Iron Fist

You hear a lot in the news these days about global warming and its consequences, from rampant forest fires and droughts to receding coastlines and terrible storms. What you don’t hear about, though, is the havoc that global climate change is wrecking in your own kitchens. Specifically, on top of my refridgerator.

Yep, the week of temperatures in the high-90s/low-100s gave me liquid nectarines.

Gross.

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Okay, kids, we’re gonna have a new feature here on Iron Fist. Every month, I’ll be releasing the “Fuck You” List, denouncing those people who clearly need to have a major FU sent their way.

This initial Fuck You List is going to be pretty intense because it’s been a rough month, what with starting a new job and all and not having had the time to launch my usual weekly rants against anything and everything. I should still manage to come up with plenty of F-bombs to drop in subsequent months, because as some of you may have noticed, I am a pretty irritable dude.

Without further ado, here comes the list:

• People who ride their bike on the wrong side of the bridge: Seriously, fuck you. I’m not going to gripe about cyclists who use the wrong side of the road, because even though I probably shouldn’t, I do that whenever it’s convenient. And when I do, I do my best not to inconvenience other cyclists. But people who ride on the wrong side of one of Portland’s bridges, specifically the Steel Bridge, which I cross in the morning on my way to work: what’s your deal? Don’t you realize that, in this country, we drive on the right side of the road? That includes this bridge, where five times this past month I’ve had to pull to one side on the narrow sidewalk portion of the bridge to let one of you jerks get by. Do you hate America that much? Don’t you realize that we fought a war of independence against England so we wouldn’t have to deal with that driving-on-the-left-side-of-the-road crap anymore? That, and there was something about taxes too, I think. Fuck it, the point is, get over on the other side of the road. Most of the people who I let by at least had the decency to look embarrassed, but this one goddamn hippy obliviously sailed by me not once, but twice this month. The second time he couldn’t even be bothered to slow down because he was holding a latté and couldn’t use his handbrake. Listen up, longhair: you’ve been given your free pass. Next time you try to pull that shit, you’re gonna get my Five Fingers of Righteousness right across the eyes as you ride by in your dazed hippy trance. That, and fuck you.
• Pedestrians on the Hawthorne Bridge: So long as I’m hosing people who don’t know how traffic operates, I want to say something to people walking across the Hawthorne Bridge, and that something I want to say is, “Fuck you.” You know, when they painted in those stupid lines to separate the sidewalk into a “cylcing lane” and a “walker’s lane,” I dealt with it. I thought it was a little rude to put us right next to traffic like that, but when I thought about all the times that I’d had to wait because a hoard of morons was walking in a clusterfuck five obese tourists wide, I said to myself, “Well, at least the walkers will stay to one side so we can make it across without being impeded by their ponderously large asses.” Except, of course, you tools can’t even do that. I still have to maneuver around large packs of morons walking along without a care in the world in tard-land, oblivious to how they’re blocking bike traffic by not packing together in their designated fat-ass lane. One dickhole even had the temerity to wander out directly in front of me because he saw something shiny on the ground. I probably would have just run him over if not for the fact that the collision would have spilled me over in front of the city bus that was passing by six inches to my left. Next time, dude, next time.
• Heat waves: Yeah, I’m saying Fuck You to the weather. Hundred-degree days suck ass.
• My predecessor: So as I mentioned previously, I started this new job the day after the Fourth, and was supposed to receive training from the guy who had held the job previously to me. Well, he showed up late on my first day, which made me late, since I couldn’t show up in the controlled access area without him, and that made me look like an asshole. Seriously, who shows up late on their first day of work? That’s a “fuck you” right there. But later, during the training, as he showed me the mediocre shit he used to do before spending some time looking at Auto-Trader, I commented that this job seemed to have a fair bit of downtime, compared to what I used to do.
  “Well, yeah, there’s some downtime,” he said, crossing his arms defensively. “But, before I left here, I was at overload, in terms of work.”
  “Really?” I said. “Isn’t that just because you’re a namby-pamby little wussy boy?”
  “No dude, this work is hard,” he insisted. Then, as I stared him down, he relented. “Well, I suppose the fact that my anti-testicles, which produce anti-testosterone for my body and make me into a little nancyboy, might have something to do with the weaselish bitch-ness that makes me suck so bad at everything I do. But seriously, doesn’t everyone have a little of that going on?”
  In silent reply, I showed him my own balls, and let him know fear.
  “Truly, Master,” he said as he kneeled down and rubbed his nose on the ground, “you are Great.”
  “And don’t you forget it,” I said. “Also: fuck you.”
• People who don’t know what coffee drink to order: Previously, in “I just want coffee“, I railed against those persons who ordered elaborate drinks when all I wanted was a cup of coffee. That’s bad, but not as bad as people who wait in that line, get all the way in front of it, and don’t really know what they want. First of all, there’s only a finite number of coffee drinks available. Secondly, out of that finite number, you must have one you prefer slightly above the others. And thirdly, you’ve been standing in line all this time, and the goddamn menu is right there. Look at the fucking thing and decide, instead of gabbing with your honky boyfriend, the skater try-hard, whose immaculately pressed Dickies shorts are pulled down precisely the right amount, and whose glaringly new hat is turned at precisely the right angle. That way, when it’s your turn to order, I won’t have to punch you in the kidney and issue you a “Fuck You.”
• Mulligan’s: You don’t serve pitchers? You’re a bar in Portland, and you don’t serve pitchers? Fuck. You.

That’s it for now. Tune in again in a few weeks, I’m sure I’ll be pissed off again.

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I just realized what time it is. What the hell am I doing up this late?

Fuck it, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

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Today we’re going to talk about the Thirsty Lion in downtown Portland, and why it’s a shitty bar and why I’ll never go there again.

I’ve been going out for “guy’s night” happy hour every Friday pretty regularly for some time now, and I try to scout out new locations with half-way decent happy hours for us to go. So I came across the Thirsty Lion, an “Olde Englishe Pubb” styled place built into the old Bar 71 location. They had a decent looking menu posted in the window (I admit I was intrigued by the weird culture-boundary crossing “Corned Beef Tacos”) so we decided to check it out. It turned out to be okay, and we shed no tears about $3 pints of Guiness, but we were vaguely weirded out by the way the waitress kept touching us, especially when she put her hand on my thigh. I know some people are all about having hands near their respective crotches, but for me, having a stranger put her hand that close to my junk was a little unnerving.

I decided to give them a second chance this last Saturday, when Beemer Todd was in town from San Diego and itching for a drink. I arrived to find him seated and working on his first beer, so I grabbed a seat at his table and we started catching up. Fifteen minutes later, exactly zero waiters had come by to see if I needed a drink. “This is bullshit,” I announced, using my ‘This is bullshit’ voice that I save up for announcing that things are currently at a bullshit-status. “How long did you have to sit here before they came to bring you a drink?”

“Dude, I had to go get mine at the bar.”

(Read the article)

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I’ve lived in Portland for almost five years now. I’ve yet to get to one of the Rose Festival parades. Maybe if I actually attended one, I might be a little more excited about it. Still, most of the time when the Rose Fest rolls around I find myself feeling like a tourist, who’s stumbled across some local festival in the place where he’s visiting that he didn’t expect. “What the fuck is all this?” I think as I push my way through unexpected crowds. “And where did all these goddamn people come from?”

Last year, the start of my vacation happened to coincide with the Rose Parade. I worked a partial shift at my job on the first day of my vacation (yep, I’m a sucker), and Ashley came to pick me up so we could get our rental car and get on the road. What should have been a 12-minute round trip ended up taking over half an hour as we were routed around closed streets and waved into a detour queue of other cars. After I’d finally gotten home, and packed, and walked down to Budget to pick up my rental car (an hour behind schedule) I remember the clerk asking me if I’d had a chance to see the parade at all. While I was polite about it, I’m pretty sure I told her I couldn’t stand parades. That’s not entirely true, but still, I was pretty irritated at the time.

Maybe I’ll go next year, maybe that will give me another point of view on the whole thing. Although I will always regard the practice of setting up a tent along the parade route the night before as being vaguely idiotic.

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