final days of summer..

so the fall equinox is on tuesday. are you ready? to be honest, i really like the fall. my birthday is in the fall (october 2nd, if you didn't know); i really enjoy transitional seasons. the breeze in the air, leaves rustling under bike tires. fall gets a bad rap because its the precursor to winter... in portland the rain starts in the fall, usually sometime in october.

i have lived in portland for almost 5 years. i moved here in mid-october of 2003. within a week of my arrival, i had a bicycle and a bass guitar. i bought those things before i even had a bed. i started volunteering at laughing horse books. spent a lot of time looking for a job, listening to records and cooking food with my new housemates. even though i moved to portland from santa cruz, i ended up living with a few kids from south dakota, which is where i went to high school. i went from being a part of the queer community in santa cruz to living in a house with a bunch of straight dudes.

there was rock n' roll joe, who lived in the basement. joe is kind of like the punk rock version of elvis, he has even been known to where fringe during concerts. he is the lead singer and guitarist of a local rock band. joe worked on-call as a stagehand, usually a couple times a month. 

morgan and shawn shared the master bedroom. they were dates at the time i moved and my main connection to the house. shawn and i had known each other since high school and he had even come to visit me a few times in santa cruz. the room i lived in was tiny. and when i moved in it was less than 200 dollars a month because another couple and their huge dog, grizzly bear, were living in the basement as well. 

ian, also known as ianhead, was living in the other bedroom. when i came to visit before moved in, i wasn't sure what it was going to be like to live with ian. he seemed like kind of slacker and hung around the house a lot, sometimes without a shirt on. but we actually ended up getting along really well. we were both pretty 'chill' and tried to steer clear of drama, of which there was plenty.

there was also zoe, morgan's 10 year old dog whom everyone thought was a puppy. morgan was real excited to have a lady move into the house and insisted on being my portland guide. this usually meant the 2 of us driving around together, stoned, and her talking about a million miles per minute about everything. jumping from how the streets were situated to what her favorite record store was. i tried to keep up and retain as much as i could...

---friends, this is the beginning of a much longer story, i am realizing. if anyone has any feedback on how to make the introduction more 'active' or engaging, lemme know...--