Washington/Oregon Trip

My trip to the Pacific Northwest (am I supposed to capitalize that? I hate capitalization rules!) was great. The day I arrived, I went down to Olympia, where my two friends live, to a shindig at my friend's girlfriend's house, and I got to hear some great tunes by some very talented musicians, and I played a bit myself. Next day, we hiked around a park and saw a lot of mossy trees, but sadly, no banana slugs. I waded around in the water, which had a direct contiguous connection to the Pacific Ocean! Atlantic and Pacific...check!

Monday, I traipsed about Olympia. Went to the capitol building and got my haircut. I got to see my friend's bluegrass band play a gig at a local bar. They were great. We played music together back when he lived in Bloomington. I helped him get started playing hillbilly music (he mostly played Classical before that), and it was fun to see how he's developed his fiddlin skills.

Tuesday, I went up to Seattle and farted around at Pike's Place Market, this big indoor farmer's market-ish place. I bought a painting and had a good fish sandwich. It's famous for the fish stands, which were cool to look at. I also red a lot of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I tend to enjoy extremely violent stories that are told artfully. McCarthy's writing is poetic and interesting and beautiful, even while the content of the story is as bloody and bleak as any I've ever read. Fun times!

Wednesday, I went to the Science Fiction Museum and the adjacent Experience Music Project, a rock and roll museum loosely dedicated to Jimi Hendrix, who is one of my favorite musicians. The sci-fi museum was pretty cool. It was a little on the boring side, with most of the exhibits relying heavily on covers of sci-fi novels, but I learned a lot about the genre. I realized that there was a LOT more to the sci-fi subculture than I had been aware of. And it was cool just to read all the crazy plots from all the stories...lots of "why didn't I think of that?" moments.

The Experience Music Project was cool enough. It's weird to see rock and roll, which is alternately counter-cultural and juvenile, bestowed with the gravitas of a museum. A good example is the description of Hendrix's death as "a tragic overdose of sleeping pills." They must've forgot to mention the heroin.

Wednesday night, there was some good, late night jamming on a porch. Thursday was a chill day...just farted around and watched a bad made-for-scifi-channel movie about bigfoot (seemed geographically apropos). There was also a discovery that my friend's house is likely bugged. We were sitting around the empty house, and I mentioned a certain decorative platter's lack of aesthetic appeal, and a day later, it had been replaced! Weird!

Friday, my friend and I went to Portland to visit a friend from the old BC days and to see the city. We did all that, and ate a ridiculously artery-clogging breakfast. We left Portland and travelled to the Oregon coast, where we did some frolicking on a beach and visited a large phallus in Astoria, the place where they filmed Goonies. Well, technically it was a "column," but, you know...c'mon...those things are obviously designed to appease female gods.

And Sunday I left! and it was fun. And tomorrow I go to New Mexico to work at camp for a couple of weeks. Adios!