balding angrily

As I said, I started this article while thinking about Poi Dog, but realized I had some other love to throw Oregon’s way. In the first draft of this, I took a lot of cheap shots at hippies, but then I realized that, like hipsters, hippies get a bad rap. Plus, I don’t really know what I’m saying when I say hippy. Plus, if the conserva-jerks that do Southpark rail against hippies, I don’t want to. Bring on the bullets.

• Poi Dog Pondering - One final thing about them: buy Electrique Plummagram if you are curious how an Austin collective takes it to the dance floor. It’s a damn good little CD.
  
• My Parents-in-Law - Ma and Pa Jerry went to visit relatives there, and apparently they have a nephew that is also gay. This other gay and his partner took them out many times for dinner, and Ma and Pa couldn’t stop talking about how nice these guys are. Jerry and I were hurt; we think they love these other gays more than us.
• People That Talk A Lot - I stayed with my cousin for a long weekend in Eugene, (see Poi Dog post) and she was with a guy that would not stop talking. This poor fella was tasked with showing me the wonderful town of Eugene, and quiet, introverted me had a really hard time relating to him - well, to anyone really. I suffered from a “shyness that [was] criminally vulgar” at that age. I was so afraid that I was being judged all the time that I always had a sour look on my face. Well, that hasn’t changed much. Anyway, my cousin’s sweetie had to make up for the lack of convo by talking non-stop. We played rented video games.
• Clear-Cutting / Seeing the Other Side of the Story - I took it for granted that clear-cutting of forests is a bad thing, lumberjacks are bad, paper is bad, etc., etc., etc. I came from California; all I knew is the environmentalist line. Driving up to Oregon, I saw these swaths of bald land, and I said something like, “What a shame” to my cousins over dinner. They looked horrified, and told me that the environmentalists were costing thousands of people jobs by shutting down forestry companies.

  I’m not saying I hold the forestry line, but looking at a small town which depends on the logging industry, you have an example of how sometimes an economic issue conflicts with an environmental one, no matter how Al Gore would like to spin it.

• People That Don’t Hold to the SoCal Norm - Growing up in SoCal, I thought all people were body/hair/makeup hyper-conscious. Not so much in Oregon. Maybe that’s unfair; maybe that was just in Roseburg.

  And who the hell am I to judge? I went about 4 months one time not wearing underarm deodorant because I was poor and I was sick of my white shirts getting that yellow stain in the pits from the stuff. I figured if I just washed a lot every day, I could combat the odor. Eventually I realized that my stink, no matter how much I washed, wouldn’t go away. A couple of years after this, I was involved with someone that was a bit into, erm, armpit-licking. He wanted me to stop wearing deodorant. I didn’t stop, and we didn’t see much of each other after that.

• Pleasant Tourist Communites - There are only a few touristy places with a distinct aesthetic in the U.S. that stick with me. I think about these places when I think, “These people do the tourist thing right.” Coos Bay is one of those places. I wonder if I went back if I’d have the same opinion. I had ice cream in Coos Bay. Ice cream is good.