Last night DBarr102 and I shut down the Rose City Strip, which is the new and much improved club that now occupies the space where Cocktails and Dreams used to fester. The beauty of living so close to it was that we didn't leave the house until 1:30am and still had time to look around the place, pound a couple drinks, and throw down some bills. As the DJ pointed out, they put a lot of money into remodeling this club, and it shows.

“If Baltimore shut down in 104º they'd never be open! You gotta fuckin' suck it up, man!” Kimbot's birthday was this week, and the heat shut down Portland almost as bad as the cold did last winter.

For the last few years I've stood at the bus stop every morning and watched the large wooden letters that once spelled TOMMY'S deteriorate and crumble from the building's facade on SE Powell and 35th while the smell of rank seafood wafted by from the fish market on 34th. The last remnants of the sign didn't make it through the winter and have yet to be replaced. Behind Tommy's shines the neon Cocktails and Dreams sign, although the “Dreams” died long ago, and recently that sign was ripped out completely so that only the border remains. Although the club's hours are still posted on a piece of paper taped to the front door, the place has been closed for the past month.

Well we had a great time as usual at the Oregon Country Fair (OCF) last weekend. The group we assembled for camping at Zumwalt was maybe the largest we've had yet, and also probably the rowdiest, although we could scarcely compete with our neighbors, who brought a vaporizer and a three-foot bong and took acid the first night and giggled until the sun came up. Good people.

It's time for the Oregon Country Fair, my favorite event of the year. I've been looking forward to it for the last twelve months.

Shopping for underwear is like browsing the gay porn section in a seedy back-alley sex shop. The guy at the register looks at you as you slink in, and you wonder, “Does he know why I'm here?” The security guard eyes you suspiciously. You try to act casual, moseying along, perusing the wears, thumbing through t-shirts, until you arrive at the men's underwear section as if by accident.

The other day my brother Marko and I were walking back to my place from the liquor store and decided to pop into DV8 for a quick visit. Back when we'd just moved to Portland we used to hit the place pretty frequently, but it'd been quite a while since we'd hung out there together. We were both broke, so we agreed to limit our stay to just a couple of rounds.