Sweet Nectar of Life

I read "Shoe Dog" so now I am an expert on Nike and all the other brands that are trying to be them. The coolest part is Portland was the major pivot point in their succession, I assume they reign supreme because Nike is so cool and awesome and better. At some point, I'll have to find the Shoe Dog Adidas book. I'm sure it's an amazing story of how greed and corruption lead to their ultimate demise to superstar underdog Nike, I mean Puma is already a skeleton in the closet... SO Nike is king in Portland. And don't worry that I jumped to an overtly biased conclusion with little evidence, it's all the rage right now among news reporters, millennial bloggers, opinion columnists, politicians, and people holding Master's degrees in French Polynesian Art. Shoes have strange prestige in Portland. Nike makes a few thousand pairs of these special shoes a few times a year and 180 million people want them on drop day. Anyone that cops a limited edition pair of

Portland is slowly climbing the ladder (depending on who you ask) in the food world. But we are not top dogs yet. When you ask people, why are you visiting, I will rarely hear of all the restaurants they must go eat consume in order to fulfill their destiny. I don’t mean to rag on the food in Portland, it’s just the same as a Paris or Bangkok or Copenhagen. But I have read so many articles talking about how Portland is the end-all destination to eat, I'm just not seeing it, I mean there are like two places in town to find a door Chicago-style deep dish pizza. If you can barely cover the US, how are you going global? https://flic.kr/p/imJrtk The problem is, everyone in Portland thinks PDX is the most amazing place in the galaxy to eat. They protest - no, my co-workers heard from their dog walkers that her neighbors youngest sister's former grade school teacher traveled in search of great food for 34 years and only found it in Portland. The pride in our food is bl

Well, my kicks are lit, my ride is lit, my job is lit, my life is lit, but something is missing. As a Portlander, you can't just talk the talk, walk the walk, and protest the things you hate - you have to do more. So, today I decided to learn to play the Bass While this may be out of left (or right/independent/I don't vote or care) field, it has actually been a long time coming. Throwback to a Thursday in 2015. It's October, I'm in Arizona for the Annual The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. I just got my wife her first iPhone. It was a space gray iPhone 5s with 16Gb of memory. I know what you are thinking - 16Gb - WTF, it's basically unusable. And while you would be correct, she wasn't big on apps and relied heavily on iCloud to store pictures. Overall it was a good phone, hand-sized, and took what was at the time the best mobile phone pictures. Even though in retrospect the pictures were crappy, it was miles ahead of my android.  So I'm in

Commuting is the necessary evil of the Parisian lifestyle. Portland, being the large-small town that is claimed to be, has a Metropolitan Area Express or MAX for short. This modern light rail system with a tap to pay and its own app is for the most part useful bordering on useless. As a Portlander, I pride myself on this cute little transit system and have much respect for the person that has figured out when and where each train, bus, and streetcar stops. It, however, leaves much to be desired. First off, the platforms. If you have ever traveled the underground systems of NYC or London, toss that image out of your mind. The MAX is an open transit system and as such many of the stops are literally a Ticket station on an otherwise unsuspecting sidewalk. You are walking along one second, and the next you are at a MAX stop getting run over by people pouring onto the sidewalk. If you are not looking you can easily miss the "Hop" post, a cute pole with a touch less pay box o

I come from Billings, MT, it takes 20 min to drive 30 miles. There are bad drivers in Montana but when there are barely 100k it's hard to get them all on the road at once. Portland, however; OMG, 70mph in a 50mph is "the flow", people will ride your tail for a mile just to speed around you and exit. Distracted / reckless driving is rampant, pedestrians are daredevils, and my insurance doubled just moving here. I don't know how a hipster is supposed to drive but I'm not going to be trying to flip the 78 on the Crosby Norman while driving, combing my beard, drinking coffee, and texting. There are a few things that get under my skin more than anything. Speeding: see also big oil needs all my money and the earth can die. For those of you that are so rich that gas costs (or in many cases electric bills for your Tesla charger) don't matter, you can skip to the part where your risk of death goes up and you are killing the earth. For everyone else - set your al

Portland is known for many things but none is more notable than crunchy hipsters. They love organic, upcycle everything from napkins to soup cans, and drive hybrids. SO obviously I have to get one too. Portlanders have a fierce and vocal sense of national pride and determination for improving the world around them. If I am to integrate, I have to buy a hybrid that was made in the good o' US of A - a Honda Accord Hybrid. I know. Tesla. But I have only been blogging for a few weeks and don't have that kind of money yet. I could wait a few more days until my blog is really big time and someone gets it for me from my Amazon Wish List, but I can't wait. I needed instant gratification. Prius was too small, not to mention I have blind brand loyalty to Honda. The first and most important part of car shopping is picking the color; you have to look at this expensive machine every day for years to come. The color with define your life and personality, even your driving style. I ha

SNOWMAGEDDON 2019 (it's important to note the year because Portland will have another one in a few years, like clockwork) Snowmageddon or snowpocalypse, unlike it sounds, has little to do with (depending on your level of knowledge or understanding and specific beliefs) of the end times from the Christian perspective. The best I can tell, it is snowfall (real or predicted) that literally closes all or part of Portland, OR. And I mean snowfall of no more than a few inches, depending on where you live. Hold on to the last statement as it becomes the only thing from this blog post you need to remember. To start, the name is humorous for a couple of reasons, the biggest reason is "apocalypse" in the modern definition is - the complete final destruction of the world. So we could only ever have one, ever... like we would all be dead and gone and there would literally be no world left to have seen another apocalyptic snowstorm.   Another reason I laugh is: "h ey Google