Leftovers

So, as has been adequately explained, I recently spent some time in Oregon in the company of Annna, Matie, and Ben. In addition to the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, where Blood Everywhere made their offical debut with Six Shorts In Moonlight, we puttered around Eugene and Portland for a while. There was a fine exhibition by the roving comedy troupe Mr. Show, there were visits to many of Portland's used bookstores and miscellaneous wedge-shaped buildings, and generally, a fine time was had by all.

After a quick twilight tour of Eugene in the Deathbug, Annna and I dragged my luggage into her living room, which was to be my home for the next few days. Between the prominently-displayed penis panties (on the wall!), the collection of Jesuses, the bathroom's skull motif, and the couch that had once been the third-row seat in Ben's VW microbus, I was appropriately wowed by the decor. Soon after my arrival, Matie served up an excellent bowl of steaming borscht and I was introduced to Jessie, the cat. Jessie is mostly deaf, but she can still hear herself yowling, which she does at odd intervals and with impressive volume. Surprisingly, I managed to sleep soundly through the night -- when I remarked on how early it was the next morning (I usually don't wake up before noon, but between time zone changes and lack of sleep on the plane ride, I actually arose at a respectable hour), Annna commented "I got up because the cat told me."

After a morning filled with the legendary punk rock episode of Quincey, M.E. (which is even more amazing than you'd think) and speculation over which songs to apply the uke to, a microbus containing Ben and many stacks of old magazines pulled up to the curb. Ben had brought something else with him on his trip up from Medford. Two somethings, in fact, and they were both air mattresses. Judging by their advanced age, they were Annna and Matie's ancestral air mattresses, and we all had quite a time rendering them usable as beds for Ben and myself on the living room floor. I found out that night that they were quite pleasant and cushiony to fall asleep on, but were a different story in the morning. A hissing, mostly-deflated story. Soon after I'd bummed some coffee from Matie and managed to attain a degree of coherency, Annna woke up. "The floor told me," I advised her.

Later that day, while we meandered through the Eugene street fair, Frog caught sight of Annna. Seeing a chance to make her escape, she pointed at me and cried out, "This is the guy you want! He came all the way from New Jersey to see you!" Now I own an official Frog joke book, complete with grimy fingerprint. I think meeting Frog completes the Eugene-Springfield experience, but Annna and Ben weren't about to let me go without icing the cake, or rather, clotted creaming the scone. A quick push-start of the microbus later, we were well on our way to Ruthie B's.

Ruthie B's is in person just as it's described in the article. I had never seen such a concentration of knicknacks, and when we sat down to ate, there was a group of women that spanned three or four generations, giggling in the feather boas and outlandish hats Ruthie's provides for tea partiers, and having their pictures taken by someone who may have been Ruthie herself. I knew what to expect going into Ruthie's, though. Much less so at the Cameo, where we ate days later in Portland. The Cameo is one of Portland's many wedge-shaped buildings, which played a substantial role in our decision to eat there. Before entering, we all thought it was just another greasy spoon. It was that, and much more. Readers, I ask, what are the first two things you think of when you think of the Northwest? That's right, lumberjacks and Asians, and it only stands to reason that the Cameo is a Korean flapjack house. I think Ben and Matie opted for more traditional fare, but Annna and I both got huge rice flour pancakes with scallions and other vegetables mixed into the batter. Mine had cheese, too. Everything was pretty good, but I made the mistake of forgetting that I'd been provided with some kind of sesame syrup. A woman who I can only assume worked at or owned the place came over and reminded me of this fact, then started spooning it on for me when I was slow to grab the tureen myself, insistently admonishing me, "you try, you try". Fortunately, the stuff was harmless and tasty.

Aside from learning how to pronounce "Truwe," sampling the illegal charms of absinth, and discovering in myself a nearly musical capacity for yelling, I learned a number of things. Ben's ability to disprove the urban legends that made up the majority of my knowledge base was put to use several times, but while we wandered around the neighborhood hardware store, it was I who found a gap in his lexicon. A two to five gallon, tightly sealable gap, as it were. Simply put: I may spout secondhand anecdotes at a rate of roughly one every ten seconds. I may believe that spiders lay eggs in the lips of sleeping people, and that Bob Dole was killed in an accident with a runaway hot dog cart. I may try to play words like "yaoi" and "naib" in Scrabble. But I know what a pickle bucket is. My hosts were utterly confounded by the term.

A lot of the time was spent in stores. I would enjoy shopping more if I could always do it in Oregon, where there's a great concentration of surplus. Aside from the intentional poking through the racks at the used food store and comparing bad science fiction novels at the largest used book warehouse in the contiguous United States, there were unlooked-for encounters aplenty. When Matie and I were dispatched to the local Hollywood Video to rent Life Force (they were out, I talked her into Motel Hell instead) rather than waste valuable time on it at the festival, she happened to mention her fear of muppets. She made the mistake of doing this in the checkout line, within earshot of a greasy woman dressed in rags who spent several minutes arguing the case in favor of the movie Dark Crystal until the line moved forward. At that point, a small child (which may or may not have belonged to this specimen) provided an appropriate break in the conversation by hurling at Matie her tennis ball, a ball which, judging by its soiled state, was shared with at least one dog. The other random encounter was in a food store in Portland, where a bakery-department worker, planning to give us free cookies, approached and said, "How do you make a family smile?" Ben immediately replied, "Blowjobs?" After a few sputters and a laugh, he gave us the cookies and went home with a story to tell the wife.

Some time was also spent at a corn maze, or as the locals call it, "the Maize". The maze itself was dog-shaped, or possibly coyote-shaped, which didn't matter because we weren't looking from above. Or rather, it did matter in terms of finding our way out of it, but I managed to get us lost during the five minutes I spent holding the map because I was engrossed in talking about axe murders with Ben. The farm that contained the maze also had a goat pen, which was drawing a far greater number of visitors than the maze, most likely because it was daytime. The goats had been provided with an enormous sort of Habitrail made of elevated platforms and chicken wire. They could tramp up an incline to reach the upper level, and visitors could purchase goat feed and raise it to the airborne goats using ropes and pulleys with cups attached. It was really odd. After a while, the goats realized that there were much more capable pulley operators in Annna, Ben and myself than the small children who comprised the rest of their new friends, so they would all stampede toward whichever pulley (there were five or six, I think, though several were broken) was creaking. Annna organized a classic pincer attack, with all three of us sending goat-lunch heavenward simultaneously.

Annna and I tried to cover Quinn The Eskimo, on my recommendation because I'd heard the Manfred Mann cover and because the King of Prussia likes it. She only had the Bob Dylan version, which is not recommended if you're trying to learn the song, since half of The Band are playing different songs, or the same song a few measures behind, and possibly backwards. We decided later to try I Walk The Line and I Walk The Thinnest Line, but the latter was almost as unsuited to ukulele as Quinn, so we just re-recorded I Walk The Line with yelling, since that's how we thought the Dead Milkmen would have wanted it. So here's us sullying the memory of a well-loved artist, and here's us doing it again, faster and louder.

[Ed. note: there is a hiccup in thingsihate's uploading capabilities. Rest assured, once it is restored you will indeed have access to these wonders of musicianship and this notice will disappear.]

Anyway, Oregon: good, Truwes: hospitable and generous, hand gestures: large and sweeping (almost choreographed in their grandiosity and precision. I'm serious).