I couldn’t find myself anything to do on New Years’ Eve.\u00c2\u00a0 Honestly, my preference runs to something like watching part of the Twilight Zone marathon run every New Years’ Eve and every July 4th on the Sci-Fi network — alone or with a group of sympaticos — which I have done in the past,\u00c2\u00a0 and probably will in the future.<\/p>\n
I rode from one corner of Portland to another, seeing if such and such a place were open and if such and such another place were open.\u00c2\u00a0 Neither were.\u00c2\u00a0 At one point in the Tri-Met ride, I looked around and saw that I really had a strong dislike for everybody in my sight.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a panoply of hipsters, and a bit of bathroom graffiti struck out at me “Hipster Culture will be shown to be just as vacuuous as Disco was”.\u00c2\u00a0 There was a group that especially annoyed me — and one person in the group who did so even more.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a studied and carefully crafted geek chic and a strange “too cool for school” pose from a young lad just slightly than I… I don’t know quite how to describe it, and am at a loss of what disparate cultural cues shoved into a blender brings this person to the point he was at that precise moment.
\nAt a different point in time, and with a completely different crowd — one that I liked better, and one that allowed me to shrug the other crowd off and inwardly figure “Well.\u00c2\u00a0 Leave them to their fun and I hope they enjoy themselves”–, two slightly high and slightly drunk gay men pointed at about three men in their sight, saying “Hot”.\u00c2\u00a0 I am happy to say that I am Hot.\u00c2\u00a0 Two people wearing the typical Fare Inspector uniform, but clearly with other duties this day being a “Fare Free New Years”, walked in.\u00c2\u00a0 They jotted notes in a notebook, frantically scanning the scene.\u00c2\u00a0 This again brought me to a state of annoyment.\u00c2\u00a0 Either you see something or you don’t… there is no notetaking for reference.\u00c2\u00a0 I am sure they had a mental list of items to take note of.\u00c2\u00a0 Interestingly enough, one of them said something to one of the gay men — who immediately obeyed by tossing his cigarette (or was it a joint?\u00c2\u00a0 No.\u00c2\u00a0 Couldn’t have been.) out the fast-closing door.\u00c2\u00a0 A seat immediately opened up, which I jumped at to sit in.\u00c2\u00a0 I saw why it was free… there was three beer cans.\u00c2\u00a0 I, having had bad experience sitting next to empty beer cans, shoved it out of my seat — contemplating for a second waving at the quasi – authority figures to say “Not Mine!”
\nI couldn’t figure out what could possibly be happening at Pioneer Square.\u00c2\u00a0 Sometimes it is cordored off on New Years’ Eve; sometimes it is not.\u00c2\u00a0 It wasn’t this time.\u00c2\u00a0 There was a decent sized but not overwhelming number of citizens milling about… I would later learn that one of them was Daniel Lee, all the more reason to have avoided the spot.\u00c2\u00a0 The next day I saw that a ball of some sort had been broken into pieces, and silver metal specks were all under the large Christmas Tree.\u00c2\u00a0 More power to that.
\nThe rest of the night was all a blur, and just as well that it was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I couldn’t find myself anything to do on New Years’ Eve.\u00c2\u00a0 Honestly, my preference runs to something like watching part of the Twilight Zone marathon run every New Years’ Eve and every July 4th on the Sci-Fi network — alone or with a group of sympaticos — which I have done in the past,\u00c2\u00a0 and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-ground","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1998\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}