July 29-31 2023

It turns out that JC doesn’t have a grave and his family didn’t do anything for him after he passed away. I remembered visiting his folks, and it was a pretty bleak scene, so I guess I wasn’t too surprised, but it was really sad to hear.

When I was walking home from the black metal show I found a bloodied bird wing in the middle of my path and took it with me, but it had insects crawling on the rotted exposed flesh, so I wrapped some lavender around it and hid it outside of the hostel in a bush. I had a feeling that Justin (JC's old friend who I met up with) and his girlfriend would want it, and he said that they totally would.

I met up again with Lissy and she picked me up downtown and took me to Hawthorne and some vintage stores.  Before we met up I found a vintage suede lime green motorcycle cycle jacket at a store downtown that fits me like I've been wearing it every weekend for the past 5 years.  Then we went to a place called Baghdads, and I ate the one expensive meal of my whole trip: a vegan burger with Cajun tater tots.

There was an old theatre attached to the restaurant and Barbie was playing a sold out showing.

It was so nice to have a new friend to hang out with, and to layer some new experiences onto the Portland matrix that don’t involve JC, or being drunk and high AF.

I ended up going out to the Coffin Club to dance with Lissy and her roommate and it was the same venue that JC’s old band would be playing at on the weekend. And even though the biggest douche bag from Vancouver who is a full on rapist (who had the gaul to slut shame me back in the day assuming that I was sleeping with every guy friend I had, which wasn't true at all!) is now living in Portland and was also at the show, though I was able to deal with it a lot better than I would have had I been by myself.

It sounds like no one in PDX knows about the rape, and he scuttled away to a new town. The gross thing is that he was there with a new crew of friends and they were all the “cool” people.

I remembered all of the reasons why I dropped out of the punk scene, and and how scenes in general breed so much narcissism and fucked up social dynamics. Though I also ran into another old friend who was great to see, and the bands were awesome. There was also an amazing vegan food cart in a courtyard out back, and and the decor and diversity of the club were wunderbar. I had to leave part way through the last band to catch my bus and then catch a ferry.. I would be up for most of the night.