Northeast Broadway in Portland was quite the happening place today.

When I came home for lunch–I live off Broadway, in the Irvington neighborhood–I stopped at the grocery store on 30th and Broadway first. As I was leaving, there were police cars blocking off Broadway, because a car had driven up onto the median and ripped out its transmission, sending pieces of metal skittering out all over the roadway.

At about 4:30 this afternoon, the old Albina Fuel building caught fire, and it’s still burning strongly as I’m writing this. I drive not too far from there on my way home from work, so I decided to take a smallish detour to hopefully get a closer look, or possibly even a picture – yes, I was one of THOSE people today – but the road was closed off, and all of the drivers were being diverted into the surrounding neighborhoods. The black smoke and occasional flames were clearly visible, even from many blocks away. There isn’t much wind, luckily, so the firefighters are already starting to get the fire under control.

Tonight I’m going to see a documentary about the closing of a famous record store in Northwest Portland, which has been a neighborhood mainstay for thirty years. It’s going to be a bit surreal, because the filmmaker is a woman I actually kinda know. I came across her profile on MySpace, on a page dedicated to a recent Japanese movie that I really enjoyed. “Wow,” I wrote to her, “we have enough in common that it seems like we’d make really great friends, at the very least. Take a look and see what you think.” So we met for coffee, and talked for over three hours. We went for a walk up and down Northwest 23rd, and even went to that record store for a while, before we had any idea that it was going to be closing its doors. We had a really great time, but I haven’t seen her since. Which is kinda weird, and I don’t have a good answer for why we aren’t closer than we are. I thought for sure that we would be. Just another instance, I suppose, to illustrate that sometimes things don’t work out in quite the way you think they’re going to. She’s tried to come to some of the things I’ve been involved with, and I’ve tried to come to some of the things that she’s involved with, but we both have fairly crazy schedules, so it hasn’t happened yet. Tonight may very well be the first time that we run into each other.

Weird.

Should be cool, though.

I gotta go. Sort of nowish.