The rest of Portland, Seattle, & Sol Duc

The observer awakes on a twilight hill-top...a low chatter, beer cans, a wisp of cannabis.

ZooBomb! Washington Park, Portland. A crowd of bicycle messengers, trill junkies, unknowns, and assorted esoterics all undergoing inebriation rituals before the shit hits the fan.

"So what is ZooBomb?"
Says this kid that is with some paper trying to play journalist.
"I don't know..."
"Great!"
Name, age, etc.

He was going about it all wrong.

So the murmer hit a note and we all made our way down to the road.
Thirty or fourty on kid bikes with no brakes, myself and two others with skateboards.

"Skaters, Go!"
We led the pack.
The hill was a monster.
Eleven or so at night and riding on intuition alone. We tore down that thing, terrified.
I pulled over when the fog of bikes overtook me and watched from the tail.

"On yr left!"
"On yr right!"
"Yeeeeee haw!"

Seeming fearless bombers of all walks tearing down a 3+ mile incline through a richer neighborhood of Portland.
Hey...this is where Mikey and I slept in a bush last summer on our jaunt down to Arcata.

So that was just great, coming out dead last in the Big Race and a biggole hole in the shoe as proof of her devestating angle.

P-town was ok. Always something there...rubs me funny...can't stay too long.
But the people were great; couched at three different places with good people met through couchsurfing.com (Thanks for the heads up, Allisun!)

Caught a ride out of north Portland with a drunk redneck construction worker that had a distinct aura of Scuba Steve, god damn his soul. We drank Bud tall boys up I-5 clean past his exit near Long View. He'd taken some sort of liking to me...We went to competing high schools on the same side of San Diego. He talked shit about hippies while I drank his beers and smoked his cigarettes and kinda said "Uh-huh" every once in a while to keep him driving. Good enough people...just a different take on things.
I can handle that.

So he takes me 60 miles past his exit to Olympia, and buys us some softie takkas at Taco Hell, as he called it.

Meet up with the Gramps there and have a nice dinner with him and the new wife.

G-pa drives me up to Bremerton the next morning. He gets to pondering out loud...he does that a lot... about why a white woman would sleep with a black man. It was a very pressing issue to him. He concluded, after many years of general confusion and alienation, that these women must have self-esteem issues, and need the black man to "Validate" them with Big Black Cock.
Sure, why not?
But Gramps had taken it a step further.
"Why, if I was really thinkin when I was young, I woulda nailed me a good strong black woman when I was your age!"
"Whys that Grandpa?"
"To wash out the Black Race, of course!"

Hmmm...so, some people were raised in Georgia. What can you say?

Ferried over to Seattle and spent the afternoon with Alena at the park, looking for Bruce Lee's grave, no luck, drank a few, jammed with Dana on turntables and casio synth, then crashed at his pad on Alki beach.

So, ferry to Bainbridge. Miss Betsy Blue and Natalie pick me up there. We walk the beach and go back to Port Angeles, grab a Frugals burger, walk the spit, and head on out to the Duc.

Here, now. A good crowd this season. It will be something. A fellow Arcatian in the ranks, which is great. The beer is ungodly expensive. Great to be back.

Miss ya Jilli-J!