PDX Day 1: My stupidest accomplishment
PDX Day 2: Happy hour indeed
PDX Day 3: Portland so far
PDX Day 3.2: FUPD has assumed control
PDX Day 4: Laughs, libations, and lost chances
PDX Day 5: Cherubs, rainbows, and unicorns shitting Portland glitter cupcakes
PDX Day 6: Homebound
Sunday, 17 June: Time to head home
Sadly, my trip to Portland has come to a close. It’s tempting to stay for a few more days. I thought about making a run up to Seattle and visiting some friends there for a few days, as well. It’s tempting to just not go home anytime soon, but there is much work to be done in SLC.
Before leaving, I meet up with an old friend, Crystal, for breakfast. She and I met several years ago on LDSLinkup.com . I was borderline LDS at the time, and she was a youth minister from another faith. I’m still not sure what she was doing on there, but we started chatting and have remained friends ever since. Our lives have changed a lot during the course of our friendship. She’s now married, I’m now definitely not LDS. She and I have only met face to face a couple of times over the course of the years. It’s remarkable to me that our friendship has been transacted mostly via Facebook and phone, and has endured nonetheless. Following breakfast, I picked up Adam (the guy I met at the naked bike ride, that needed a ride back to Logan), and we were on our way.
As I mentioned previously, I had some reservations about being stuck in the car with some potential freak show for 12 hours. The ride started out great, he is a big hip hop fan, so we happily bobbed our white boy heads to People Under The Stairs, The Swollen Members, P.O.S., Jedi Mind Tricks, etc, as we headed east.
At one point, Adam said, “Uhh… I have a confession to make”.
“Great, this is where this ride is going to get weird…”, I thought to myself.
“What’s up?” I said.
“I have a passenger. It’s a rat. I hope that’s okay”.
Lucky for him, I spent lots of time working with rats in the behavior lab at Utah State University in my college days. Lucky for him, I think rats are pretty cool. Actually, that’s really just lucky for me, because let’s say I didn’t like rats. What would I have done? Would I have freaked out and told him to get the rat out of my car? That could have been weird. At any rate, I was totally cool with it. He kept the rat in a little box in his backpack 95% of the time, anyway, only bringing him out occasionally to feed / water it.
As we drove through some unknown part of Oregon, we passed a tree farm. The symmetry of the trees was striking, as was the fact that it existed. There was something fascinating and dichotomous about the notion of a man made forest:
The rest of the drive home was fairly uneventful, save for one detour around a huge fire south of Boise. We listened to the audio book version of Tucker Max’s new book “Hilarity Ensues”. I’m a big fan of Tucker Max – not necessarily because of how prolific his penis is, but because of the way he moves through life: “There are lots of things I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of Peruvian women with sharp knives, I’m afraid of heights, but when it comes to rejection, I’m fresh out of give-a-fucks”.
That is the secret to living the good life, as far as I can tell.
Thanks for following along on my little journey to PDX.
