Yamabushi Mon Amour

Not that long ago, I discovered that the Library of Congress has a Flickr photostream. No shit. The Library of Congress has started posting its vast collection of historic, public domain photos on Flickr, God bless ‘em!

 Ted Easterly, Cleveland, Alabama

They haven’t gotten very far, and the subjects are all over the map. But still, it’s already an Americana extravaganza. Suffragettes, Presidential processions, bareknuckle boxers, and all sorts of other sports figures, including the rather, ahem, cocky baseball player above who’s obviously very confident with his big bat.

I’ve also run across other people who have started collecting LOC photos on their own flickr pages, like this guy who has assembled hundreds of bike-related images, such as the ones below. (Bikes are phallic. Right?)

And I couldn’t resist this photo in particular. It’s a boy standing next to his bike and smoking a pipe. I wish I could muster half the dash and effortless savoir faire as that kid. Some people have just got it.

I was recently hanging out with a friend, who, for reasons that will soon become obvious, shall remain nameless. He was checking his calendar on a big, new, sports-utility phone. Since I’ve been shopping for a new handset myself (going on six years now), I asked what kind he got. It was a Something Something. I don’t remember; the names all sound like bullshit to me.

Anyway…

He told me his last phone got wet. Could I guess how? “It fell in the toilet,” I remembered. Yep, he confirmed, but how?

“It fell out of your pocket?”

“Is that the best you can come up with?”

Sadly, it was. So this is what he told me: He was really drunk (which in most cellphone disaster stories is pretty much a given, right?), and he went to take a piss. At the same time, standing over the toilet, he decided to text a friend.

I laughed, “Oh, no! And it fell out of your hand while you were texting?” But he wasn’t done. He rolled his eyes impatiently and went on.

See he had trimmed his pubes recently, and there he was pissing and texting. So he looks down and thinks, “My dick looks really big right now! I should take a picture!” And turning over his phone to get a good shot, it slipped out of his drunken hand and fell right into the toilet. Plunk!

Efforts to revive the victim were unsuccessful.

“It was like,” he concluded with a shake of his head, “… instant karma.”

Well, here we go again…

Every Monday I post photos of guys smiling.

East Side

We’ve finally — Finally! — settled into the daily sunshine and pleasantly warm temperatures of a Portland summer. It’s an old joke here that the end of winter is the 4th of July, which was pretty much true this year. Now I’ve got to cram three seasons worth of activity into the next two months.

The 4th itself was one of those infinitely long days, the kind that, at the end if it, when you look back at what happened in the morning, it seems like days ago. I started with tennis with a friend, Skip, then took no fewer than four seperate bike rides over the course of the day. My roommate Will and I had a cookout in the backyard, then watched fireworks on the Hawthorne Bridge, then went out to some bars and then ended up dancing on the steamy, crowded dance floor at Holocene until closing time. It was all great summer fun.

This past Wednesday, I was supposed to play tennis with a buddy, Elby, but he decided to bail and drive to the coast. Instead, I hung out with my friend Richard in his little garden at the Kailash Ecovillage. Despite the aspirational name, which refers to a sacred Tibetan mountain, the center of the Buddhist world mandala, home of the Hindu destroyer of evil and sorrow, it is in fact a generic apartment building in Southeast Portland, and if it were just a little bit neater and cleaner, it would pass quite easily for a cheap motel. Nonetheless, his garden is lovely, and I sat in a broken Adirondack chair, drinking locally-brewed (of course) beers while he watered. When it came time to gossip in earnest, we retired to his living room, and he played piano for me while we talked proper trash.

 Kailash Ecovillage, now renting

 Our own sacred mountain community

Eventually, when the beers had done their inevitable work, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. Richard asked me, if I didn’t mind, would I piss in the white jug?

Uhhhh….

It’s for the garden, he said, and I obliged. It was a little weird, I will admit. But then, what the hey, I was visiting the Kailash Ecovillage after all. When in Rome…

Not five minutes after I returned to the sofa, there was somebody at the screen door asking if we had any bottles. Great, I thought, a homeless person begging for recyclables — at the door, for goodness sake. But no, instead, it was Richard’s landlord. He was coming around to collect jugs of pee.

[And now, dear reader, I will pause to allow adequate time for you to absorb this quintessential Portland moment. The landlord collected his tennants' pee. ... ... ... Okay.]

The jug was handed off quite unselfconsciously. Some time later it was returned empty. Richard’s only comment was that he would prefer something with a larger opening.

West Side

Yesterday, I had some errands to run and buzzed over to Patagonia just before closing. I naturally ran into a friend at the farmer’s market in the parking lot there. She was with her gay best friend, with whom I have, of course, had sex. (Oh, the gays.) It’s something that is never ever mentioned, though it’s always there in our eyes. (Again, sigh, the gays.) My friend and I somehow fell into that seemingly inevitable I’m-getting-older, I-suddenly-have-all-this-gray-hair conversation. The guy and I just as inevitably fell into a long discussion about the cute fixie rider who works at the pizza shop and how well you can see his dick through his jeans. Is he massively hung? Or does he just display well? We both had many well-developed theories on this subject. (Yeah, again, gay guys.)

 Numbers. Trucking company. Northwest Portland.

Eschewing a beer on the roof garden, I headed for Food Front, the co-op on that side of the river, which seems to be patronized and staffed mostly by neat Yippies, as opposed to the dingy Trustafarians at People’s in Southeast. (It make me wonder: If you ultimately inherit your parents’ money, do you have to switch co-ops?) After buying my four bars of natural soap — a two year supply — I continued on to Forest Park.

 Thurman Street winding up up up into Forest Park

I was going to hike a trail out to the Audubon bird sanctuary, but I missed my turn and ended up cranking in low gears up up up Thurman Street to Leif Ericson Drive. I rode out the gravel path for a while with the passels of lycra-clad, pot-bellied, retirement-age coots on pricey mountain bikes, trying to prove to themselves that they’re not old. There was also an infinity of joggers, each and every one of them with at least one unleashed Labrador mix, running ahead, pissing on everything. Ah, nature.

 The gently curving Leif Ericson Drive. BIG

I will admit that, unlike the mountain bikers, the joggers were, to a man, incredibly fit and uniformly handsome. It was like they had all just come from a Navy Seals beefcake calendar shoot. Running shorts come right up to here, ya know, and all those iron thighs were in full view. I became distracted.

 Ivy-covered garages on Thurman Street

One tall, handsome Viking of a man in little red shorty shorts caught my eye in particular. Since I stopped to take pictures from time to time, he would pass me. Then back on my bike, I would pass him. It happened all the way up the gravel road, then down again, and then even down the street into town. He paid me absolutely no attention whatsoever, which must certainly be true love, right? I wanted to say, Dude, stop following me! Just ask me for my number already! But I guess he was just too intimidated. I have that effect on exceptionally good-looking men.

 Bike path under the I-405 / Fremont Bridge on ramps

On my way back through town, I passed under the ramps for the Fremont Bridge and took some photos. Yeah, it’s a total cliche, but with their dramatic swoops, taking a picture of them is practically a rite of passage for anybody with a camera in this town. I think there’s even a law.

 Requiste arty shots of highway overpasses

I went home to the east side of the river for a while, but wound up back in Old Town to go to a “queer night” and stroll between some gay bars, which, despite my six years in Portland now, I have never done before. I went out alone, but my (straight) roommate Joel got roped into being the designated driver for two gay pals. We all showed up in the same place then decided to make a night of it. First the Eagle Underground, then Boxxes, then Silverado, which has male strippers, another first for me and maybe a last. Not a fan of the shaved butts, thankyouverymuch.

It was all mildly creepy — all these places I never go (with good reason) filled with stereotypical gay guys. It’s a side of Portland I never see and have long imagined extinct. You’d think by this point that absolutely everyone would realize that that gelled swoop of hair in the front looks ridiculous, or that Abercrombie is now right up there with Old Navy in terms of quality, style, and social cachet. It’s like 1996 all over again. With all of the thousands of examples of male hotness in this town, all of the utterly sexy oddballs, all of the incandescently beautiful freaks, even all of the simply natural hunks, why would anyone want to be a generic mall-store clone?

The evening wound down in the same way they all do downtown, with a trip to Voodoo Doughnuts. I got my usual maple cruller. Sometimes I try something different but always regret it. Let this be a lesson, kids: change is bad.

 3 men, 1 nervous doughnut. Billy, Graham, Joel & a sweet little peach fritter.

It had cooled into the 50s; I put on a sweater. (And this is July, folks.) Billy, one of us gays, kindly offered me a ride and put my bike in the back of his mini-van (mini-van!), leaning well away from his own shiny, orange, vintage frame fixie. They dropped me off at home with slightly inappropriate hugs. Strings of Christmas lights cast the backyard in a timeless glow. I parked my bike in its place, turned off the lights, poured another drink and settled down, at last, for the night.

I haven’t been writing for a long while. I keep trying to get started again, but I’ve been busy. Sue me.

This week, we finally had a beautiful day. The east coast was sweltering in a heat wave, and we were having highs in the 50s. On Thursday, with the first warm, dry weather, I was out taking bike rides, one after another. Even as the sun was going down, I rushed up to the top of Mount Tabor to watch a blazing orange sunset.

 Mt Tabor resevoir was empty when I last rode by

On Friday I put fresh “flowers” on the mantle in our woefully bare living room. A month ago, I put some lilacs from the yard up there, and my roommate Will loved them. He said, “It looks like… human beings live here.” So I’ve kept up the habit.

 Flowers on our mantle. Bare white walls.

I also decanted our second batch of Kombucha, which turned out nicely. I’m a convert. There was a tiny paper thin “mother” at the top. The first we’ve gotten.

Mentioning kombucha in Portland is like talking about your chickens or tomatos (or pickles, or saurkraut, or home brewed beer). Everybody chimes right in with their own story. We all bond over our urban neo-agrarianism.

Saturday was the World Naked Bike Ride. Fourth year in a row that I’ve ridden. This time, I got a group of friends to go together. There were reportedly 3,000 people. It was nuts… so to speak. Quote of the night from this straight dude to a total stranger: “Man, you’ve got a biiiig wiener!”

 The view. World Naked Bike Ride, Portland, 2008.

I stayed as late at the after-party as I could, but I have a weekend job now. Had to be up at 8:30. I’m a sales girl at Patagonia. When I rode my bike in to work this morning, I passed all of the marchers in the gay pride parade getting set up in the park blocks. So much going on around here these days. You suffer with nothing to do all through the damp, bone-chilling winter, and then suddenly, everything happens at once.

Every Monday I post photos of guys smiling.