East Side, West Side

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.

Sue Me

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.

Sun & Rhubard

Finally, we had a beautiful day.

 Airport in the distance. Mt Hood on the horizon.

My housemate Will and I went for a long ride on the bike path along the Columbia River, right next to the airport. There were great views of Mt Hood. It was Sunday, and a families with children were everywhere. I keep forgetting those exist.

 Will taking a photo of Mt Hood.

Then when we got home, I made a crumble with rhubarb from my own garden. It was so tart, but with vanilla ice cream, it was absolutely perfect. (Here’s the recipe.)

 My long red rhubarb

 Rhubarb crumble

Every year, it seems to take forever for the sun to get here, then suddenly it just feels like summer.

Purple & Green

I’ve been picture happy lately. Nice weather has gotten me out of the house and looking around, and I’m finally acting on an idea that’s been on my mind for years. I’m “documenting” Portland’s dizzying array of purple and green houses.

 Fresh paint. Purple & green house in Southeast Portland.

Not purple or green houses, but houses that are both purple and green. Yes, at the same time. Yes, intentionally.

Almost as soon as I drove into town, I noticed them. Green houses are practically infinite here, and purple ones are also quite numerous. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised then that purple and green houses are so common. What’s more, purple with green seems to be the city’s unofficial color sceme. Even the carpet at the airport is, you guessed it, purple & green.

  Purple & green carpet at Portland’s airport, PDX

How did this happen? What about those two particular colors represents the very essence of Portland? Vermont, for me, is sky blue and forest green, like a drawing on a Ben & Jerry’s carton. Mexico is blood red and warm gold, right off an old bullfighting poster. So where do we get purple & green?

I think it’s all around us here, the green is obvious and everywhere in the Northwest. Purple, though, is here too. The blackberries, marionberries, blueberries and plums. The rosemary and lavender flowers. The grapes and the wine they make. Flower, fruit and foliage: Purple and green. Whether you’re a family farmer or a yuppie oenophile or a back-to-the-Earth hippy, the generous fertility of the Willamette Valley is at the very heart of life and culture here.

 Purple & green Portland: Flowers & foliage, foundation & clapboard.

Speaking of granola types, might as well admit that purple and green are also hippie classics. No question that the persistence of the colors together carries with it the faint whif of patchouli, of keeping the psychedelic faith. The children of Gaia are still saving the planet… one paint swatch at a time. Namaste.

Funny that, because at one of the first houses where I was taking pictures, the owner came up to me and talked. Her husband was on a ladder in the backyard at that very moment, still painting on the new hues. “Honey,” she yelled, “there’s a guy here taking pictures of purple and green houses.”

“He would appreciate that.” she said after turning back to me, and we discussed how bright the new colors were turning out. She was hoping for something more subdued, more gray. She was awfully concerned about good taste, and thus she could not have been less of a hippy. In fact, she was as yuppie as they come, but here she was painting her house purple and green. So it looks like the Gaians may have won.

At flickr:
Check out this (as yet tiny) collection of purple & green houses at the new photostream I’ve dedicated to Portland’s “built environment.”

Conversation Community

Friday night, on the 31st, I went to my fourth all-gay guy game night in about as many months. It was nice in the usual ways. I won a lot, and guys flirted with me. There was plenty of good cheese and tolerable red wine. Best of all, people carried on actual conversations.

 CW: Patrick, Tim, Steve, David, Neil & somebody’s (gasp!) white socks

Portland is such an easy place to be gay that it’s sometimes hard to meet other homos here, since we all just hang out with (mostly straight) people like ourselves and do not find it necessary to go out to gay bars (which everyone hates) to socialize. “All of my friends are straight” is a common refrain among gay guys in this town. But what do you do if you want or need an actual gay friend? Then what?

I had long been feeling that need for gay buddies, and I tried to go out to bars and queer nights to meet new people. But big surprise, bar flies are not really my kinda folk. And they’re only after one thing. Which, believe me, is just fine. Still, that left me without new friends. So late in spring I started pushing Andy to have a party of some kind for gay guys at his place, and games seemed to be the type of thing that would draw a certain (nerdy) crowd and stimulate real interaction.

He was sceptical. “All my friends are straight,” he said quite predictably, and “I don’t know any gay guys.” Whatever! How many do you need? Between us we can rustle up six at least. But he wanted to invite the same few straight friends that he always sees. Look, I finally pointed out, if you want to meet new people, then you have to do something different. He relented, and, long story short, we had a great inaugural game night with eleven tipsy homos toe-to-toe in a tiny studio apartment. We all had a great time, and we’ve done it three more times now, with other hosts and other guests. There’s been a good turn out every time; seems we’ve tapped into a real need.

On Friday, I knew things were going well when someone mentioned how his tomatos had done this year, and half the room started buzzing about their tomatos. That’s the nice thing about these evenings. We talk. About stuff. Unbelievable that it takes so much work to make that happen.

I’m kind of worn out from socializing at this point, which is fine. Things will probably slow down naturally as everybody settles in for the damp weather. I’m just hoping these connections will continue to develop. That’s why I bother, after all, not because I’m much of a game person. I’m not at all. I’m a conversation person, and those of us in the conversation community really need to stick together.

Midnight Mystery Ride

The heat from earlier in the week finally broke. (It was just over one billion degrees on Wednesday, which is about forty-one celcius. Right?) Today’s high was a crisp and refreshing eighty-three degrees. Still higher than average, but what a difference. I felt like one of the living again.

With all the inactivity during the heat wave, I’ve had lots of energy to burn, even after spending seven hours tonight gardening and cleaning the yard. So as midnight approached, I decided to join in on a Midnight Mystery Ride. There have been lots of them already, and it’s typically a small and organized affair. A few dozen folks will meet up at midnight (of course) and then the leader, who is usually different every time, will guide them to a secret destination. Cans of beer will magically appear, and conversation will theoretically be made between likeminded but previously unaquainted cyclists.

I’ve passed on the many earlier rides. I’m never in the mood to hang around with strangers, and the weather has often sucked too. But tonight was a glorious evening — perfect biking weather — and I’ve been in a social mood. So at a quarter til twelve, still full of energy and enjoying the night air, I sped over to the starting point in Northeast.

I was a little too late, and as I got close I saw maybe two dozen folks heading in the wrong direction. They told me they were trying to catch up with the main group who had already left, and I joined their motley peloton in the chase. It took us a couple of miles to find the others, but it was obvious when we got near. We could see the flashing police lights from blocks away.

We got to an otherwise abandoned intersection along the waterfront near Union Station, and our little group sat at the red light, wondering what to do. For a quarter mile on the road to our left were maybe ten or so motorcycle cops, each with several young hipsters next to their bikes on the curb. I had heard that a police presence was expected, but it was clear that they had something to prove tonight.

Finally a girl on a fixie (my favorite!) in a cute little sweater (it was, like, eighty degrees) but no helmet or lights, rode over from one of the cops and told us what people were getting tickets for, which amounted to not stopping at red lights and obstructing traffic. (One poor guy had an open beer in his front basket and got arrested with a DUI. But, well, he’s obviously very stupid, and it was probably for the best.) So, we all hesitantly turned left at the green light, and rode in the bike lane of an otherwise deserted road until the mass of cyclists a couple of hundred strong appeared before us, traveling in the opposite direction.

Since there were cops right behind us, we all very carefully signalled and turned right into a parking lot, then turned left out of it to join the main ride. Then everyone very nervously made their way out of Northwest, over the top of the Steel Bridge, and down to the Esplanade, where with two thirds of the group lost somewhere behind, we sat. And sat. And sat. The leader wanted to head back to the original destination, but scores of people protested and simply decided to ride off “South! South! South!” That is, thoroughly intimidated by the prospect of a ticket, they simply avoided roads by continuing down the riverside path. Little by little, people trickled away, and the crowd slowly dwindled from, maybe seventy, to fifty, then thirty.

One organizer was speaking on the phone to someone at the planned destination, trying to figure out what to do. He announced to the people within hearing range, “He says if we don’t go back, then the cops have won,” which did absolutely nothing to galvanize the crowd, who wanted nothing more than a fun time and all but ignored him. I yelled back, “They already have,” and he laughed uncomfortably and continued chattering with his pal on the other end. Ultimately, nothing was decided.

After half an hour of sitting still, and seeing the same faces I always see at every event, people who undoubtedly recognize me but who’ve never said hello, I decided I might as well get out of there. I buzzed down the Esplanade and soon passed thirty or so bikes chained up to a railing. Their riders were down the embankment, next to the river, standing and socializing on an old contcrete landing. I stopped to take a picture, and a guy I would refer to as “older,” but who was probably in fact younger than me, came riding up. He called out the wrong name, confusing me with someone else whom I know to be incredibly unattractive. (Awesome!) Then he introduced himself (Randy? Raleigh? Roger?), and I swear to God he was cruising me.

When I told him I wasn’t going “down there” to hang out because I didn’t know anybody, he smiled big and said maybe I could meet somebody that way. I momentarily considered whether I’d want to get to know him. Hmm… nope. So home I went.

On the way back, I passed several packs of cyclists. Each time I wondered if they had split off from the mystery ride as well, but in Portland, groups of people are just out riding at 1 a.m. on a Friday night anyway. They were probably just having their own private fun. While I was silently gliding around Ladd Circle, I saw a bunch of bikes lying in the grass, and standing, sitting, or reclining around them were their owners, enjoying the beautiful summer night, just like me, living life while they had the chance. Those were the people, I realized, that I had wanted to meet tonight. And I looked back at them somewhat longingly as I rode on, but, of course, I didn’t stop.