaurant and screamed (wait, I want to remember it, right) ‘Freeze sucka!’ or ‘I kill you!’ or something. But I remember it being really primal and loud and it scared the hell of me. He even jumped off the high railing of the deck and went racing up to the car. I followed behind him and when I got to my car, it seemed like this woman, while trying to back out, had bumped into my car hard enough that the trailer hitch on her Jeep got snagged underneath my bumper! Then she tried to drive away! But it was really stuck under there.
And the most surreal part was how unapologetic she was about it, which is kind of an understatement, because it was pretty obvious she was going to just drive away and yank off my front bumper if we hadn’t stopped her. [Everyone has subsequently attributed this to the Washington plates on her car, i.e. an Oregonians wouldn't be like that].
Now at this point, the entire restaurant is fascinated by this situation and is watching and commenting on everything that unfolds and we’re giving them this keystone kops floorshow of bad techniques for how to un-entangle two cars. Since we were on a steep hill, there was no way to jack up my car safely. A lot of regulars from the restaurant came out to offer tools and advice. One guy was really insistent that we needed to let a little air of the back two tires of her car to lower it so the hitch would clear the bumper (the defendant, hereby referred to as ‘The Bitch’) was all, ‘I’m not letting air out of my car’s tires cause it might damage them.’ Even though there was a gas station a block away. Meanwhile, she had already really messed up the front of my car. I had a bid done today that came out to twelve hundred dollars in body damage. And she’s not returning my calls. But I have her insurance and license plate info, and Portland law states (I talked to the cops today, too!) that I can get through to the insurance company with police assistance, though I already ended up talking to them today as well.
Ultimately, Stephen figured out how to pry free the trailer hitch that was causing all the problems and the whole restaurant exploded in applause when The Bitch finally pulled away.

Also: If you have a cell phone and live and Portland and want to incorporate more technology in your social life, then check out dodge ball.

Even though Portland’s the only place I’ve ever lived that has a mild and breezy summer and I have a notebook still overflowing with lists of places in town I want to check out, I keep daydreaming about all these vacations I want to go on.
I picked this book at the library called ‘James Dean Died Here’ that tells you the locations of a million pop cultural locations, including the two above. I feel like those years I spent in LA were totally wasted on me, since when I was there I couldn’t be bothered to drive past the Happy Days or Brady Bunch houses.
I’ve also been reading Tiki Roadtrip, but for different reasons, since you can’t beat The Alibi on Interstate Ave. Interesting fact: they don’t have tiki bars in Hawaii and it’s kind of considered politically incorrect. This is a pretty devastating thing to find out, since I always imagined it to be a tackiness whirlpool out there. But my travel plans are strictly continental US.
I also want to go to Detroit and the Wisconsin Dells (don’t open this at work if your computer has speakers attached — it has an annoying song).

I’ve also recently enjoyed: Taco Time and Signs of Life.

Hard to believe this was only a year ago.

The kitchen in this house has become a minefield of creepiness and everyone’s to blame:
*The avocado plant in the windowsill
*The crying ceramic babydoll/pumpkin head
*The serial killer clown endorsed ice cream cones

So if anyone reading this is looking to invest fifty-million dollars into a movie by a director who’s never made anything (me), then I have two great film ideas that I’m fake-directing in my head right now. Both would make cool old-Hollywood-style melodramas: the Barbara Payton biopic (50s starlet turned hooker) or the James McGreevey story (the recently resigned NJ gay governor with a blackmailing boyfriend). I suspect that the Lifetime Network is going to beat me to the punch on the McGreevey idea and that somewhere Susan Dey is half-heartedly learning a Jersey accent for her role as Mrs. McGreevey. I’m sure the film would be all from her point of view and be called ‘Bed of Gay Lies’ or something.