helping to keep portland weird

i just got back from my very first trip out to the west coast in portland, oregon for my friend tori's wedding! between mormons, salty lakes, crop circles, a blue man, free roadside toilets, and the world's smartest baby, i saw a lot of weird shit this weekend. a lot of weird and awesome shit. tori's got a lot of badass hippie friends, and one of them even smudged me (see video below for further details) on saturday night. so according to native american folklore, i'm invincible or something. or maybe not, i don't really know, but it's basically a purification ceremony involving burning sage and blowing the smoke around people. and here i thought that was restricted to cleansing haunted houses! i figured it couldn't hurt, although, sometimes when they do it on that show 'a haunting' it makes shit worse. let's hope i wasn't/am not a haunted human being.



i also lived it up in my hotel room in a style i like to call 'home alone IV: lost in portland', only this time there was just junk food and jumping on beds and not so much burglary. although, i did momentarily consider constructing a complex rube goldberg mechanism to ward off potential evildoers.

outside the hotel walls, i enjoyed the best weather of all time; as noted in previous posts, my body cannot handle heat and/or humidity. i thrive in freezing conditions, although i prefer a solid temperature range between about 56 and 84 degrees farenheit. portland got to be about 83 at the highest and 54 at the lowest, so we were right in that ideal range. skies were blue, air was breezy, and NO HUMIDITY WHATSOEVER! paradiso my friends, paradiso...you don't even know how much i appreciate not sweating, because i sweat about 85% of the time around this inferno. i was able to really enjoy it yesterday when tori and her family went to mt. st. helens to explore the wonders of volcanic eruptions. i wandered into a bar to watch the world cup match (argentina beat the shit out of mexico and i rejoiced. and drank.) and when i came out of there i was pleasantly buzzed and ready to take on a day of getting lost in a city i know nothing about.

i stumbled upon a ton of great record stores and perused the bargain bins, snatching up about seven gems for a grand total of $2.50. i'm most excited about soeur sourire (the singing nun) because i lovelovelove this cheeseball song called 'dominique' and i've been trying (unsuccessfully) to find the digital album for ages. i listened to that one on repeat this afternoon, and i'm super excited to hear what this one lp sounds like that i snagged for $0.50 that is labeled all in japanese.



after sharking records, i hit up a used book store and grabbed some serious garcia marquez paperbacks including 'leaf storm', which i proceeded to read for the rest of the afternoon in a park in the sunshine. an excellent end to an excellent day.

top three things i learned in portland:

1) public transportation is mad easy to cheat; i didn't pay a cent the entire day because there were no gates to get on or off the train. honor system? i don't think so, bitches.
2) from my personal experience, portland is comprised of 80% homeless people, 15% hippies, 4% hipsters, and 1% normal people. and 99% of these people use backpacks wherever they go.
3) it is awesome.

THE END. oh and i forgot to tell you that i got stuck next to fifteen year old mathletes on the plane from houston to dc today. and they were really annoying and full of hormones and trigonometry. they wouldn't stop talking to me until i politely asked, "hey what's the square root of shut the fuck up?" (except i didn't really say that because i pitied them for having to spend the summer going to mathletics competitions.) NOW THE END.