Outside a bar.  One woman, one man.  The woman, with Rising Indignation:  “So what you’re saying is, because that girl slept with that guy at that party, I should sleep with you?  Is that what you’re saying?”

Man:  Well, yeah.

There has to be a story behind that, right?  No word on whether they hooked up at the end or not.

Outside a supermarket.  One man, mid-20s, runs up to greet a man, mid-30s…

older:  “Yep.  Just got back.  So, what did you do?”

younger:  “Oh, I don’t know.  Sat around.  Masturbated.  Got high.”

older: “Sounds good.”

… Hm?

A man walking with his son, who I’ll just randomly say was … seven years of age.  The child says, “Dad.  Would you rather live in space?”  The dad pauses slightly, though not dramatically — a function of trying to figure out two steps in advance more than trying to come up with anything profound — “No.  I don’t think so.”  The child asks, “Why not?”

I didn’t hear anything beyond this.  I assume there’s a chapter in “Parenting for Dummies” which covers how to answer these questions.  I assume dad can go any number of directions — maudlin, grimly humourous, sentimental, irreverant.

The snow has altered, likely unofficially and off the books, the rules and regulations of the road.  I think this is understood by all, and if the sight of people cross-country skiing in the middle of downtown streets doesn’t bring that home, nothing will.  The sledders in various neighborhoods I think have had the common decency to quarantine off their streets.  Sidewalks exist sparodically in various forms — cleared, partially cleared, not cleared, snow stacked up where it wasn’t before thus obliterating a bare minimum.

Which is why it was odd, walking just to the side of the street, sometime after one car had passed, the driver for a small truck slid their window open and uttered to me, “Use the Sidewalk.”  It took a decent second for me to process that that just happened, which meant my response went un-heard by him — a shame — there are times when you don’t really want curt responses to be heard, and there are times when you do — this fit the latter.  “There is no sidewalk.”

The comment puzzled me.  He’s driving as per road conditions, like, three times as fast as I’m walking.  This might make sense if I were unusual in my middle of the road walking,  but I wasn’t.  So I can only guess this was an element of low-boiling very low-key road rage.

Sometime later I enter into downtown proper.  I see plastered to a pole a sticker reading “Bring The Troops Home and Put them on the Mexican Border”.  Read further down the sticker, and I’m familiar with this — as seen here — “National Alliance.  Hillsboro.  Call blahdeblah # for radio schedules”, which I suppose means some neo-nazis are broadcasting on short-wave radio during half hour intervals.  The next post over and I see “Call blah de blah to Report fascist and racist activity”.   Activity as far as I can tell is sort of confined to a handful of stickers in the dead of night and your random assortment of graffiti in public places… and the occasional Elks Club Lodge “rock band reunion” “please go away” meeting.  Well, a white christmas for them, I suppose.

Someone bought $431 worth of stuff at the Dollar Store yesterday.  I assume that’s 431 items, but there was actually a sale going on at the Dollar Store, with 75 cent items.  Still, looking over at the sort of waving away any line cahier, it looks like it was all dollar items.

A woman had approached me while shopping, with a smallish Rice Krispies Treat item, and asked “Could you read the number of calories for this for me?”  I read it to her.  She balked, and said “Thanks.  I… guess.”  I don’t know what she was expecteing.  The two quasi-meal items I was buying were rather unhealthy, preservative laden microwaving boxed foods.  Utter crap, really, which is destroying my body and will be the death of me.  Just as certainly as the Krispie Treats will be the death of her.

Spattered on various white spots on Mississippi Street there is this graffiti:

“Hipsterville Straight Ahead”.

Okay.  I see what that is getting out.  But the next graffiti reads:

“7/11 for Hipster Sluts.  —>”

Hey now.  But what is it referring to?

On the other end the arrow for this location points “<—-“, so the range is narrowed.  I suppose it might be this place?  This would pose an item of irony for everyone involved.  The proper response, though, is the word of the year, “meh”.

This may just be the most awkward church sermon I would ever have the displeasure of having to hear.  He’s pacing in front of a bed, and uses the word “sexperiment”?  Isn’t this the type of thing we successfully cordioned off to the 1970s?  Then again, the economic woes throw us right back into the 1970s, so everything old is new again.  Ugh.  Have the children been sequestered away, at least?  Was there fore-warning for the congregants to stay away?  Or is this a stunt they have come to expect, and thus it’s all sorted itself out already?

I overheard details of a stranger’s sex life the other day, a girl talking with a boy (I guess the “trusted friend” type, and you can take that however far you want) about relationships.  I will refrain from using names here, the great thing being I don’t know any names here.  The girl had a serious relationship, and thought there was an understanding that this was not necessarily monogamous.  So she did some guy on the side, and when she told her boyfriend about it, and asked “okay”, there was friction between the two.  And this is a lingering curfufel.  Now, of course, what was interesting was her explanation of the difference between the two acts of sex.  The non-serious mate was “so much fun”, with a lot of tango-ing, a lot of charging from every which direction.  The serious relationship was dull as Hell, with a (imagine a tedium here) “Bang.  Bang.  Bang.”  And  “Oh, just stop it already!”  But it is great to have him around.

Hearing further, I figured out what the real situation here was.  The awesome sex took place in a laundry room.  Of course the other sex was boring by comparison.  If she really wants to charge that part of the relationship up, she needs to start doing it with him in the Laundry Room — a room of real erotic possibilities.  That’s where all great sex takes place, I hear.  I almost wanted to interject this point into her discussion of her sex life problems, but that was unwise — I was having a difficult enough problem pretending that I wasn’t hearing them (and by them I mean her).

I wonder, though, if there’s a healthy number of porn films which take place in a Laundry Room — if it’s a profitable sub-genre?  I don’t think so.  I haven’t seen too many girly poses done atop a washing machine — dryer set.

Come to think of it, that pastor (I see that Dan Savage discusses that matter here) should bring a washing machine and dryer, instead of cavorting on a bed, to the front of his church congregation to drive home that point.

I was drawn into a debate yesterday, to settle a matter.  I didn’t much like being drawn into the debate, because there was a good chance I would not be authority on the matter, but there I was — two strangers called me over with one guy saying, “Okay.  Help us out here.”

“You watch movies?”
A strange question, and one with the obvious answer of “yes.”  But this is vague and it’s as likely I haven’t seen whatever movie they’re going to give me as it is that I have.  Are they talking a Fellini classic or Weekend at Bernie’s 2?
“You see the movie… The Godfather?”
Oh God, no.  I don’t like the spot I’m in.  Yes, I’ve seen The Godfather, but I’m not going to be able to provide anything substantial to settle a debate.  “Yes, but… um… not for a while.”
“Okay.  Fine.  Now… when was that made?  What decade?”

Is that it?  I just have to say when it came out?  “Early 1970s.  I’m thinking, maybe 1973.  1974?”  (A quick google check just now shows that it was 1972.”

“Get out!”
“No.  See.  I told you.”
“It did not.  It came out in the 1980s.”
“You’re just upset because he gave you the right answer.”

“No.  Look.  Al Pacino.  Scarface.  Think about the age.  Scarface came out in 1988.”

“Um,” I said.  “No.  That sounds… a lot later than it came out.”  As I said that, the other guy shouted out, “Scarface came out in, like, 1982!  Jeez-Uz!”

A google search just now shows it came out in 1983.

As this went on, I wasn’t quite sure what the terms of the debate were, or what the misguided man’s mindframe on the matter was — he thought Scarface came out in 1988 and extrapulated back to The Godfather with Al Pacino’s age, but I sort smiled and walked away, knowing what the issue at stake was.  And I breathed a sigh of relief that I had a reasonably accurate answer, even if my guage was that this was a pointless debate that demeaned anyone who wanted to argure over it.  (People who care enough to argure over The Godfather or Scarface should be beyond its release date and be delving into other issues of minituae.)  But for me it is a bit of hit and miss, and I dodged a bullet in terms of providing something useful.

A family — dad, mom, baby in stroller, four year old boy — walk into the street car.  I am sitting on one of those “loner” seats.  The boy calls out, “I Wanna Sit down!”  I begin to pivot over to rise up and offer the boy a seat, before edging back and correcting course.  The dad tells the boy, “No.  We’re standing.”  With that I remain seated, never mind I am getting off in two stops — this is an important life lesson for the boy.

The boy whines a few more times that he wants to sit down.  The mother scolds him, telling him he was the one who wanted to ride the street ca.  I get off a stop after I meant to, my way of accomodating the situation.  Had I stood up, the kid surely would have become a juvenile delinquiet as a teenager and gone on to be incarcerated as an adult.  As it were, I have put him on the path to an advanced degree and a six figure income.  On the other hand, there is no telling what the baby in the stroller picked up from the seventy-year old stranger grandma figure who was waving and making smiley faces at him/her.  Nothing but trouble for that kid.

So, Portland has more or less sucessfully curbed the Prostitution problem on 82nd Avenue.  There is a tad bit of NIMBY-ism in the celebration, only in as much as nobody really cares what happened to the prostitutes or the probably not cracked problem of Prostitution in general.  They’ve said to have dispersed into other neighborhoods a tad, been moved over to Seattle for different lucrative business, and on from there.  But the problem which arrives when a prostitute aggressively propositions you, and you try to walk forward and accidentally make an oral agreement by saying “Fuck you” is solved.

But I think I have spotted where the prostitutes have gone.  I was walking out of the Lloyd Center Mall when a couple of Verizon employees jumped out at me selling, obstensibly cell phones.  I walked past, and heard the selling point: “Would you like to be Serviced?”  What else could “Would you like to be Serviced?” possibly mean?

A bird pooped on me yesterday morning.  It was one of those occasions which causes one to think and consider various matters of the Human Condition, Life, the Universe, Everything.  I thought about where the nearest faucet might be to drench the bird-shi& away.  I also wondered which type of soap might be best to get it off of my hands.  Further, I contemplated whether I needed to put my coat into the washer or if I could just rinse it off and douse it with a towel a bit.  Deep thoughts all around.