Author: Brian

Kevin is not a runner, although he would like to be. The opening minutes of the race on Sunday were at a walking pace for both of us, due to the huge number of other people. But once we got past the starting line, we could move to a slow jog, still dodging all the other people but now spread out enough to give us room, he in runner’s shorts and Nike Shox, me in my kilt and Brooks Adrenalines.

But it still was a bit fast for him, and I’ve been training half-way decently; before even a quarter-mile, he needed to walk and I was ready to go.

“Go, go!” he said. “I’ll be OK.”

“I’ll be on the left-hand side as you cross the finish line,” I said, and then I moved forward and didn’t look back.

Literally.

Even when I heard giggly girl voices behind me a few minutes later.

Girl 1: I just want to find a hot guy, and follow him.

Girl 2: There’s one! In the kilt!

My immediate reaction was Oh, they’re mocking me. I am short, pudgy, balding, and I’ve got esteem issues to boot¹. But they didn’t sound like they were mocking me; they were giving me props for being brave enough to wear a kilt today. So I was able to talk my negative voice down from the mental ledge and take it as a compliment.

Especially as they continued:

Girl 1: Him? That’s hot!

Girl 2: (shouted) I love your kilt!

I didn’t turn around. I just smiled and held up my hand, making the circular OK sign, and waved.

I could still hear them talking, though.

Girl 1: That kilt’s really cute.

Girl 2: We should have worn kilts!

Girl 1: Next year, we should totally wear mini kilts!

I immediately pictured hot runner girls in tiny mini kilts and tied-off white t-shirts, running behind me.

I then pictured myself next year (in much better shape) running the Shamrock Run with an entourage of hot runner girls all dressed in matching mini-kilts. That might even be enough motivation for Kevin to keep up with me for the whole race… Or get my other friends to join me.

How do I make that happen next year?² I’ll even spring for the kilts…

¹ That’s a joke. At my own expense, but still meant for humor.

² No, I didn’t talk to them again after that, or try to find them after the race. I’m kinda single-focused like that.

After the off-and-on rain of Saturday, Sunday morning arrived dark, windy, and rainy. And cold.

I still got up, though, and got dressed in my finest (and only) kilt. Kevin and I were running in the Shamrock Run 5K. Kevin had run it with me last year, and wanted to do it again. Though he had called me Friday evening, worried about the weather forecast of rain for Sunday morning.

He got what he had worried about, all right. It was coming down in buckets while I waited for him to pick me up.

Joking about the bad weather helped cheer us up, and we drove downtown and found a parking spot. We kept mentioning that we wished it was the part of the day for eating the giant post-race celebratory breakfast, like we were reading each other’s minds.

Walking towards Waterfront Park and Front Ave., we passed a group of older men and women, dressed in green, with green beads and hats and some of the men in kilts, like me. They were taking shelter under an overhang. One of the ladies saw us, and me in my kilt, and called us over. “You look so cute in your kilt, I want to give you one of these,” she said, and held out her hand. Draped over her arm were two silver chains, each suspending a little green plastic shot glass. “And you get one, too,” she said, gesturing at Kevin, “because you’re his friend!”

“Oh, right on!” I said, “thank you!” Kevin and I put the chains around our necks.

I held mine up. “Y’know… it’d be nice to have a little somethin’-somethin’ in here to warm us up for the race…” I was joking, but the gentleman standing next to me smiled and said, “You’re right! What’ll you have?”

I said, “Some scotch would be nice” and he waved over a friend, who pulled out a clear flask with brown liquid from a backpack.

“It’s only a single-malt…” the man said as he put a little shot in our glasses. One for me, Kevin, the man in the kilt, and the man with the flask got some, too. We raised our glasses in a toast, and downed the unmarked liquor.

It was smooth. And damned if it didn’t actually warm me up! Suddenly, even though the rain and wind had not stopped, I felt a little warm glow radiate from my stomach outward. One of the group took me and the other kilt-wearing gentleman’s picture (I should have given my email address so he could send me a copy but did not), and Kevin and I left to go get in place for the race, which was starting in 10 minutes.

A shot of scotch, a run, and a beer chaser. What could be better?

In Twitter, people have invented a way to tag individual tweets so that they are part of a larger, tagged, group. That method is called “hashtags” because the tag includes a hash mark.

So all the tweets about the Twitter meetup (or “tweetup”) at the KGW Studio on the Square yesterday evening are tagged “#squareup”.

If one searches Twitter for #squareup, one would see all the tweets about the event.

Isn’t that cool?

KGW has converted the old Powell’s Travel Books location, a bunker under Portland’s living room (a.k.a., Pioneer Courthouse Square), into a remote studio. And Wednesday night, the people behind their Live at 7 show, Stephanie Stricklen and Aaron Weiss, invited all their Twitter followers to come see the new space.

There were a lot of people there, more than I expected. The little studio was full of people I’ve interacted with, but have not met in person.

There were three exceptions: Neva, whose birthday party I went to a couple of weeks ago, and who seemed to see me as a familiar face in a sea of new faces.

Second was Aaron, who works for the county in the same building as I do. Aaron and I have been in the same meetings, and interacted on blogs in the past, but never formally introduced ourselves to each other until last night. (I expected Aaron to sound like Seth Rogen but he doesn’t; he sounds like Aaron).

And, of course, Christopher Frankonis, The One True B!x, a Portland blogging star, whom I have seen in public previously; I finally shook his hand and introduced myself.

I got a hug from Stephanie Stricklen, and I got to tell the Director of Programming for KGW that I’d like them to do more local politics and reporting. I got to chat with a producer for the show about getting local musicians into the studio for concerts and shows. We, as a group, gave advice to the talent for the station on how to best make use of Twitter for their reporters – the basic idea being, let each individual reporter do what they want with their Twitter accounts, and just collect them all on the main KGW web page. Don’t restrict them in what they talk about. If they want to just talk about the stories they work on, let them. If they want to talk about their pregnancy and where they had dinner, (like Steph), let them.

The whole point of Twitter (OK, one of the points of Twitter) is that you can follow or not follow people for whatever reason you want. Me, the bulk of people I follow are interesting in one way or another, and the bulk of those people are local. But other people might have different ideas on what makes others interesting or worth following. It’s about finding an individual voice.

So far, the best part of Twitter, for me, is that it’s led to meeting great people in person.

I took a few pictures of the event, and you can find more and better pictures of the event here.

The remote studio is small but packed with tech. The cameras are all robotic monsters that are controlled remotely from SW 15th and Jefferson, and directed into place via a rail marked with barcodes (which I tripped over and knocked out of place – sorry, Aaron!) There’s a raised desk that, I believe, Steph said she would never use. There’s a big green screen for doing weather in front of, a technical skill that is difficult for me to imagine doing gracefully. And nearly everyone commented that it would not be long before people, regular people in the Square, would be flashing and mugging for the cameras in front of the windows.

Which, I believe, is the real-world outcome of what D.J., KGW General Manager, described as “being connected with the community.” Right on!

Kevin and I were out and about, and driving around the Hawthorne area looking for a parking spot. Destination: Powell’s on Hawthorne.

He pulled onto a side street, and while I was looking at him and saying something, I interrupted myself and pointed out his side window. “She’s a stripper.” He turned, looked, and saw a tall, dark beauty with a crimson swatch in her hair crossing in the middle of the street.

I told Kevin her stage name, and mentioned that she’s on my MySpace friends list. Kevin was interested (though not beyond the bounds of basic curiosity), so after he parked, I pulled out my iPhone and showed him some of her pictures and related what little I know about her. “She’s… well, she’s probably not calling herself a ‘Republican’ anymore, ’cause the Republican Party is in steep decline. But she’s anti-Obama, and pro-gun, and all the other generic Republican talking points. But, damn, she’s got an amazing pair of (as far as I know) natural breasts.”

I joke that spotting strippers in their street clothes is fairly common because Portland is reputed to have a very high ratio of strip club per capita (which urban legend has been examined and found wanting). That means, to me, that any random attractive woman I see is likely to have been, is currently, or will be in the future, a stripper.

But maybe I just see strippers more often because I go to strip clubs a lot? Maybe it’s me? I’m so tuned in to the talent working at the various clubs I frequent, I recognize them more often than regular people?

Last evening, I was riding home on the bus, tired and a bit overwhelmed by the group I had just left (about which I’ll write later). I was sitting in the seat right in front of the rear door, surfing on my iPhone, zoning out. The bell rang, the driver pulled over, the rear door opened, and a voice called out, “Thank you!”

The voice tickled my memory.

That voice was in a normal everyday tone of voice. But the last time I heard it, it was cooing and giggling in an assumed, but entertaining, tone of voice. In fact, the only times I had ever heard it. Or should I say, “heard her.”

I looked out the window, and, sure enough, saw yet another stripper, dressed in normal street clothes, walking down the sidewalk and away from the bus.

It happens nearly every day. Don’t you wish you lived here?

Wil Wheaton went nuts over some recordings of kids playing arcade games. I haven’t listened to them yet, so Wheaton may be justified in his nuts-going, I don’t know.

What I do know is that Wheaton’s mania for nostalgia is parallel to my own lately. So I found the ending to Wheaton’s post a bit more thought-provoking, and, hopefully, worthy of a small post.

He posed the question of choosing, to own for your very own, any four arcade games, and what would they be? Oh, and a pinball machine.

I never really enjoyed pinball the way I enjoyed arcade games so I immediately modified it to be any five arcade games. Even then, I had trouble picking just five. Here’s the list that first came off the top of my head:

1. Pole Position (sit down version)
2. Battlezone (stand up version)
3. Elevator Action
4. Asteroids Deluxe
5. Tempest

Three of the five are vector-based graphics games. Only one (Elevator Action) features personal violence – the rest are abstracted violence (very much abstracted in the sense of competitive racing for Pole Position). And all of them feature a simple, single goal, rather than complex story-telling. They’re just games where the point is to survive and do as much damage as you can (or race as long as you can go).

And they all date to 1980-1983 – the years I went to high school.

Every single one of those games, at one point, were installed in the local 7-11, and I must have spent hours and hours, and quarter after quarter, playing each and every one of them, oblivious to anything else, mesmerized by the flashing lights. Most times I would be wearing headphones and listening to a mix tape of some sort, songs recorded off the radio, which would explain the lack of any songs not cut from the corporate commercialist cookie-cutter, ugh. It wouldn’t be until later that I discovered that there was a lot of awesome music that did not get played on Portland radio stations…

Blowing up asteroids, or stylized tanks, or shooting enemy spies, all stood in for whatever it was that I was avoiding out in the real world.

If only I had any idea what it was, exactly, I was avoiding?

What would my life, or anyone’s life, be like without video games? It would be irresponsible of me to speculate.

I had about 20 minutes to kill until my bus arrived. I was cold. Wanted something warm. There was a Starbucks nearby, with free wifi and hot coffee.

There’s always a Starbucks nearby.

But I wanted decaffeinated since Dr. Carl has told me to cut back, and the three cups of coffee I had eaten with breakfast were probably my limit.

The last several attempts to order decaf at this specific Starbucks had been marred by a complete lack of decaf, which news was delivered with an apologetic tone of voice but no real explanation. In each previous case, I had been offered a decaf Americano, which I had sometimes accepted with resignation, and sometimes declined along with any other option.

I waited my turn, and when the black and green clad employee asked me what I wanted, I said, “Tall decaf, please, with room.”

The boy barista (baristo?) half-turned towards their brewed coffee, then turned back with a familiar faux-sad expression. “I’m sorry, we don’t have any decaf. We stop brewing it after a certain point.”

Still smiling my I-expected-this-answer-but-it’s-not-OK smile, I sighed and said, “OK, give me a tall decaf Americano, with room” and handed over a couple bucks. As he rang me up, I said, “This is the fourth time I’ve come here and you haven’t had decaf.”

The girl making the espresso drinks piped up. “They told us not to, anymore.”

Baristo handed back my change and kept talking. “I guess they figured that we just don’t sell enough of it.”

I shook my head, smiling faintly, and stepped back so the next customer could order.

The baristo said, faux-sympathetically, “You’re not the only one!” Really? That’s the exact opposite of the excuse you had before, you know, I thought, either no one buys it or lots of people ask for it. Which is it?

“Sure, great,” I said, “but it still disappoints me.” They? I thought, who are they? Is that corporate? “I’ll just have to tell them that.” I tried to project a sense of I-know-it’s-not-your-fault-but-it’s-still-not-OK-but-please-don’t-spit-in-my-drink as I walked over to the espresso-drink waiting area.

The girl ahead of me had ordered lots of drinks for a big group of people, and when she was done collecting them, finally the girl behind the counter called out, “Tall Americano!” and set a drink on the ledge.

I walked over, put my hand on the cup, and said, “You mean ‘tall decaf Americano,’ right?”

She turned the cup around to see what was written on it, her face falling. “Oh! No… I didn’t see it,” as the baristo called from the cash register, “Yeah, that’s supposed to be a decaf!”

Honestly, I wasn’t upset so much as amused. How much more wrong could this transaction go? I now looked like the customer from Hell, even though I thought my requests were well within the bounds of reason. The blockage wasn’t me, and the initial problem was up the corporate ladder somewhere, and this current blip was an honest mistake. Still, everything was conspiring to turn it all into a Really Big Deal. I smiled wanly, then stepped aside so she could make me the right drink.

The baristo, who had some experience in these things, told the girl to keep the Americano because someone would probably order one soon enough. Lucky customer!

She completed my drink and brought it out; she handed me a coupon at the same time, worth one free drink next time. I thanked her, then walked to the condiment area. Yay, a free drink. If I had been really unsatisfied, would a reason to visit again in the future really be the trick to turn me around? Luckily, I’m addicted, and Starbucks are everywhere. I tucked the coupon away for later.

I waited for the clueless elderly Asian couple to finish stirring their coffees and adding their flavorings, then stepped up. Everyone has a routine, a little coffee meditation, a ritual they perform. Mine is: take the lid off, pour in a little half-and-half, tear open and pour in two packets of turbinado sugar, stir thoroughly, replace the lid so the cup seam is on the back.

Only this time, it went like this: take off the lid, reach for the half-and-half… of the two stainless steel pitchers, one was labeled “2%” and one was labeled “Whole milk”. No half-and-half. Oh, this is an easy fix, I thought, and turned to the girl. “There’s no half-and-half,” I said, as gently as I could after the customer catastrophe earlier.

And she gave me the face again, the one that says she’s really really sorry, but… “We ran out of half-and-half, we don’t have any.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. Loud. Hard. I hope I didn’t hurt her feelings. It was simply absurd. I turned back to the condiments area and reached for the 2%, while the girl continued to explain that she had used the last of their half-and-half to make someone else’s drink. Now I started to notice more little touches to this comedy: there was no turbinado sugar so I used regular white sugar; in their urge to satisfy me they had not given me a cup with room as I’d originally asked, meaning I had to pour some out to make room (which, if the employees had seen, probably felt like salt in the wound but was simply me being practical); and when I stirred, I got a little hot coffee on my fingers.

I intend to send an email to corporate telling them about my experience and the contradictory “we don’t sell enough decaf so that’s why we often disappoint our customers” reason I was given. I’ve had reasonable responses to complaints to Starbucks previously.

I’ll leave the entire story here, though, for your delight, to live on the internet for as long as the internet lives.

I sat on the edge of the small conference room, along with about twenty of my union brothers and sisters, while we listened to our union president, Becky, and vice president, Michael, discuss what leadership was proposing we do to save our employer money, and therefore save jobs.

Of course, unions being a democracy (the only democratic (small d) institution in the workplace meant that first, the union membership had to vote to approve any plans the union executive board put forth. That vote was early next week. And to our benefit, my union appears to be among the few in the county that are taking pro-active steps to save jobs; others have been taking a “wait and see” line.

The twenty people in this room, this one “brown bag” session, represented such a tiny fraction of the total membership, so I was unable to gauge the mood of the entire voting block from the mood of this handful of people. But the people in this room felt overwhelmingly pro-job-saving.

Except for one, outspoken, angry, defensive woman, who kept chastising Becky for not doing “more”, trying to get “more” out of management in this severe economic downturn. Like what? She mentioned more vacation time, more sick time, a promise to get the money lost back next year if things turn around…

I found her greed a bit overwhelming, and after the meeting, my friend Ken summed it up best by saying, “She sees it as the union vs. management, when in reality it’s the union and management vs. the recession.”

Quite so.