July 18-20: Hot Rose City

Being back in Portland these past couple of days has been a treat. We've visited to our hearts' content all the old streets, a bar or two, friends and old co-workers. The sun has been blazing and the streets have been simmering in the city. The old neighborhood around Mississippi continues to boom, gentrification's funky flag plastered on all the telephone poles between signs for Saving the World and Sexy Cabaret shows downtown at the Sinferno, blowing in the wind, hanging indolently on recycled cobb walls of the newly remodeled building convergence community center, coffee-stained, homespun emblems of bicycle wheels and shiny dollar signs wrought into a steel worker's artisan montage along the sidewalk.

Tomorrow, we'll load our belongings back up onto our backs and head up the Eagle Creek trail up towards Timberline Lodge and the PCT on Mt. Hood.

One more cup of coffee for the road. It's getting late and I am the only one up here at the house. My legs are sore from biking around town this afternoon. I spun down through the busy afternoon traffic to see Dan and Lacy, now running the show over at the Habitat ReStore. They were filthy and happy and we shared a smile and were positive and mutually respectful each others' situations, plans, space, etc. It's just comfort coming through -- or a sense of ease that comes when people are genuinely happy to see one another. I then spun wheels over the Burnside Bridge and made a quick stop at REI before tearing back down towards the Willamette River and making my way over the Broadway Bridge, turning north up the old familiar route on Williams in North Portland. In a flash we'll be gone and this place will feel so distant and golden again. It took minutes to find the old headspace here, the old feeling and the insularity, the ease and the quiet dissatisfaction. What a trip.

If the job I am hoping to land in Seattle doesn't pan out, I would bet on very strong odds that Eliza and myself might just find our ways back to Portland by early next year. It's a tough prospect to turn down.

I chopped my own hair tonight, struggling and butchering in front of a bathroom mirror. Eliza delivered on clean up, thankfully, fixing my hipster biker dyke do, and pulling off a sharp, clean presidential look, all said and done.

Franz joined Jaimi and Erika and Eliza and me at Amnesia Brewing Co. for beers yesterday at happy hour. I couldn't remember for the life of me what the place was called before getting over there again. He is doing well. Writing. Working for the city doing environmental type jobs, setting things up for volunteers, I presume, fixing things, driving a truck. I wonder what he really does . . . We had a nice evening, culminating with a quiet tapering off at the White Eagle. Little Sue and Lynne Conover sang sweet songs, old ones and some new. It was nice. The bar is so old with its brick walls and old style gas lamp fixtures burning up above the southern side row of tables and stage. Dawn was waiting for us when we arrived. Eliza and I were late already and walked in just ahead of Tom who has been working like a madman. He seems very driven these days, unconventionally trying to build himself a life nitch out of hobbies and an interest in aesthethics and beauty and nature and manual, hard labor. He is out now, after 1 am, painting a ceiling mural for an employer who couldn't wait.

The mural is to be of a cloudy, blue sky. It is a nice image, really. Tom, up on a step ladder, setting his own sign among the ethereal blues.

Climbing.