First of all, let me apologize profusely for not updating this in a month.  I’ve been busy with work and haven’t really been exciting enough to warrant a blog update.  I get up in the morning, go to work all day, come home and play Oblivion all night.  Or work on Steve’s website¹.  Or generally just dawdle about until it was time for sleep.

The truth is, I’ve gotten a bit lazy over the past few months.  My job is ultimately boring and lacks any sort of energy.  I sit and push papers all day.  In a chair.  All day.  Thus, I’ve gotten fat.  And secluded.  I find myself spending a lot of time alone.  Don’t get me wrong, I like being alone, but after a while it gets grating.  Like walking down the waterfront.  Nobody walks down the waterfront alone.  You stick out like a sore thumb.

Anyway, my friends Missy and Nick came down from Tacoma for the weekend, because it’s Missy’s birthday², and I, much like Newton’s first law of motion, found myself at rest and unable to put myself into motion.  This happens a lot.  Fortunately, it was Missy’s birthday, and that was the external force needed to get me off my ass and out for the weekend.

And it turned out kind of neat.

Saturday was pretty simple.  Missy and Nick had originally arrived Friday night and wanted to hang out then, but I was in the middle of coding websites and whatnot and told them I’d hang out tomorrow.  They had a jam session, though, so I somewhat regret my decision.  Either way, on Saturday we (Missy, Nick [one married couple], Guin, Jeff [the other married couple], and the latter party’s three wonderfully vibrant children, whose names escape me right now³) met at Old Wives Tale for a late lunch/early dinner⁴, which was quite delicious, but also quite spendy.  I will mention at this point that missing two days of work (which I did to go to Boise for the weekend) is not the best thing, especially on rent payday.  Oh well, I’ve been broke before, I can deal.

Afterwards I went home for a bit more web design, before we all (minus Jeff, who was either taking care of the kids, or didn’t like karaoke, or both) headed off to Suki’s for karaoke!  KARAOOOKEE.  I haven’t sang karaoke since I moved here.  Suki’s was full of a hodge podge of young attractive business-looking people and some hipsters, mixed with your average Weirdos.  The ratio was much nicer here than in Boise, though.  In Boise, your typical karaoke bar will have anywhere from 40 to 75% weirdos.  Here it was more like 5 to 10%.

The first song I sang was Fergie’s “London Bridge,” which I prefaced by saying, “Hi, my name’s Josh and I’m from Boise, Idaho.  Now I’m going to show you how we do karaoke in Boise.”  Needless to say, they were impressed (the reserved table full of affluent young business folk especially).

At one point some guy named Mike was called up to the stage, where we all learned that it was his birthday.  For his birthday, he received a free cocktail⁵, and a “karaoke bump,” meaning he could bump his song up to the next on the list.  Pretty cool.  Then Dick, the DJ, brought all of his friends up on stage to spank him.  The guy was 41 years old.  Dick made them spank him 41 times.

All this led me to one fantastic realization: this was eventually going to happen to Missy.

My second song was “The Rainbow Connection,” complete with Kermit voice.  At this point a new group of people began to enter the bar.  They were young (25-30ish) model looking people.  The men wore Ed Hardy shit and looked lithe and handsome, the women were a mishmash of hipsters and black dresses and ranged from “hot” to “absolutely gorgeous.”  At first we paid no attention to them⁶, but they soon became a bigger part of the story.

Missy, in all her Indiana-born and bred glory, sang some Garth Brooks song.  I had to hand it to her — we hadn’t heard any country at all that night, and I was used to every other song being some stupid country song.  In a way she brought me right back home.  But before she sang!, she got her birthday present.  She’s only 27 so there wasn’t as many spankings.  But for the last one, Nick smacked her pretty damn hard.  I must say, it was awesome.

My last song was a duet with Missy.  It was, to be specific, “Suddenly Seymour” from the awesome musical Little Shop of Horrors.  I’ve always wanted to be in that show, so it was nice to sing the song.  We kind of butchered it, but for not having heard it in so long, we did a good job.

Shortly after, some really hot girl from the group I mentioned earlier got up and dedicated her song to the the group.  She mentioned that they all recently graduated from the dentistry school at OHSU, which led me to exclaim, “DENTISTS?!!” really loudly, because I thought she was going to sing “Dentist” from Little Shop of Horrors.  Alas, these were not the musical theatre types, and she (and everyone else who got up on stage) sang “Graduation” by Vitamin C.  Real classy.

At this point I got it into my head that I would sing Dentist, even though the night was almost over.  I went up to Dick, asked him if I could sing it, he said maybe, I was like Okay, and that was that.

Then something happened wherein some lady (also exceedingly hot) from the group of dentists used an alias to get up on stage quicker and Dick wasn’t having that, so he told her she couldn’t sing, and she made a fuss and the dentists started yelling and booing, and that’s when we knew it was time to go home.

Moral of the story: never deny a dentist a karaoke song.

(This is gonna be a long entry, apparently.)

Now SUNDAY, Sunday was the Surprise Protest.

To backtrack: through the grapevine I learned of an interesting concert the band Loch Lomond was going to play: specifically, it was to be in front of a castle in Portland. I immediately thought that was pretty nifty.  So Sunday afternoon I loaded myself into Missy and Nick’s car and we headed off to Washington Park.

The instructions via the grapevine said that we should meet at the tennis courts and wait for someone (it really never said who), where we would be whisked away to this castle up in the west hills.  So we waited.  At the time it was just us and some girl whose name I can’t remember.  Then we ran into some other girl who was also looking for where to wait.  She said she had seen chalk arrows on the sidewalk, and I said, “Let’s follow them!”  So we started following the chalk arrows, and about halfway up this hill, we ran into the people who we were supposed to follow.  They told us to go back down the hill, mostly because they were going to read a fairy tale to all of us when we walked back up.  Fair enough, I thought, and we all went back down.

It was a this point that we learned we were in a Surprise Protest.  The lady who used to own the castle was protesting because they were going to tear it down.  There was a small camera crew and some crying.  At one point the guy who owns the castle now drove beside us and started bitching at the lady from inside his car.  Some other people said stuff, etc etc.  I just wanted to hear Loch Lomond.  So we started up the hill.

the journey begins

This was the lady reading the fairy tale.  She was also taking phone calls from people who were either very angry, or knew some people who were very angry about what was happening.

the protestors?

The line of people heading up to the “castle.”

Now you can read this really poorly put together webpage about the castle, or you can follow my account, which goes like this: some really crazy rich guy in the 1930s decided it would be cool to have a castle up in the west hills, so he builds one.  End of story.  Now, the guy who lives next door to the castle purchased it from this lady (because she couldn’t pay her mortgage? I’m not sure) and decided to knock it down.  There’s more to the story, but honestly it’s blah blah blah at this point.

We learn as we’re walking up that Loch Lomond isn’t going to play at the castle itself, but rather at this lady’s house, which is about a fourth of a mile away from the castle.  So, let me get this straight … you couldn’t afford to live in a castle in the west hills, so you moved out … to a house just down the street, in the west hills?

This entire scenario smelled suspiciously like an Affluent White Person Protest.  But I’ll get to that in a second.

the group gathers

So we all take our seats in the grass at this lady’s house.  They read another fairy tale (oh, the first was Robin Hood, I forgot to mention that, and the second was Show White, which was picked by unanimous decision from the audience), and then Loch Lomond plays a really short acoustic set on the grass.

loch lomond

we were behind them

They sounded awesome.  Loch Lomond is truly a great live band.  Their albums are good but they sound twice as good live.  Plus the all acoustic setting just made it even better.  They only played four or five songs, which was a bummer.  And meanwhile the lady who once owned a castle was bawling the entire time.  Some cop cars drove by but didn’t raise a fuss, and the 63 bus passed once and was kind of annoying, but overall it was a great little found concert.  A really cool idea.

After their set they said that we could go up and look at the castle.  FINALLY, I thought, and so we all eagerly walked up the hill to look at this castle that they were so desperate to save.

And then we saw it.

the castle

WHAT?  That’s the castle?  Suddenly my Affluent White Person radar went off like gangbusters, and I realized I’d been Had.  First off, castles aren’t made of wood.  Secondly, you can’t save something that’s ALREADY BEING TORN DOWN.  Thirdly, it’s just a building!  Why was this woman getting so worked up over a building?  Especially one up in the west hills that 95% of the population of Portland isn’t going to see in the first place?  Apparently it was once on the Portland Historic Monument yadda yadda list but got taken off by this douchebag neighbor.  Well, I can attest that that neighbor was indeed a douchebag, but come on!  There are thousands of people down in the city right now who are desperate for a job, who are milking unemployment and food stamps and government assistance because our economy is in the shitter and no one knows when, or if, it’s going to get better — and you’re worried about this?!

Priorities, priorities.

I dunno, the entire thing seemed shady at this point.  The camera crew documenting everything … for what?  A DVD that no one is going to buy?  Why are you making such a big deal out of something that is NOT a big deal to anyone else but you?  I … yeah, okay.  This is just another one of those “white people pretending to have problems” sort of things.

Anyway, I’m sure it’s a tragedy for the lady who owned the place, but the rest of us just wanted to see a show.  Can’t we just see a show?  Why does everything in this city have to be attached to some movement, some protest, some political whatever?  You have the most breweries per capita in the world — can’t we just get drunk and watch a show?

And that was my weekend.