travel light

when underage nutrinos make hardcore music...

i don’t think that i’m the only working writer/editor/critic who reading their own work after publication is like chewing on their own arm. this doesn’t make it any easier. i got a good byline kick for a while when i was an intern at willamette week, and every few weeks now i’ll read something particularly snappy of mine and get that old feeling, but mostly now—especially now as a less-green editor—i get bummed. like, everything i do in print could have been done better and whatever comes out on wednesday/second thursday/”beginning of the month” is not the reflection of the writer i should be. in journalism, i’d like to be up to par as me as a writer of short stories and that doesn’t happen often. journalism is the perpetual compromise agreed to only because it’s provisional—it will, somehow, catch up. don’t ask me how that’s supposed to happen.

anyhow, sometimes i wind up being able to see through all of the above, and the past couple of weeks have included some of those times. i wrote a fair amount (too much) for XLR8R’s portland issue, which is out right now. looking at the stories, i’m first very thankful to the magazine for, well, letting me be so loud. i hate on the city a lot these days, and so often it deserves every bit. but, when i got a call for pitches for this issue, a lot of things i love came back and the truth is i could have written two full magazines worth of copy about awesome things in portland. so, head to http://xlr8r.com/features and look for these stories

fist fite - AWESOME BRATS.

vibe posse - an attempt to explain ROB WALMART

holocene - one of the best things to happen to portland in my four and a half years there.

daniel menche - simply the best interview i’ve ever conducted. drone shaman, sweetest musician left in portland. maybe the only noise musician i’ve ever talked to that can articulate perfectly what their music is about. i’ll post a full text interview here later.

bummer

oh, and then i got jumped

dunno. i was riding my bike on a trail around westport and got mobbed by a bunch of teenagers. i guess it was a bikejacking. one of them busted me in the face. i stayed on the bike and got away. i’ve never really been punched that hard before and it sucked a bit.

also: i guess it’s implied, but my foot still hasn’t fallen off. in fact, i can see my ankle bones again.

it did and it didn't

the toothache went away, or at least i got used to it, but in last weekend’s adventuring i managed to get my first poisonous spider bite. it looks like a cigarette burn and itches.

did i mention the poison ivy never went below the belt?

it could be (get) much worse, really

I have poison ivy. It looks like this bout—my second in as many weeks (many hours in the bushes lately)—could be a doozy. There’s a couple patches by my left eye (that would be one that had pink eye last week) and my arms, hands, and wrists are covered all over as well as a patch on one of my ears. I think the contact came at the start of a 30 hour non-bathing “camping” stretch, so this could get much worse.

I also have a toothache. Or, rather, I’ve had a toothache since waking up a week before this past Sunday. It keeps getting better then worse then stays the same, so I haven’t gone to the dentist yet. I’m also not sure I have dental insurance. So, I dunno, maybe this weekend I’ll have to get the pliers out, though that seems like pretty extreme self-surgery even by my standards.