Nesting

For a while now, I’ve been meaning to go to Ikea and buy curtains. I guess it’s a nesting instinct. Winter’s coming; time to make my home a cosier place.

 Portland Ikea: Visible from space

So on a sunny day last week, wanting to get out of the house, I hopped on a bus and then a rush hour train out to the Cascades station, which exists only to serve a brand new, big box retail ghetto. There’s a Ross and Marshall’s and Staples and Sports Authority and, of course, an Ikea, which sits alone in its own sea of parking spaces. The doors of the train used to stay closed at this stop, and you’d look out the glass at vast, empty fields and wonder why we were even sitting here. Now, just two years later, there are streets and lights and banks and restaurants and an all-you-can-eat buffet of American binge consumerism.

And there I was, ready.

 Välkommen

 Träsh

Browsing through the example living rooms at Ikea, it at first seems like an affordable version of that most cruelly named modern furniture store, Design Within Reach. How exciting! Good, modern design actually within reach! But as everyone knows, a closer look reveals that virtually everything in the place is made of industrial glue held together with bits of sawdust. The stuff is cheap in every sense. And what I always forget to remember before I visit is that everything, but everything, is made in China. Basically, Ikea is just Walmart for city people.

Still, there I was, ready.

But first things first. I had actually planned, as part of this little four dollar vacation, to eat at the Ikea cafe. On previous visits with other people, I would look over at the wall of glass with the airport view and sigh longingly. I figured that this time, if nothing else, I could get, I dunno, tea or something. Actually, though, I didn’t have to pinch pennies. I ended up with a fresh veggie wrap in a whole-wheat tortilla with poppyseed dressing, and for desert, an almond cake. Both were relatively wholesome, filling, and enjoyable. Not bad for under five bucks. If I were a sales girl over at Dress Barn Woman, I would definitely walk here for lunch.

 Dinner

 The million dollar view from the Ikea Cafe

At the next table was a young rock hipster, all self-consciously cool, with furry mutton chops and a vintage suede bolero jacket. He was sitting with a much older couple who seemed quite conventional and very clearly Midwestern. I assumed they were his parents and that they would soon be footing the bill to decorate his apartment in a style to which he would like people to think he is accustomed. Later, I saw them all shopping. The son had a big bag bulging with goodies, and the parents walked passively behind him, side by side, saying nothing. I wondered what they thought. Did they get a vicarious thrill helping their son look cool? Or did they just philosophically accept more money down the drain?

Ultimately, I didn’t get any curtains; nothing was right. I just got a blanket (or is it a table cloth?) from the “As Is” section for three bucks. (Made in India.) And I got a box of imported Swedish cookies for one dollar. Clearly food is the best deal in the place; the lingonberry preserves ($3-ish, Sweden) are less than half the grocery store price. I made a mental note.

The trip wasn’t a total wash, though. I got a 2G XD memory card at Staples ($24, Japan). And at Ross, I walked away with a two pack of black Levi’s boxer briefs ($5, Dominican Republic) and a eight-piece placemat and napkin set, much needed, I assure you, and a steal at $7 (India).

(After writing about it just now, I feel the way I felt when I was actually shopping — kind of gross, like I’d just eaten fast food.)

 Ikea bike parking, 100% availability

It was dark when I left. The station was eerily quiet; the train, which was packed full of cell phone chatterboxes on the way there, was almost empty. All the way home, I stared at my sad reflection in the windows.

 Cascades Station

 Empty MAX

 Self-portrait

Back at the house, I knocked on my roommate Will’s door and asked him to give me a hand. With considerable effort, we slid open the dining room table and put in one of the leaves, transforming it from round to oblong. I placed the new placemats, neatened the centerpiece, and put the high back chair at the head of the table. Will and I both stood back and admired it for a while.

Growing up, all of our family meals were taken together at a dining table (and beginning, yes, with bowed heads and a prayer) — no eating alone in your room or over the sink or in front of the TV at our house. That place to sit and eat together has always been for me the hallmark of a healthy and stable home life. I had been wanting a real dining room table for a long time. Now, finally, here it was.

Dictionary Party

As with many households, the kitchen is the main communal space in our home where everyone inevitably crosses paths and, while chopping, frying, or chewing their food, has extended conversations. Yesterday, Joel and I were tossing back and forth our usual mildly sarcastic banter, when I asked to eat a slice of his bread. I was out, and his heavily-seeded, multi-grain, sprouted, all-natural, bio-diesel, carbon-offset health bomb smelled really delicious in the toaster.

I grabbed a slice, and when I went to close the bag there was no twistie to seal it. I asked if it was okay to just spin the opening and fold it over. “That’s what I do,” Joel said.

“Ah, the holistic solution,” I replied. “…or the homeopathic?”

“Hehe. I don’t know,” Joel mumbled. (He clearly didn’t care.)

“:…or,” I continued, pulling another vaguely similar word out of the air, “the heuristic?”

A little later, I saw Joel carefully spelling out “heuristic” on the dry erase board in the kitchen. I asked, “What’s that?

“Isn’t that what you said?”

“Yeah, but I don’t think it’s related to the other two. I don’t really know what it means.”

“Well, now it’s on the list to look up. Anything else you want to know about?”

I touched my chin in faux contemplation, which, as it turned out, was not so faux. I asked, “What’s the difference between ‘proto’ and ‘ur.?’”

“I think proto means first, like ‘prototype.’”

“I don’t think it does. I think it means, like, before. Like, prototype is the thing before the type, what comes before it is what it becomes.”

This was a challenge that could not go unmet. Joel went to his room and grabbed a dictionary.

He looked for “proto” first, but then ran into something else on the way.

“Prosy,” he read, “matter-of-fact, dull, commonplace.”

“Oh, like ‘prosaic,’” I said. “I like that word. I need to use it.”

Joel moved his finger on the page. “Prosaic! Lacking in imagination and spirit, straightforward, unimaginative,” he read.

“Ah, so basically the same.”

After a pause and some more searching, he continued, “Proto! … indicating the first or earliest or original.”

“Hmm” was my only reply. I didn’t like it that he was right.

He flipped some pages, then read, “Ur! Prefix. Original… prototypical… a combining form meaning ‘earliest, original,’ used in words denoting the primal stage of a historical or cultural entity or phenomenon.”

“So ‘ur’ is kind of the same as ‘proto,’” I said.

He was still busy flipping pages. Finally landing on his target, he read, “Heuristic! …constituting an educational method in which learning takes place through discoveries that result from investigations made by the student.”

“So,” I responded, “… this is kind of heuristic, what we’re doing now.”

“Yeah.”

“Sitting at home, reading the dictionary! It’s always a party around here!”

Joel looked up and, with a smirk, mustered his best ironic tone to highlight the genuine enthusiasm: “A dictionary party!”

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.

Cheeseball Recipe

Grow a mustache.

One of the de rigeur elements of the beard removal process is to shave your facial hair into styles that you’d normally never wear, just to see how it would look. I happen to have a naturally bushy Walrus ’stache. Very 70’s, huh? And was that not the cheesiest decade in all of human history?

This post could also be titled “A Surefire Cure for the Blues” or perhaps “Natural Prozac.” Just try not to laugh while posing with a giant fucking Pancho Villa mustache on your lip.

I think this would lend itself well to a themed party — a Valentine’s Mustache Party maybe? A Spring Break Mustache Party? A Fuck a Statutory Rapist Party? The jokes would be endless. The sex would be… hmmm.

Chair Whore

I am the proud owner of 18 chairs and one stool. How did this happen?

 Almost all my chairs

Some people take home mangy stray dogs; I take home broken chairs. Every one I own needs some kind of repair, and I’ll get to it someday. A couple of weeks ago, my roommate Becca bought a house and told us she would be moving. That meant I might have to move too since everything is in her name. Nonetheless, when I walked home from the grocery store the next day, I picked up another old chair somebody had put out with the garbage. I couldn’t resist; it had genuine leather. (It’s the modern one above. Top row, second from left. Black and chrome.)

I can only imagine how many of the sad old things I’d own if it weren’t for Burning Chair, my annual Labor Day celebration. This year, five were sacrificed. They were the ugliest ones or most unfixable, which makes me feel a bit like I’m casting out the weak members of the tribe or abandoning my sickly grandmother on an ice floe.

 Little white chair after years decorating the front yard…

 … it had to be put out of its misery.

I’m going to stay in our house after all, but I have been surprisingly busy lately fixing my chairs. It’s like I want them to be presentable for the new roommates. I want people to think they’re cute, to see that they’re perfectly good. I’ve gotten kind of attached to my little flock, you see; I don’t want to part with any of them. I feel responsible, and if I don’t take care of them, who will?

The Blueback

One thing I like about my friend Brian is that he actually does stuff. He got me to bike out to the gorge this fall and scored us tickets to the Davis Cup finals recently, and a few days ago, he booked us on a submarine tour. That is, there’s a decommissioned sub docked near downtown, and I pass it all the time riding my bike. I’ve been wanting to take a tour for years but never did. Then Brian suggested it, and just days later it was reality.

 USS Blueback at left, Markham Bridge at right. See BIGGER.

Not much to report, but it was quite interesting. There was a diorama onboard comparing international submarine sizes. (Hmmm, looks like Russia is compensating for something.) Subs are pretty phallic, of course, and they are full of seamen. We had a really hard time not making jokes.

 Buttons, dials & knobs everywhere

 The bridge. Lovely panelling, no?

 View through the periscope

 Submarine guts

 Portland skyline & Markham Bridge from the Esplanade at OMSI

Perhaps one thing does warrant special mention: The weather was dry, clear & beautiful — in late December.