Home

That title should be followed up by one thousand exclamation marks because Portland, Oregon... oh Portland, Oregon. There is nothing like home, which you forget mightily when you are touring the globe because everywhere seems incredible, each new place an adventure mountain. But when you get home, I'm talking about home home, where every street is tagged with a memory and you run into your people at every gallery show, boat dock and hot dog stand- man, it doesn't get any better.


So I'm talking about Portland, just like the New York Times likes to do.

We took Sean's boat on a spin down the Willamette River yesterday, the strip of blue in the middle of my fair city. We ducked under the (still standing!) Sellwood Bridge and the Ross Island Bridge and just when we hit the Burnside Bridge we caught the strums of the Waterfront Blues Festival, the biggest one of it's ilk west of the Mississippi, so we anchored in with the rest of the lucky waterbound and hung out. Sunscreen, beers, heckling of the other boats... becoming one with the panorama.

Portland is the hippest city ever, ya dig? Like, we're reinventing the cool kid wheel out here. I like how the scenesters here are scruffybeautiful, like really pretty 1950's style dresses you dig out of the Bins (oh, you don't know the bins? You haven't truly lived til you've been up to your elbows in unwashed piles of societal cast offs in the Goodwill donation center. You pay for your stuff by the pound, people! And there I go talking about the bins again...).


I croozed First Thursday last night, yuppie downtown's excuse to get arty with it on a monthly basis. Me and a couple of dear friends walked through a parking garage to get to a sweaty staircase that took us to a sweatier artist's co-op on the top floor of the Everyday Music building on West Burnside. Talked to a "sweet and salty art folk" lady guitarist (holler Mindy! hope you're grooving on the blog), caught some coulda-been-colder drinks and prostrated ourselves on the hardwood floor. And you know, we're laughing...

And sweating like hell (humidity not being all that common in the land of the Perfect Summer) and rolling around on the wood being poor-as-hell rockstars. And I realized I have friends who know me and belong to me and that I'm not getting rid of, no matter how many times I take out that passport.

Which rocks,

Peace and Love,

CD