Actual Bar Conversation

Me: I'd like to close out my tab, please.

Guy: I'd like to place another order, unlike these pussies.

Me: Your accent, is that Australia or New Zealand?

Guy: Kiwi, mate.

Me: Ah, the velcro gloves.

Guy: We love our sheep. Keeps us warm at night. Ah, yes, a Coors Light, a Sprite, and a Diet Coke.

Me: Wait. Coors Light? I thought you said you weren't a pussy.

Snow

Portland received a couple inches of snow today. It started this morning and continued ever so slowly to accumulate all day long. From what I have seen, Portland has three snow plows and two snow plow drivers. Instead of clearing the streets, the buses just chain up and the mayor tells everybody to stay at home.

Of course the factory declared today a "forgivable absence". Those who made it in could work and get paid, those who didn't would not get written up. What saints. So of course I have to drive to work. While missing a day of pay wouldn't kill me, my snow driving pride as a born and raised Minnesotan was at stake.

Dude, the roads were fine. Yet there were people who would start to skid going down a hill, slam on the brakes, and immediately send their vehicle into a 180 degree spin-out. Then some guy in a wagon decides the best way to force his old rear-wheel-drive vehicle up the hill was to gun it a whole hell of a lot. This is why I like to drive when it snows in Portland. Free freak show.

By the end of our shift, out of a normal working crew of nearly 100 operators between the two assembly plants, we had six. All of the maintenance guys showed. Between the two plants that meant there were six of us. Yep, one maintenance guy per operator. Bored, bored, bored, bored, BORED!

A good way to recover from boredom is to drink at the pub. After work I picked up my lovely wife and we went with a coworker to the Pub at the End of the Universe. There we enjoyed their eclectic juke box, cheap pool tables, a fine ham sandwich, and $10 pitchers of micro-brew. My turn as designated driver, but still a blast of a night. As the place closes down, some girl is telling me that the secret to driving in this snow is to drive very slowly. "Don't worry about me. I'm a Minnesota farm boy." Still she insists that we need to drive very slowly. As we are piled into the truck I am heard to comment, "What part of 'Minnesota Farm Boy' didn't she understand?"

Snow in Portland. More entertaining than a midget rodeo.

Chaos Rising

I mentioned it yesterday and I shall wax on more about it today. Robert Anton Wilson has died. While this has happened before, the results seem a bit more verifiable this time around. Old Bob has not surfaced to reassure friends that some paper made a mistake in running his obituary.

My wife comes home from school yesterday and tells me that as part of her class, they all went around the room with introductions stating name, age, and religion. She declared herself Discordian. Usually such a proclamation requires quite a bit of follow up. Most people have never heard of this joke posing as a religion cum religion posing as a joke. But on this day a person in an earlier class had also announced himself as a Discordian. His roommate made him a Pope (Spectacles, Testicles, Brandy, Cigar, You are now all Popes as well) and told him he would never meet another Discordian. An obvious lie since later that day he in fact met another Discordian. Not only that but he need do little more than Pope somebody (as I just did to all of you) and he would know another Discordian. The poor kid had never heard of Robert Anton Wilson, so my wife threatened him. He had until the end of the quarter to read some RAW or she would excommunicate him. When all of this transpired, neither of us had any idea that old Bob had snuck out before breakfast.

Then I found out, blogged it, and went to work. As lunch approached at work, someone inquired if I would like a hot dog for lunch. Hail Eris! I ate a foot long coney dog with so much crap smothered on it had to blaspheme against religions we don't even know about yet. While not a Friday, it still felt right.

After work a group of us went to the Pub at the End of the Universe to drink some pool and shoot some beer, or something like that. There I got my group of people who had never heard of the guy to toast Robert Anton Wilson. Or maybe they offered cheers to the fact that after five minutes the crazy guy had stopped ranting about some dead writer they had never heard of.

I have twenty of his books and have read others. Several of them I have read multiple times. Not only do we have the limited edition Maybe Logic documentary but we drove down to Santa Cruz for the premiere of the film and sat in the front row. My favorite author has passed away. In my eyes he was the last of the psychedelic revolutionaries. Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsburgh, even Terrence McKenna all passed before him. So why instead of feeling sadness do I find myself wanting to cheer and chant, "GO, BOB, GO!"?

Lots of fun at Finnegans wake.

Sex, Drugs, and Rock-n-Roll

I'm not typically much of a partier. It's hard to get yourself excited about hanging out with a bunch of drunken bastards when you tend to not even like sober people. For some reason, I convinced myself last night that partying was a good idea. If you're not going to party often, when you break the fast, you need to break it good and hard.

It started innocently enough by playing pool and darts at the Pub at the End of the Universe. They have great tap selections there and I ended up downing two pints and a pitcher between getting off of work at 11:30 and bar close at 2:30. Then I was faced with the decision of either catching a ride home or continuing the party elsewhere. Like I said, good and hard.

Caught a ride to someone's house and slammed another beer before switching vehicles to head to the actual party. At the actual party I was greeted by several familiar young faces from work who quickly ushered me to the keg in the basement. Good thing they were on top of it. I had just enough time to slam another beer before we all got kicked out. I've never before been kicked out of a party without tire irons being involved. It was all so polite. Only yelling and threats of violence were used. Probably because there was no band or skinheads present. Kids these days. Then it was a ride to an apartment. The only alcohol that manifested there was a jug of Carlo Rossi. Shit, that brought back memories. You know it's the good shit because it has a handle so you can't drop it. After a few hits from the jug I taught some folks how to smoke a tobacco pipe. Yeah, tobacco. Rebel rebel. I got home before dawn and I'm only in a little bit of trouble. See, I had left a phone message from work saying I was going out for a few drinks. When I didn't show up shortly after bar close, someone happened to wake up and get worried that something really terrible had happened to me. Fair enough. So next time I feel like going out and making a public ass of myself with the young twenty-somethings, I know to check in so as not to cause unnecessary worry. Yeah! Punk Rock! Anarchy! Personal Responsibility! WOOT! (Ow, my head.)

So, after a totally wild evening I can look back and say that while I partied pretty damn hard, I had no sex, no drugs, and there wasn't even rock-n-roll involved. The juke box at the bar was playing Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. Which reminds me, I need to learn how to walk in slow motion for the next time I'm at the Pub walking towards a pool table with Hurricane playing.

The traditional party formula is for amateurs.

The Pub at the End of the Universe

Writing for NaNoWriMo about a Portland bar with a name like The Pub at the End of the Universe is great. Every time I mention the place it gets me eight words closer to the 50,000 word goal.

Now I understand some of you don’t know the Pub at the End of the Universe. She’s a left-handed lesbian midget albino Eskimo. Wait, that’s Sarah Jane. I’m all messed up on cough syrup right now so just like never mind. The Pub at the End of the Universe was designed by a group of extremely nerdy hippy anglophiles, and this is a good thing. Besides being a tribute to the author of the ever-so-popular Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the interior seems to borrow architectural features from another pillar of British fiction, Terry Pratchett. In Pratchett’s Discworld novels, he describes the space and time bending properties of extremely large collections of books. Anybody who frequents old book shops can tell you that when you enter what looks like a tiny storefront of a crammed book shop, the browser is soon amazed to find how many rows of shelves the store actually has. They find new sections at every turn, short stairways that lead to floors that could not possibly be there, and find themselves wondering if they’ll ever get out again while questioning why they would want to. Pratchett calls this L-Space, for Library Space. It is expressed mathematically as books = knowledge = power = (mass x distance)/time. Similarly, a video shop in Portland has amassed such a huge collection of rare and bizarre films that it has created what might be one of the first examples of V-Space. Once I walked in there and after spending several hours searching through titles, walked out with two videos a couple of minutes later. On another occasion I popped in real quick for a couple of movies, and would swear I came out the next day. The idea is that the sheer magnitude of such collections can warp reality. The Pub at the End of the Universe has somehow picked up on these architectural anomalies and created Bar Space. I have to call it B-Space because if you were to refer to it as Pub Space people would get completely the wrong idea once hyphenated. Not that kind of place at all, at all. While many cities and small towns play host to such anomalous structures, Portland, Oregon seems to have naturally picked up on the notion. It might have to do with such a large quantity of exceptionally nerdy hippies collecting there and bringing their Head Space with.