So I’ve been playing this game for a while on a website y’all probably should not go to, fubar, as it’s not for gentle or literate folk. On the rare occasion I’m social there I know where the raggedly band of Resistance keeps there camp (yes, if stupid is the enemy, not quite as stupid needs resistance fighters). When I had the AC and assorted sensors fixed in my rig I had to do something for an hour or so, I went to Denny’s with a tablet so I could cheat at the game I play on fubar. Unlike Facebook where you can make as many accounts as you have email addresses, fubar gets all bent if you create accounts from the same ISP address. I don’t know if all of fubar gets bent, but the sort of old school RPG game gets bent because they sell additional characters.
Denny’s has pancakes, was, ok still is, across the street from the mechanic and, most importantly, has a different ISP than my home. Why is this worth mentioning today? Well, first off, I’ve been snarky all morning and had the good grace to keep my snarky off this site (whether cross-posted or no). PB is still a fragile community, yes, it’s been terra formed but it still has the new car scent and I don’t want to be the guy that smokes in it first. OD is awfully touchy these days. So, reason 1 == no dawg snark, or at least an attempt to minimize dawg snark, on PB and OD. Secondly, the Denny’s character like the rest of the mob, which is comprised of me, I and dawg, has a pit-bull as the avatar (the mob theme for my turf is Pitbulls of Babylon. Fubar likes themes. Fubar isn’t subtle enough for snarky. Fubar leads with its genitals.) . It’s the first pit-puppy pic that isn’t a dog of mine (two of the three now deceased). Reason 2=== dogs.
It would probably be healthy to change my avatars. Mental health. Yet I can’t delete those dogs. I play the Denny’s character a lot because it’s just a cute velvety mink colored baby pit, it has no other associations for me. Part of what I mean by being homesick is that Oregon is where I raised my dogs. Yes, it’s where I raised my children too, but dogs live in dog years. It’s one of the things that mitigate the joy of a puppy; you know you will outlive the good dog it will become, the part of the family it will be. That’s why Marley and Me was so damn popular. I mean sure, it was written well, but not with any flair, not with profound language or anything quotable, it was the story itself that touches the heart of every dog owner. You come to love these beasts and you will outlive them. It’s not that Marley was a bad dog, though that was the overt gist of the tale, it’s that he was a family dog and the story is recognizable, human, humanity, canine, caninity.
People leave me messages about how cute my dogs are. I have an entire folder of pit and wolf puppies. It has to do with the whole keeping score of popularity aspect of the social end of fubar; people can bomb an entire folder with high scores. It’s stupid. When I play that end of the game I can get in the top three hundred. The top ten have used real money or, if they flirt well enough, have been gifted things that cost someone real money. Real Money to be a fake personality. Obscenely decadent. I miss my dogs. I went up to the corner convenience store last evening. I forgot what it’s like to have all the students back in town. I could gossip or tell bad planning stories or funny student stories from 68 to 78, huge gap, 2012 to the present. Don’t feel like it right now. The convenience store is across the street from the eastern end of where most of the campus is (I mean the buildings, land wise MSU is huge, it’s the first land grant college, or it was when it was a college, the university pre-dates, I believe, MI being accepted into the union) and it sells alcohol and beer. The place was crowded with what looked to me like high school sophomores with cases of beer and weird ass sweet shit to mix with southern god damn comfort, fuck. Remember whatever it is you’ll never drink again because you puked it up in high school? For me that’d be southern fucking comfort, god damn.
I found myself in the same conversation I’ve had a hundred times at the QD, but with a new employee. All I said was “I forgot what it’s like when the students come back” she accused me of being a professor, which, oddly enough was flattering, but I went into the whole I’m from here but I’m an Oregonian thing which, frankly, is beginning to bore me a bit. Where are you from is like Hi How’re you. It’s small talk in a town with a revolving population on the other side of its main drag. Strangers are the industry here.
Though Portland has a number of colleges and universities you’d never call it a college town. It’s a Port town, the Columbia is a might river and among the thousand uses for it, coming up the river from the pacific makes it an industry. It’s why I didn’t talk about trains in reference to Portland very often. Here they need freight trains; there the shipping industry carries most of the freight. I never wrote entries about Portland’s shipyards, but they have them. In June, during the Rose Festival, navy ships (sometimes Russian or Japanese navy ships too) come up the Columbia and park at waterfront park, downtown Portland, right next to the grifting booths and the elephant ear tents, and you can tour them. Most of the sailors are out looking for hookers. It’s only a two week invasion, and after my first decade there I usually avoided downtown during rose festival, though when the kids were little I’d take them down, sometimes, to see the parade.
Things get a little crazy here during football season; I think the first game is next week. Students burn couches in the streets and, because it’s a different generation, some people will discover their first I’m-not-drinking-that-ever-again liquor and lose their virginity both on either end of burning a couch in the street. In Portland Couch Street is pronounced Cooch. I’m an Oregonian and I can’t tell you why it’s pronounced Cooch except that it’s someone’s name but, more importantly, I can’t tell you why I was compelled, as every other Oregonian in the Valley, to correct the pronunciation and with a straight face say the vaguely obscene sounding Cooch. I’m sure sailors and hookers would titter and the word Cooch.
It’s damn near impossible to avoid the impossibly young students, it’s not like you can just not go downtown for nine fucking months.
Ok, I’m spent.
Loading comments...