Intermission

We are still here.

Nicole and I have been reading and researching as much as possible in preparation for our next step. Unfortunately, the state of the economic world has made things seem like it may be more challenging. I make the mistake (daily) of looking at the gloom and doom that is being constantly reported and can't help but get sucked in. It's also fair to say that I really don't know how this "situation" will affect our future. Needless to say, I'm not too worried. . .we have worked really hard to break the chains that connect us to it.

I've been wondering if the movie "Fight Club" is being rented more often right now. I used to watch that movie nearly everyday before I went to work at a restaurant on NW 23rd in Portland. The year was 1999, everybody was drinking Starbucks, talking on cell phones, and spending money on knickknacks for their condos:

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The NW Portland Years (1999-2000)
I hated living in that part of Portland, yet I had worked really hard to find this "Shangri la" when I had been living in Bend. Don't get me wrong, Bend was great at the time. I ran everyday and mountain biked every other day but Bend at the time lacked the cosmopolitan experience for someone my age (25) . . . so I set my sights on Northwest Portland.

Northwest Portland is more than just a geographical reference to a part of Portland, it's more of a neighborhood. In the late 1990s it was an up and coming shopping district with boutique shops, outdoor dining, and coffee shops with parking spots for your dot-com Lamborghini.

I initially moved to NW 21st with a friend who also thought it would be fun to move from the small town of Bend to the giant city of Portland. He and I had already been roommates for a while in Central Oregon so we knew that we could get along. After only a few months in Portland, he bought a dog and moved back to Bend (then joined the Air Force and has been in for 8 years.)

Eventually it was only me in a two bedroom apartment overlooking The Gypsy (restaurant.) The apartment was the cheapest thing I could find in that neighborhood and it showed from time to time. An example of how "affordable" it was became evident when one morning I woke up to find that the walls of my bathroom were ballooning. It looked like giant moles had burrowed down the wall from the ceiling and were making their way to the floor. I lived on the 3rd floor of a 4 story apartment building so I knew that trouble was coming from above. The curious boy in me decided to push with my finger on these raised portions of the wall. The paint immediately gave way and a steady stream of warm soapy water sprayed all over my bathroom. Apparently the pipes above my bathroom had broken just below their bathtub.

What was funny about that experience is that in the days following, the management worked to fix it at a snails pace. At one point (or should I say the breaking point) the maintenance guy cut a hole in my ceiling (my upstairs neighbor's floor) right in front of their toilet. I walked in there and looked up to only see a pair of crumpled Levi jeans covering the a 5 inch by 5 inch hole. Minutes later there was a flush and the jeans disappeared and I could see my neighbor's bathroom ceiling. I was on the phone within minutes demanding resolution to this problem and used the whole situation as leverage for the best apartment in the building (at the same rent.) I moved to the fourth floor the very next day.

So now that I had the coolest apartment, in the hippest part of town, one would think I would have been happy. It didn't work that way at all. Because living in that part of town everyone would put on their best outfit to shop or "be cool" on a restaurant patio, I felt like I needed to look my best even when I would walk to the store for bread. Being single at the time compounded this environmental insecurity.

I eventually learned to tune out most of the neighborhood. I would listen to headphones if I was studying at a coffee shop, go on long drives out of the city, and I also kept a bag of water balloons next to my bed.

As mentioned earlier, I lived right next to a restaurant called The Gypsy. This place (at the time) was not really a destination restaurant, more of a "Let's meet at The Gypsy before we go dancing" or "Let's all go to the Gypsy now that we have been dancing." Get the picture?

I had no AC and in the summer everyone in that apartment had to leave their window open to stay cool. It was wonderful to be on the top floor with my windows open because the breeze kept it just right. The only problem was that The Gypsy down below tended to attract young drunk males who typically would take fights out to the sidewalk...at 2 in the morning. Because my sleep was valuable to me, I became very irritated with the constant scuffles that occurred just 4 stories below my window. The solution: water balloons.

To be clear, I had a couple of tactical advantages to my location.

1. I lived on the 4th floor
2. I lived above a huge tree (the tree top was around the 3rd floor)
3. The street lights were below my position
4. I lived in a keypad secured building
5. Everyone had their window open with the lights off
6. My door had double locks
7. They were drunk
8. I was sober

Nothing changes the attitude of two drunk alpha males like a water balloon to the head. Typically I would lob the balloon (this helped mask the point of origin) on to the head of the more aggressive of the two. After impact I would hide for a moment or two and listen to the reaction of the targets. Surprisingly it was often the same reaction. They would instantly befriend each other in the name of finding whoever threw the water balloon. "You go that way around the block and I will go this way and we'll beat the crap out of him." This response happened most of the time. Two would-be enemies would team up to fight a new bad guy. Fortunately for me, no one ever had the sense to look up to the apartments...thank goodness for alcohol.

This annoyance along with many others made Northwest Portland a tough place for me to be happy. Near the end I made the best of it. My form of entertainment was going to the Starbucks on the corner of 23rd and Hoyt and people watching. It is still a great place to watch people to this day.

One day just for fun outside of that Starbucks I pretended to tie my shoe on the sidewalk and instead affixed a quarter to the sidewalk with superglue. I stood on it for a couple minutes before going back inside. I sat at the bar inside Starbucks facing the window for over an hour watching people try to pry that quarter from the sidewalk. I watched as older women would pull out tools from their purse such as a metal nail file trying to get it. I had no idea a glob of glue and a quarter could provide so much entertainment.

I eventually moved far away from that part of town and look back at those years as a "growing experience." Years later I would learn that the love of my life, my wife Nicole, worked two blocks away from that apartment during the same time. I find myself constantly wondering how close we came to each other without meeting. I know that my whole perspective would have been different if I had met her then.

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I will try to write more little historical "episodes" when we have gaps between our adventures. Hopefully this will help provide insight for the inspiration of our journey.

Lastly, Nicole and I might be close to another adventure...but we have to keep it under wraps for now.