In This Economy?

Recently, ITE? may or may not have strangled a hooker, forcing us to leave the DFW area until things cooled down. After calling the airlines to see what flights were available on short notice over Memorial Day weekend at a price we could afford, we decided… What better place to spend a long anonymous weekend than Portland, Oregon?

And so it begins

Upon arriving in Portland after dark (11:45 p.m. Pacific), we collected our luggage and jumped in a taxi to our hotel, not realizing that we probably could have saved $40 by taking the light rail. The deep feelings of regret we had when we found that out were mitigated somewhat when we read that the unemployment rate in both Portland and Oregon is higher than the national average (12% versus 8.9%). That gave us a good laugh. Trouble in paradise.

We stayed at the Jupiter Hotel, a hip joint that’s probably more motel than hotel but has a restaurant, bar and music venue on site, as well as a strip club one block over (more on that in Part 3). The Doug Fir Lounge fired the first party shot of the weekend. Drunken cool kids crawled around the courtyard and parking lot like lice on the many, many homeless people Portland possesses. We knew we had come to the right place.

Our room had everything we needed: a flatscreen TV and a condom. We put the condom to use immediately, like we always do about this time, filling it with water for use as a canteen on the next day’s trip to Mount St. Helens (full story to follow in Part 2).

After that, we hit the bar to talk to the locals and tourists about the state of the economy. Because it was well after midnight and we were at an establishment that trafficked in alcoholic beverages, the facts were hard to ascertain.

Instead, we found out that this 21-year-old had never had more than two drinks before in his life, but now he was “fucked up,” to use the parlance of our times. He also divulged that he had never had sex but that for some reason he was now wanting to sex up this female friend at the end of the bar who he had never thought of that way before. We bought him a shot, sent him to the bathroom to vomit, mourned our lost youth and innocence, and then chatted up that girl he was talking about.

All in all, a very uninformative night. But things would get better as the weekend progressed. We returned to our room and watched an episode of Mr. Ed that had Wilbur dressed as a Chinese waiter with Coke-bottle-thick glasses and buckteeth. These are the kinds of things we can throw in the face of older generations when they accuse us of being dumbed down.

Mr. Ed today.

NOTE: By “we” and “us” I mean “I” and “me.” I would never allow any of my co-staffers in the same room with me. Especially when condoms are sitting around encouraging lecherous behavior.

Tags: hipsters, Jupiter Hotel, Mr. Ed, Portland, unemployment

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 4:23 PM and is filed under Human Encounters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.