The Last Tiki Bar on Mars

So I’m returning from Forest Grove where I was visiting my lovely, talented and very fun daughter when the spirit of Watusi intervened.

He whipped past me on his single-speed, no shirt, cheeky backpack. My Yuba elMundo electric cargo bike is monumentally strong, but not fast. A few blocks ahead of me, I can dimly see in the streetlights he’s bombing towards Killingsworth, arms waving above his head in joyous wild abandon then BAM! smack into the pavement.

I pull up to his crumpled form, using my bike lights to make sure to shield him from any auto traffic coming up behind us. (COVID rules – no traffic, but still best to be careful) Of course, he’s young enough that even sans-shirt he bounced off the road and was back on his bike in 30 seconds.

If only I had my phone out and recorded it, because it was pretty entertaining.

Now here’s something kewl about biking one simply can’t get from our fine motor vehicles… We chatted while riding along. His name is Drew. Yes, he’s a Bike Nut.

#PORTLAND

Not Mars-related, but sci-fi related and timely.

Destination: Planet Negro is a sci-fi spoof and social satire from Kevin Willmott, a filmmaker with a very specific voice, and whose works we’ve previously covered here at Cinapse. I’ve tried to shine some attention on Willmott, partially because he’s local, but mostly because his films incorporate important themes that need to be a part of our contemporary dialogue. Are his racial satires preachy? Yes, undeniably. But they’re frequently insightful and also pretty darned entertaining.

Austin Vashaw

I think the film is both funny and insightful. Perhaps you will too. Read more here: https://cinapse.co/destination-planet-negro-mixes-social-satire-and-campy-laughs-66e81346dc48

There’s talk on Facebook regarding fictional novels about the founding of England, so I thought I’d make it simple and write my own. Here it is:

ARRGH! It's cold and wet out! 

Would someone *please* go out and invent tea and whiskey?

Ok, now let's fight about who gets it and how much!

“Freedom is just another Leprechaun with nothing left to lose”

“Dr. Pangloss reminds us that we are living in the best of all possible worlds, so live it up, suckers!” — The Author

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes. Quotes below attributed to Flaubert himself.

Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nonetheless.

I am like a cigar: you have to suck on the end to get me going.

Tears are to the heart what water is to a fish.

I am only a literary lizard basking the day away beneath the great sun of Beauty. That’s all.

Garlic is the enemy.

“I have another issue I need to address here, so that you have time to prepare before your next visit to the store:When you were in the store the other day to begin the onboarding process, I noticed that you carried with you a strong presence of garlic odor (?). It may have been on your clothes or something. Because there are many coworkers working with each other, as well as the customers on the sales floor, the company policy manual addresses  the policy of personal hygiene and odors such as strong perfumes, etc. I’ll have to ask you to consider if this is a condition you can resolve before you’re completely onboarded, because it is not something we can delay attending to.”

When one finds themselves standing next to a sample table in a CostCo for 8-something hours you get to really experience how being in Costco is a 2+ hour trip for many people as they wander back and forth in search of meaning in their lives. “Where are the chocolate flavored lobster tampons?” they’d ask me. “I don’t actually work here and they keep moving things around. Maybe try over by the regular lobster tampons?”

That’s all over now, but evidence would seem to suggest that I was pretty good at suggesting bottles of Willamette Valley Vineyards wine would do the trick. Several would be even better.

It’s called The Moda Center at the time of this writing (2020) but in 1993 it was still The Rose Quarter, because that’s where we quartered our roses. For $300/month (or so) we had a roach-infested studio apartment in one of the hotel buildings originally built for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition. From our place we had a quality view of I-5 traffic. Parking was free when I found it and we had a great claw-foot bathtub, a mattress, and a mushroom shaped stool to sit on. Everything else was a cardboard box. I’d sit on that stool and bang out job applications on an aging word processing machine propped up on a box. A friendly guy named Ray ran the place. I believe he was pushing 70 at the time. He liked to spend his time at Denny’s. I’d like to believe he’s buried there today. Ray did a good job of tolerating all his low-income tenants, always in good cheer and doing little favors for us. Ray had a big soul. We all worked at gas stations and fast food joints within walking distance. It’s hard to forget the distinctive smell of someone cooking frozen peas and cheap hamburger in a frying pan, and the sound of domestic disputes echoing down the hallways. Then there were the friendly teens taking their first steps into the world, and the gang of Rose Quarter security guards who’d sometime hang out in front of the building.

Northeast Portland. Hey guess what? Black people are scary, aaiieeee!!! We’ll talk about this more as you turn these pages, but short story long North and Northeast Portland were the only places in the area where non-whites were allowed to settle from the 40’s through the 70’s. Then there were us kids just trying to find a place we could cover on minimum wage. You wouldn’t believe it looking at these neighborhoods today, but in 1994 they were pretty scruffy. Were we even going to be safe there? We didn’t know.

The day came when we decided we could move up to a one-bedroom apartment. $425/month, just a few blocks north in a house that had been fixed up just enough to be legally rentable. One day I was putting that plastic winter insulation over the windows and discovered that they were only connected to the window frame on two sides. Slight pressure from a single finger nearly dropped the window pane out onto the street. The bathroom sink faced a window. At a garage sale I bought the passenger side rear view mirror taken off an old pickup and screwed that sucker into the window frame so I could shave. Affordable Housing!

Our place was on the second floor. It had an outside space just big enough for a chair and the hibatchi we’d picked up for $5. I had to climb out the window to use it. I still carry a sense of hatred for the gas “heater” that attempted to keep the place warm and dry. It didn’t happen, but we vowed to someday have a wood-burning stove for winter comfort.

Then our big break came. The lady across the street told me she was looking for someone to rent their two-bedroom place for $650. At this point, anyone living in 2020 Portland is gasping for breath – walking distance to downtown, two bedrooms AND $650/month? Yep, that’s the fun you missed out on kids.

Other things you missed out on: syringes outside the San Rafael motel down the street. The time a friendly prostitute opened my passenger door and jumped in looking for business. The people across the way we called “The Loud Family” because their kids would be playing in the street after midnight when we were trying to sleep. The old pickup truck parked nearby with the mysterious door graphics: “Friends’ Ethical Plumbing”. I never found out what that was about, but it sounds like a novel all to itself.

Our neighbors one house to the North of us weren’t terribly happy when we took over Marsha’s place. She and her partner let them use the laundry machines… and well, they never bothered to make friends with us. Not even a hello. I guess they were under a good deal of stress. I was there when the ambulance took one of the guys away to the hospital on a stretcher for HIV/AIDS related health problems. > Insert frowny face here < Some time later with new tenants that house next door was the scene for a whole new set of unexpected drama in my personal life.