Campfyre Stories

So the rental place gave me a Dodge Avenger (Steel Silver/Blue).  Not a little car, like I asked for, but certainly a FUN car to drive.  As all my friends told me, "It’s the Iron Man car!"  As a result, on the way up to Maine, all kinds of Massholes wanted to race me.  I obliged all but the red Avenger, who probably got pulled over not long after his insane tailgating and passing and generally being a menace on the road.  I made good time, even with several stops and rolled into Portland around 11pm.

Spent some time catching up with Amber and Jason and then headed off to bed.  I was given the opportunity to spend time with each of them individually as well as together, which was especially nice since I am friends with them individually and as a couple, so it was nice to have those different levels of reconnecting and hanging out.

My primary thought was that I wanted to play guitar on the beach.  I got to do that with Amber and wound up playing for seagulls who landed on the shore and just watched and listened to me.  I was looking for inspiration and I think I found it.  I already have a chorus and the chord structure for the verses and plenty of material to work with to fill it out.

Downtown Portland is a pretty cool place, with funky shops and almost exclusively local businesses and an incredibly number of restaurants and taverns.  What little I saw of their local music scene was cover bands, but that’s not a bad thing and most of what I saw was pretty high quality.  I also noticed that there is an awful lot of visible ink (tattoos) around that city, and that the proportion of pale faces is so high that it’s rather disconcerting.  Not only do I live in a fairly ethnically diverse area, I work in a location with quite a lot of Indian and Asian faces.  To see such a majority of Caucasians is completely foreign to me.  Then again, Maine isn’t all that populous a state, so that may play a factor.

Saturday night, Jason and I hit the down for beer and food.  I got to sample a lot of the food and drink that Portland had to offer, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t even really scratch the surface.  The bars close early (1am) there (and stay open ’til 4 here!) so as I was just starting to get my second wind it was time to leave.  Also, they don’t keep their buses running that late, which is weird.  I’d think that if the city closes down that early, that they’d keep their public transportation available for an hour or so after, but no.  So we took a cab back to their place and wound down back at their apartment.

Sunday was more of a whirlwind, since I wanted to get home at a reasonable time to wind down and get to bed early (the latter didn’t actually happen).  We went back to downtown and wandered around, had some lunch, did some shopping.  It was the nicest day of the weekend, which made me not want to leave, but at the same time, what a nice send off from the state of Maine.

My trip home was much faster, mainly, I think, because the traffic didn’t really allow me to use the cruise control.  Without that set speed, the car really wanted to go 90mph (which is as fast as I’ll *admit* to driving with out of state plates at the end of the month…  heh).  Even though I got caught in the most torrential downpour I have ever tried to drive in and had a good 30 minutes of moving between 5 - 40 mph, I was able to make up the time (probably the going 90 helped) and made it home in 4h 15.

Got home, vegged out for a while, then hooked up with a friend at Borders to have some pretentious coffee.  That was a nice thing, but it kept me up later than I originally intended.  Oh well, good socialization with a favored person is always worth a little sleep deprivation.

My head is back on straight, I feel less bitchy toward most people and I only have a four-day week because we have no king.  It’s good.