beautiful, funny, sad & true

This weekend we’ve had quite the snowstorm, which is extremely unusual for Portland.  I’ve lived here for almost thirteen years, and I haven’t seen snow like this before.

Yesterday I was supposed to go to a Christmas party in an eastern suburb of Portland, so I got my car all scraped off and warmed up, and it drove fine (six inches is not a lot of snow), but the air was so cold, and there was so much blowing snow that the windows kept freezing over, and I kept having to stop and scrape them off every few blocks.  That got old really quickly, so I called my friends and said, “I’m gonna have to veto this trip.”  They actually persevered and drove out, but ended up staying overnight (which RockShowGirl and I weren’t prepared to do; luckily we stayed home), and I just got a call from them saying that their car was stuck and that they were waiting for a bus.  Luckily, they just now caught one.

Earlier this afternoon, I wanted to take a walk and get some pictures of my neighborhood, on my way to ApparentlySafestGrocery, since this much snow is so uncommon.   The pictures I took didn’t end up being very compelling, but here’s what the neighborhood looks like.

Some good Samaritan took the liberty of pulling lots of the wipers off of the windshields of cars, so that they won’t get frozen when the freezing rain starts.  Wait a minute. . .what am I saying?  It’s already started.

Most people are heeding the advice of the weather forecasts and not driving.  In fact, I saw lots of people who appeared to be out walking in the snow just for fun.  One family had a young son who decided to ski, and I thought that would make a nice picture, so I grabbed my camera, and as soon as I did, the kid fell face first into the snow.  I’m not gonna lie; it was hilarious.

So I ran my errand, bought my ingredients, and came back to make dinner, which consisted of mushrooms, red peppers, onions and garlic cooked in red wine, butter, salt and pepper.  The vegetables were then served over a bed of linguine.  (I’ve always wanted to say ‘bed of linguine’, can’t you tell?)  It may very well have been the best dinner ever.  You should totally try to make it yourself; it’s easy, delicious, sexy, and totally improvised.  You just start adding ingredients and seasonings to your own taste, and it’s perfectly acceptable to taste it while you’re cooking to see how it’s coming along.

So now I’m in for the night, but I’ll leave you with a short video to show you what it was like today outside my apartment.   The snow was falling, and the wind was blowing, and it was all very pretty.

The Plan for this evening is to get all bundled up and walk out to Broadway, to take some pictures of the snow and the Christmas lights.  Wish me luck!

OneYearAgo

My Halloween was fun, but not exactly in the way I expected it would be.  My Plan was that I would dress up as a grown-up Harry Potter, with a lightning-shaped forehead scar and a wand, but just dress the way I normally do, with no wig or anything.  I thought that would’ve been very clever and hilarious, but I wasn’t able to find a makeup kit for the scar here locally, so that was the end of that.

At work, there were a whole bunch of people who dressed up, some of whom were very clever.  One of my friends dressed up as the dead girl from the movie The Ring.  I wanted to take a little video of her, and she asked if I wanted her to walk in a creepy way, and I said, “No way, it’s much creepier if you just walk normally.”

I came home for lunch today, and was greeted by the sound of huge crashes and bangs coming from the basement.  Apparently our old furnace was being removed.  The noise was so loud that I couldn’t even stand to be in the building.  I went to the kitchen and tried to find something to make for lunch, and I heard a BAM BAM BAM BAM from everywhere underneath me, but it sounded like it was coming from inside my skull.  The walls were actually shaking from the blows of all the hammers.  I got right back on my bike and decided to eat lunch elsewhere.

When I got home from work tonight, I took my bike down to the basement like always, but when I got down there, my jaw dropped.  I started to utter an F-bomb, but my tongue never even made it to the final consonants to enunciate the entire word.  This is the scene that was waiting for me down there:

Everyone’s stuff is intermingled and haphazardly piled on top of everyone else’s, and it’s like that in every room.  It’s a total nightmare.  I must have been down there for ten minutes, with my mouth hanging open.  Even the rugs are rolled up and stuffed in there somewhere, and big drums are on top of smaller, more fragile things.

Yikes.

It looks like the workers will be back down there tomorrow, too, so we don’t dare start putting things back yet.

Double yikes.  This is gonna be a really fun weekend.

OneYearAgo

Last night I got home from a gig and just completely crashed. I slept for eight consecutive hours, and during that time, I had the longest dream I’ve ever had in my entire life. I don’t remember it linearly enough to tell it all, but I do remember most of it. It was comprised of many scenes; each was very long, with a different cast of characters (many of whom I know in real life – there are too many of them to explain, so I’ll just mention them as they appear, and you’ll have to just roll with that, I guess), and all of the scenes were all linked somehow.

Scene 1:

A couple of my neighbors (Skip & Susan), my mom and stepdad, and my work friend Val and her three-year-old son are all outside talking in the around-the-corner part of the yard of the house next door. Everyone is talking; Mom and Stepdad are sitting on the grass next to each other, Skip is sitting on the steps kinda near them, Val is standing on the sidewalk talking to Skip, her son is walking from person to person like three-year-olds do, and Susan and I are standing in the street, a bit apart from the group, talking to each other but still paying attention to everyone else’s discussion. Val’s son walks over and stands right next to Skip’s shoulder, which makes him very uncomfortable. He asks Val’s son to back up a little bit. The kid laughs in a high-pitched and obnoxious way, and continues to stand next to Skip. Val doesn’t say anything to her son, but continues to tell a story to Skip and my family. Skip is becoming visibly agitated, and quickly rolls and lights a cigarette. The kid is still laughing and standing next to him, so Skip finally reaches around and gently pushes the kid away from him, telling him to please step back. Val steps behind Skip, grabs the back of his collar, pulls it tight and starts to berate him for ‘throwing her son around.’ My mom steps over and starts to yell at Val about how she should have ‘handled her son.’ She pushes Val, who makes a show of very dramatically tripping down the stairs and falling into the street next to Susan and me. She starts to cry and yell at my mom, but once she realizes that we all know that she’s not really hurt, she stops.

Scene II:

I am on a chartered bus, with a group of fellow actors, filmmakers, film crew and various supernumeraries, all traveling to a film shoot that is taking place in a large Victorian house out in the remote hills near Livermore, California. The group consists of myself, a few people from the play reading group, Jen B and Jason R, an older guy who has long black hair and wears a black top hat, and quite a few other people. The bus is full. We arrive at the house in the early evening and set up our gear. There are broken black clouds in the sky, creating a threatening feeling, which some of us comment on as we walk from the bus into the house. The actors (I’m one of them) walk into a large room to talk and rehearse. Sarah C comes in from the other room (she is one of the production assistants) to tell us that they’re just about ready to start filming.

Scene III:

The filming has begun, in the main part of the Victorian house, and it’s going well. Sarah C is standing near the door, holding a clipboard and watching us. There are two cameras, each of which is on an opposite side of the room. There is lighting gear and all sorts of cabling everywhere. They are filming from down low, so the floor can be cluttered, because it’s not in the shots. Suddenly, a group of anarchists (I don’t know what else to call them) bursts in to the room where. There are about ten or twelve young men and women, mostly men, in their early twenties, and they are dressed in a mixture of styles, somewhere between paramilitary and punk rock. They appear to be hyped up on drugs. They have all sorts of knives and guns, which they make no attempt to hide. Two of the guys grab Sarah and one of them holds a knife to her throat. A few of the actors are pulled aside also. Some of them are pushed to the ground and threatened, and others are taken into the next room. Sarah somehow gets free and turns around to try and calmly talk with the group’s leader. A wiry, wild-eyed young guy, wearing camouflage pants and a bandana, grabs me by the arm and pulls a very large fork out of his pocket. He holds it menacingly next to my right eye. He is watching his friends wreak havoc on our group and steal our gear and belongings. His hand is shaking with adrenaline. I am very frightened, and I tell him quietly, ‘Please don’t. . .do anything.’ He laughs and moves the fork even closer. Finally the anarchists seem to think that they’ve done enough, or that they’ve gotten what they came for, and they start to leave. They load a bunch of the film gear and and a bunch of other stuff (like small but expensive pieces of furniture from the house, and some of our personal stuff, like cell phones, wallets and digital cameras, and even clothes) into their battered old SUV and leave. The house is a disaster. Just about anything that they didn’t take they either knocked over or destroyed completely. We are all a bit dazed, but relieved, and Sarah is taking stock of the situation, making notes on her clipboard about the extent of the damage. Several of us stumble outside to get some air.

Scene IV:

It’s the middle of the afternoon the next day, and I’m riding on DogBus. No one else from the film is on there with me. Each of us went our own way after the incident. I was taking the bus to Yakima with a smattering of random people, including a heavyset Native American man in his fifties and AlcoholicUnionGuy from my old job. There is an open area without any seats near the back of the bus, where the Indian guy and I are sitting on the floor, making little jokes and counting quarters from an enormous pile of them that is there, inexplicably. I keep having to start again because I always put them back into the same pile, instead of setting them aside into new piles. The bus reaches its destination on C******t and 55th (around the corner from my childhood home). I almost ask if someone can drive me to 60th and L*****n (my family’s current home), but I decide not to ask, because I don’t trust or want to spend any more time with the people from the bus. I tell myself that I’ll get myself there, and that ‘I’ll walk if need be.’

That’s all I can remember, but there was much more. I really wish I could remember how everything linked together, because it really did flow from strange scene to strange scene. If you stuck with this story all the way to the end, I applaud you.

OneYearAgo

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.