strike that

PDX

And why is Portland fabulous? It is fabulous because the weekend kicked off with the Midnight Mystery Ride, a monthly (you guessed it!) bicycle ride at midnight to an undisclosed location. Sixty or so assorted bike fans and freaks streak across the dark streets, a parade of blinking red lights and occasional bike horn tooting, winding through neighborhoods and parks and industry for an hour or two before arriving at some secluded destination – in this case a cemetery for Friday the Thirteenth – where everyone mingles and drinks and breaks into freestyle beatbox circles etcetera until the wee hours of the morning. And at four a.m. I found myself scaling a fence with my housemate Brad and a biker named Buffalo Dave and our three bikes, which was pretty stupid except that I got to exclaim I tore my fishnets on the barbed wire! Which is pretty much the mark of a successful evening in my book.

Portland is fabulous for its kickball league, which on Saturday threw a midseason barbeque, so that several dozen of us gathered fieldside in the unlikely October sun and grilled burgers and played sloshball, which is like kickball except all players must be holding a beer at all times. And then I entered the Beer Olympics with three people I happened to be standing next to, and our team won every single event from Beer Flip to Beer Hunter, and we got a baseball trophy jammed into a PBR can. And we took a picture with said trophy that is sure to surface if I ever run for office.

Portland is fabulous for its Quaker meeting, which I finally checked out this morning. Sunday meeting is the Quaker equivalent of church, and involves sitting in silence in a room full of people for one hour. The town where I lived in Costa Rica had a fantastic Quaker community – it was the first time I regularly attended any religious service in my life. I found it to be moving and centering and inspiring, a transition from one week to the next and a chance to regroup and make a smaller scale equivalent of new year’s resolutions. And unlike the Eugene meeting, which just didn’t resonate with me, the Portland meeting is welcoming and full of intention.

Portland is fabulous because I came home to my big old house and the Sunday Times, and I ate figs from the fig tree and grape jelly from the grape vines. And Jamey baked two perfect loaves of bread, so that the whole house smelled like warmth and comfort.

And Portland is fabulous because hours later, after fresh bread and a bath and a few chapters of a novel I just started by the recent Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, I walked two blocks to the 24-hour Fireside Lodge with my laptop and my letter-writing stuff and I got a hot chocolate with whipped cream and one of the last empty tables, and here I am.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:00 PM