Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

Jason just sent me this incredible web site: Scenes From My Life. It features a different person in different cities all over the world showing little glimpses of their life.

Crazy skies without color correction, though my shots of the rainbows didn’t come out that good. Actually, nothing I shot that day really depicted the sky’s hue the way this girl’s pictures did.

All of these are from 82nd Ave last Sunday when that crazy storm system blew into town.

I had a pretty fun weekend even though I didn’t have anything big planned and feared I’d spend the whole time working in the garden for lack of anything better to do. On Friday night, I hung out on the roof of Bryan’s building and watched the sun go down. Then we went to a bunch of crazy places that weren’t very crazy, but still fun. When we walked in CC Slaughters, the DJ was playing Never Ending Story (a disco remix). I muttered my gaybar mantra ‘hope I see someone from work’ three times and then I did seconds later.
An hour after that I ran into Poison Waters and told her how much I like her website.
On Saturday, Jeremy I walked half way across the city and I found out that Clinton Street Video has a huge Five Minutes To Live section of cult titles and my eyes bugged out of my head like a cartoon character. Their ‘lost and found video’ footage tapes are some of the best weirdo compilations I’ve ever seen.
I tried to go out dancing with Jenny on Saturday night, but it was almost impossible to find anything going on, which was really depressing. Crush had two girls dirty dancing, Holocene was full of a thousand boring lesbians, and Ararat was almost completely empty. Jenny was not having any of this. Half way through this disastrous evening we crashed a house party on Morrison, where everyone was twenty and three people were dancing to Public Enemy. We were like the school chaperones when we hit the dance floor, so we left. But later on, it seemed like it was the only show in town. I went back, but the cops were there shutting the party down so I went home to crash, but Jeremy and Jenny went inside and turned it into a proper dance party.
On Sunday morning we all ate pizza and watched that great new Janeane Garofalo movie that came on the Oxygen channel, which was a masterpiece.

I evacuated the city.

My friend John over at Stumptown Confid. alterted me to this bike event that I’ve been looking forward to for months. The premise is: in the 1950s Portland was one of the most prepared cities in America for the atom bomb. Back then, they speculated that when the big one was coming, it would be on a plane headed from Alaska, past Vancouver and Seattle to us (which, wait, why are they skipping Seattle?). So they built a massive bomb shelter a hundred blocks away from the river that forms a neat centerline of town on one of the mini mountains that dot Portland. They figured people would have at least three hours to evacuate from downtown to the complete safety of a few miles away. Granted, it is very easy to get out of town here.
The premise of the ride was that bombers were headed to town and we would be fleeing by bicycle. People showed up in army gear, post apocalyptic mutant gear, formal wear and for some reason, drag.

Basically it was about fifty people on bikes (including the ever popular Tall Bikes) in a freak scene mardi gras style parade through town to the shelter. People really got into it and pretended to cry and screamed at other people going the opposite directions, ‘You’re going the wrong way!!! It’s the end of the world!!!’ Despite that, strangers on bikes joined the group. Little kids on the sidewalk freaked out at the site of all the tall bikes. The guide had a megaphone with a cool siren sound effect. FINALLY, I’ve wanted one event of my life to be like the last ten minutes of ‘Slacker’ and this was it!!!

It was really hard making it up to the shelter, though really easy to get to the site. I biked through a bunch of neighborhoods I’d never seen before. The actual final stop wasn’t that impressive. Portland spent a fortune on this underground bomb shelter (now locked up tight) in the fifties and then freaked out after the Cuban Missile Crisis when it finally dawned on them how useless it would be. So to save face, it was a 911 style call center until the early 90s (and I think we’ve all had some pretty depressing jobs, but answering 911 calls in an underground bomb shelter seems pretty high up there as one of the crummiest things you could do for employment).

Gay Pride, part two.

After the parade, everyone went to the waterfront park, where you had to pay three dollars to walk around a bunch of booths set up to market shit to gay people. It was unbelievably pathetic and no, I didn’t buy any Gay Fuel, though we kind of wished they sold it at the grocery store and set up in-store displays for it.

It was still really fun anyway. There was a stage set up so we hung around to see the ‘Bear Dance’ which never happened. At that point everybody was too tired and disgusted to hang around for ‘Gay American Idol’ (which, I’m still curious about how you could make AI more gay).

Gay Pride, part one.

Sunday was my first pride parade in many years. I went to one in Chicago back in the 90s and remember my roommate Megan leaning over to me and saying, ‘No one looks good in a feather headdress and thong at 11am on a Sunday morning.’
I guess times have changed because 99% of this parade was pick up trucks with people waving and handing out civil rights flyers. Which is good, or I don’t know, more politically sensitive these days and probably necessary. But it left Jeremy and I scratching our head and saying, ‘Where’s all the bronzer and glitter?’
I liked this guy featured above. This is what every old person in Las Vegas looks like.

This gentlemen also bucked the trend. I wish the photo could have incorporated the two milquetoast people standing in front of him. The woman held a sign saying, ‘I’m proud of my gay dad.’ And the son’s sign said, ‘Straight But Not Narrow.’ And then behind them is dad (?), who was so cool and so insanely queer that I almost started bawling right there on the sidewalk.

Perhaps this is an aside. Jeremy became obsessed with the snack track this lady had going in her walker.

It was weird seeing my friend Will as the poster boy for the Mercury’s queer issue last week. Even stranger seeing it blow around on the street. Now that’s fame.

This place looks really seedy, but the only thing you have to worry about inside is dying of hipstercide.

Saturday was the big 180 + garage sale in my old neighborhood. Last year it really blew my mind, but this year it was kind of a slap in the face. First of all, for the non-Portlanders, the neighborhood it’s in (Laurelhurst) is super rich and perfect looking. And I started to wonder if these people just went through the dumpsters at Good Will to grab some trash to put on a card table in front of their homes as a flimsy excuse to mix with the neighbors. So I went back to bed. Later that day, Jeremy and I were driving past our old house and the neighbor’s were having a sale and we bought this copy of Scruples.
Jeremy asked me a bunch of questions in the car and it was determined that I had no Scruples at all and would probably win this game. But it turns out there are a lot of complicated rules, like you have to lie a bunch and convince the other players you’re not lying and they get to vote.

It was a lot of fun, but since the group knows way too much about each other already, it wasn’t the most exciting game ever. It really must be played at a tense dinner party, preferably with co-workers or estranged relatives.

So my favorite drag queen in Portland, Poison Waters, has a website which has a very exhaustive Dear Abby style Q&A.
And who’s going to go see Mandonna with me on July 9th?

I wish I had my pictures back from this weekend, which was a lot of fun and very surreal. So instead, here’s some pictures of the coast.
Did anyone see that crazy thunderstorm yesterday?!? It really merits discussion, since it never happens here. Even better than that was the strange light that happened where the sky turned yellow, then a deep red, then pink and there were thick double rainbows.

I only recently learned about this crazy train place last week when I was stalking some local folks’ web sites. It’s strictly member’s only and secretive, but there is an open house in November. So I guess it was a lucky coincidence that it was opened last Saturday for the rose fest.
I went with the expectation that it would be a really accurate depiction of the area, like Robert Moses’ crazy scale model of NYC at the Queens Museum. But this was more of a fantasy version of Portland showing what things would look like if steam locomotives were more popular than cars.

A scene from Molly’s birthday and the craziness that ensued afterwards. Actually, this was Portland’s world naked bike day entry. A couple of us caught everybody leaving in a screaming, whooping hoard. It looked like fun. Mostly, I wish I would have taken a picture of the fat guy in the clear plastic raincoat.