FlamingText

Road Trip: Portland

From the Beginning
Part 4:

    After something like five hours of cumulative browsing time at Powell's Books, all I have to show for it is a book on guitar technique that I could have bought anywhere. The fact is, I’m really more of a browser than a buyer. The kind of customer that drives shopkeepers crazy.

This might apply to more than just shopping, now that I think about it.

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    I have the afternoon to kill in Portland so after the aforementioned trip to Powell’s and lots of just wandering around the Pearl district (yes, there really is a Chinese restaurant called Hung Far Lo!) I decide to check in to the festival’s artist liaison center ( or whatever the hell they call it) for some free internet access. I check my email, send some quick replies and then decide to mosey on over to the blog, only to find that , thanks to a posting on Joshua's blog, a bunch of his regular commenters have come over to argue about politics. I realize that I have neither the time nor energy at this current juncture to debate somebody who thinks that the economy hasn’t gotten any worse over the last four years. I start trying to do some research to back up my points before it occurs to me that A:Unless I can find statistics from the Heritage Foundation’s website saying that employment is at an all-time low, and B: somehow, in the next twenty to thirty minutes (my calculation of how long I can stay at this borrowed computer station without being a terminal hog), work it into a carefully nuanced argument of such unimpeachable logic that it will convince a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who has known for at least the last four years who he was going to support for president that maybe he should reconsider, I am really just wasting everybody’s time. And "logout" is just one button click away.

So much for politics. . How does Josh have the patience for this?

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    In Union Station, waiting for the 6:15 train back to Seattle, sitting on a long wooden bench that looks like nothing so much as a church pew, I am admiring the early twentieth century architecture of the place, marble columns and high corniced atrium and false arches and such, while trying to not stare at the girl sitting on the bench just perpendicular to me. She is waifish, shoulder-length dark hair and big dark eyes, dark blue jacket, black jeans and black Converse high tops. Art student? Plainly way too young for any real-world romance, but this is just a train station crush. This is just a way to pass the time while waiting for trains or buses or airplanes to arrive.

    She is either drawing in her sketchbook or writing in her journal, much like I am. I find myself wondering if some description of me will find its way into whatever document she is creating of this experience, and if so whether it will contain the word "creepy."

    The train ride home is not nearly as interesting as the ride to Portland, given that it’s dark outside for most of its duration and this time there is no Diabolical Mr. J to help pass the time. There is another lovely young college student sitting directly opposite me, but she really eliminates her suitability for train-ride crush with the cell phone conversation in which I overhear her describe a friend’s attempt to set her up with a man several years my junior as "gross." I hate cell phones.

    The movie(!) on this trip is Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and even though I decline to purchase the headphones, I watch it almost in its entirety (minus one trip to the Bar Car) without sound. Apparently it features werewolves of some sort.
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  The train lets me off in what I now realize is, at night, probably Seattle’s scariest neighborhood. I put on my best "don’t fuck with me" demeanor, which I have no doubt is pretty hilarious to any outside observer, and make my way across six blocks of outdoor homeless encampments and open-air drug markets to my bus stop. For years when I lived in sketchy neighborhoods my defense mechanism was looking like I didn’t have anything worth taking, which works surprisingly well. I would frequently leave my hoopty car unlocked on the street, so crackheads didn’t have to break a window to find out that the stereo wasn’t worth stealing.

  But carrying the guitar sort of punctures this, as people on the street can’t seem to resist asking either A: "Can I play your guitar?" (which sounds, to my ear, suspiciously like "Can I hold your guitar hostage while I annoy the hell out of everyone within earshot?"), B: "Can I see your guitar?"(which sounds like "Can I hold your wallet?") or C: "Hey! Play us a tune!" (Which isn’t so bad, I guess, but really people: If you see a carpenter walking down the street with his toolbelt on, do you ask him if he wants to stop and hammer in a few nails just for the hell of it?)

Posted by flamingbanjo at October 9, 2004 11:10 AM