Thursday, August 18, 2011
all’s well that ends swell. so far we’ve had good luck finding people to stay with to fill in the gaps between the times that we had planned to come visit and stay with friends. when we hit Eugene we got dropped off by this sweet caravan of couples out of Austin Texas who told us to come visit, I’d gotten ahold of my buddy in town and told him we’d be landing that night. we made it a good time of a few nights in Eugene before he gave us a ride to Portland. We were going up to visit this girlfriend of ours, from the town in Sonoma county that we’d just come up from, she went to Portland to go to school. she’d promised us a weekend of treats and eats, keeping us up in the style we’re accustomed to, and true to her word, she made good on taking care of us even though we showed up totally broke at her doorstep. a few days in Eugene had cleaned out our wallets. so we got to hang out with our girlfriend and commiserate over a few evenings of her days off, and sort out all our odd stresses of being on the road for a week or so. we went out to a few of the hip Portland neighborhoods, had food cart food, had burritos at cheap joints the locals know about. they gave us comfy digs, and everyone was nice to us, some burning man folk there to talk to, some polyamourous open relationship couple who tell me they know no jealousy, interesting. some nice musicians and a nice back yard and comfy spots to relax and the only thing was there was no smoking on the property cause one of the guys gets migraines from cigarette smoke so we were always hanging off the sidewalk at the edge of the home and lighting everything with strike anywhere kitchen matches that were supplied to us from our hosts because we’d long since lost all our lighters and ended up with no money for new ones. well at least we had spent our last two bucks in eugene at the smoke shop, picked up an ounce of this rolling tobacco that they sell as pipe tobacco to get around the federal taxes… our hosts in Portland kept us happy over the weekend, caring for us and feeding us, except nobody smoked so we were on our own with that. but we made it work. showed up with tobacco and no money and at least if you have smokes you don’t get cranky around your hosts. we didn’t even cook or clean or anything, it was a pleasure cruise vacation time. but like all good things, our lady friend’s hospitality could only extend for a few nights, that was what we agreed upon before we came up, and thus we were calling around looking for places to stay. putting out the word on the social networks, writing messages to old friends, the girl was txting her old buddies who had moved up to Oregon from California. we had faith that something would work out, over the next 5 or so nights we’d have to stay alive to wait for my buddy from Eugene to come back up and pick us up again. round out a weeklong stay in Portland, some how. no money, no place to stay, the last night we have a place to crash approaching. we kept our faith and our faith was rewarded. “we could always just hitch a ride back to Eugene if nothing works out,” the girl would say to me. what ended up happening instead was we finally got in touch with some of her friends, hung out with them in a park on our last evening to crash at the place we were at, and negotiated it with this guy that the girl knew, who was around in some scene she used to be a part of, and he took us into his little studio for a couple nights, which gave us more time to try to get a hold of some other folks to help round out our week in the city of roses. never did see those rose gardens. the other issue was money, which we had completely ran out of, and we addressed this issue in a number of ways. the first thing I did was to get online and ask people to paypal me donations to my email address of lance@robotson.com on the social networks, which I didn’t think would really do much of anything, but to my surprise, some people actually came out of the woodwork and made donations to me (and my pleas to help keep our hitchhiking trip going). a relative I haven’t seen for a long time, a guy in LA I was hanging out with earlier in the year, and a friend of a friend in illinois who I’ve never met but who apparently is supportive of the lifestyle I’m leading. so they sent monies to me and I just had to wait for the money to clear into my bank account after a couple days. the other thing we did is, the girl asked her mom to western union us some money, which had to be sent to me because the girl lost her ID somewhere along the way. and so, after sleeping at this guys place who she knew, we went on the epic hike to a western union check cashing place so we could have money, for the first time in days, so we can eat a real meal where we’re not just sharing a sandwich or a burrito together. and so, on that day, we both got to eat our own hamburgers, and it was good. and the money went quick. “when you get your money we’ll spend it more carefully,” she says, back to splitting and sharing everything. the guy who put us up for a couple nights, who was a sweet illustrator, took us to a tobacco shop and we got a pack of these new york cheap cigarettes called ‘smoking joes’. they were a fine, cheap smoke. and he had good taste in music and cartoons and movies and he and the girl got along talking of those things while we all smoked in his apartment. so after a night, and the day of the epic hike to western union, and another night spent, we had finally gotten ahold of another friend to stay with, who was a nice 5 mile hike away, so we packed up our things and began to walk it. this after the rigmarole with my bank situation. it goes like this: I was trying to get my paypal money out of my bank account, but my checking account had long since been screwed up by me over-drafting it by a dollar at a redbox last fall, (on some movie I probably didn’t even like, in Oregon, incidentally) and so my debit card linked to my account no longer worked. now, this is some credit union thing, so I figure I do like I always used to do and just go to some credit union branch place that will let me get into my savings account and get my money, thru these kinds of weird member branch credit union networks they have. but what had happened was, my old credit union had recently been eaten by a larger credit union, and they no longer participated in this shared branch banking, and so when I went to a credit union where I thought it would work, they told me that my bank no longer did that and that I’d have to call them up to figure it out. and call them up I did! what they told me was, there were no branch offices in Oregon. closest ones were in Seattle and San Francisco. “well, is there anything that you can do for me today?” so I got them ordering me a new bank card, which will be sent to my old place in Santa Rosa (gotta tell my old roommates to keep an eye out for it in the mail), and then they are gonna transfer me to the card member services department head. so she makes me an offer. after I explain that I’m broke, on the road, why can’t I get my money, etc, she tells me, if there is an address I will be at, then they can FedEx overnight me my money. woo! so I say, let me get a hold of my friend who I will be staying with and I’ll get back to you. so I call up my buddy and tell him the story of my weird bank scenario, and he gives me his address, and I call back my bank, and they say I’ll have forty bucks in cash the next day. I ask her to drop a little lollipop or something in the envelope. armed with the knowledge that money was on its way, and the address to my friend’s place, we set off on our five mile walk with all our bags to his place. wishing we had a buck to our name, I spent my last fifty cents at a lemonade stand in some residential hood so we could get some refreshment. and we took breaks every 25 blocks or so. finally, in the mid afternoon, we arrived to our destination and were greeted warmly and offered cold drinks and a nice place to rest. my friend’s roommate was moving out, so we helped her move her stuff and she got us all burritos. I helped my friend work on his truck by pumping the clutch and getting out all the air bubbles as he’s running new fluid thru the hoses. we stayed up commiserating thru the night, and the girl took some bedding and made some nice nesting space for us to crash out in. well my buddy said that we could probably stay a night or two, and the next day, the FedEx man brought me my cash. so we were set again to get some groceries and do some cooking. she cooks and I clean, is generally how we swing things. and we made a nice breakfast. and we went to check out some cool food carts downtown for lunch. and we listened to good music and I thought about contacting other people to stay with. but as it turned out, my buddy ends up saying we can stay all week till my Eugene friend picks us up later, so that takes a lot of pressure off. after we establish that we are going to be in one place for a while, and don’t have to be hauling around our stuff every other day, I unpack my things and let all my oodles of stuff explode out and take up all the surface area that it can, and start looking around for things to do in town that I like doing, as long as we’re going to be around. and so, I find out about an open mic within walking distance, one I’d been to the year before when I was last in town, and I get ready to go out performing by spending an afternoon cutting and folding and gluing together cases for my demo CDs, which cleverly come in these ancient 5.25 inch floppy disks that I’ve cut open and gutted to use as packages for my cd. I manage to burn a few discs and finish packaging them in time to make it to this open mic and sign up to go on 6th. the girl has no ID but the show space is separated from the bar and they don’t hassle us getting in. I’m excited to perform for my two friends in the crowd, the girl and our host. the girl has never seen me read on stage before. so we sit through a few singer songwriter types, I order some french fries for us. some of the performers are sad and others are up beat. some sing about love and others rant about politics. one particularly interesting duo of elderly gentleman, one on harmonica and one on guitar, do an awesome set, harmonizing with each other in beautiful baritone voices like a barbershop half-quartet. when it’s my turn to go on, I got a pretty good idea of my set, a few bits I do in under ten minutes, and enough time to pitch the crowd, and a rough idea of what I’m gonna say. “so I’m a traveling poet and I hitchhiked up here with a friend of mine and this is what I do— …now I’m going to do a song, I’ve been trying to get into writing little rap tunes, check it out, i’ve also got these demo CDs I made on my laptop that come in a cool custom recycled five and a quarter inch floppy disk that i’d like to try to sell for five to ten dollars or whatever you could afford, if I might shamelessly promote myself at this time…” and yeah, I gave a good set, and the girl got to see me do my thing, she’d never been out to an open mic with me before so she’d known I do this stuff but I was pleased to get to show her my routine on stage. and I was well received, miraculously cool baritone guy is holding up a ten dollar bill at me, and then a woman comes over asking for a cd and she gave me ten dollars as well, and then I smoked a cigarette outside and another dude gave me seven bucks, and at that point I was sold out of all the copies I’d put together that night. on the way out the old baritone singing guys had been talking to the girl- “YOU are his traveling buddy?” - and then one of them tipped us out another five bucks- “here’s something for the road.” and the guy told me he liked my poem and to keep it up with the writing and the songs. good night. on the last day in town before we got picked up to go back to Eugene I scored some 1850 songs from my cool friend that we were staying with and spent all day backing things up and moving all my music library over to this sweet external 500 gig drive I got for Christmas from my step mother, i’ve always been so pressed for storage space that I have made no serious effort to collect much so it’s been cool getting back into it. plus the girl hates the dubstep that my friend from Eugene plays in his car and she was adamant that I get some more music she likes so she could listen to it on my iPod for the duration of the trip back down. but i wanted some new music as well so it worked out swell. all’s well that ends swell.

all’s well that ends swell.

so far we’ve had good luck finding people to stay with to fill in the gaps between the times that we had planned to come visit and stay with friends. when we hit Eugene we got dropped off by this sweet caravan of couples out of Austin Texas who told us to come visit, I’d gotten ahold of my buddy in town and told him we’d be landing that night. we made it a good time of a few nights in Eugene before he gave us a ride to Portland.

We were going up to visit this girlfriend of ours, from the town in Sonoma county that we’d just come up from, she went to Portland to go to school. she’d promised us a weekend of treats and eats, keeping us up in the style we’re accustomed to, and true to her word, she made good on taking care of us even though we showed up totally broke at her doorstep. a few days in Eugene had cleaned out our wallets.

so we got to hang out with our girlfriend and commiserate over a few evenings of her days off, and sort out all our odd stresses of being on the road for a week or so. we went out to a few of the hip Portland neighborhoods, had food cart food, had burritos at cheap joints the locals know about. they gave us comfy digs, and everyone was nice to us, some burning man folk there to talk to, some polyamourous open relationship couple who tell me they know no jealousy, interesting. some nice musicians and a nice back yard and comfy spots to relax and the only thing was there was no smoking on the property cause one of the guys gets migraines from cigarette smoke so we were always hanging off the sidewalk at the edge of the home and lighting everything with strike anywhere kitchen matches that were supplied to us from our hosts because we’d long since lost all our lighters and ended up with no money for new ones.

well at least we had spent our last two bucks in eugene at the smoke shop, picked up an ounce of this rolling tobacco that they sell as pipe tobacco to get around the federal taxes… our hosts in Portland kept us happy over the weekend, caring for us and feeding us, except nobody smoked so we were on our own with that. but we made it work. showed up with tobacco and no money and at least if you have smokes you don’t get cranky around your hosts. we didn’t even cook or clean or anything, it was a pleasure cruise vacation time.

but like all good things, our lady friend’s hospitality could only extend for a few nights, that was what we agreed upon before we came up, and thus we were calling around looking for places to stay. putting out the word on the social networks, writing messages to old friends, the girl was txting her old buddies who had moved up to Oregon from California. we had faith that something would work out, over the next 5 or so nights we’d have to stay alive to wait for my buddy from Eugene to come back up and pick us up again. round out a weeklong stay in Portland, some how. no money, no place to stay, the last night we have a place to crash approaching. we kept our faith and our faith was rewarded.

“we could always just hitch a ride back to Eugene if nothing works out,” the girl would say to me. what ended up happening instead was we finally got in touch with some of her friends, hung out with them in a park on our last evening to crash at the place we were at, and negotiated it with this guy that the girl knew, who was around in some scene she used to be a part of, and he took us into his little studio for a couple nights, which gave us more time to try to get a hold of some other folks to help round out our week in the city of roses. never did see those rose gardens.

the other issue was money, which we had completely ran out of, and we addressed this issue in a number of ways. the first thing I did was to get online and ask people to paypal me donations to my email address of lance@robotson.com on the social networks, which I didn’t think would really do much of anything, but to my surprise, some people actually came out of the woodwork and made donations to me (and my pleas to help keep our hitchhiking trip going). a relative I haven’t seen for a long time, a guy in LA I was hanging out with earlier in the year, and a friend of a friend in illinois who I’ve never met but who apparently is supportive of the lifestyle I’m leading. so they sent monies to me and I just had to wait for the money to clear into my bank account after a couple days.

the other thing we did is, the girl asked her mom to western union us some money, which had to be sent to me because the girl lost her ID somewhere along the way. and so, after sleeping at this guys place who she knew, we went on the epic hike to a western union check cashing place so we could have money, for the first time in days, so we can eat a real meal where we’re not just sharing a sandwich or a burrito together. and so, on that day, we both got to eat our own hamburgers, and it was good. and the money went quick.

“when you get your money we’ll spend it more carefully,” she says, back to splitting and sharing everything. the guy who put us up for a couple nights, who was a sweet illustrator, took us to a tobacco shop and we got a pack of these new york cheap cigarettes called ‘smoking joes’. they were a fine, cheap smoke. and he had good taste in music and cartoons and movies and he and the girl got along talking of those things while we all smoked in his apartment. so after a night, and the day of the epic hike to western union, and another night spent, we had finally gotten ahold of another friend to stay with, who was a nice 5 mile hike away, so we packed up our things and began to walk it. this after the rigmarole with my bank situation.

it goes like this: I was trying to get my paypal money out of my bank account, but my checking account had long since been screwed up by me over-drafting it by a dollar at a redbox last fall, (on some movie I probably didn’t even like, in Oregon, incidentally) and so my debit card linked to my account no longer worked. now, this is some credit union thing, so I figure I do like I always used to do and just go to some credit union branch place that will let me get into my savings account and get my money, thru these kinds of weird member branch credit union networks they have. but what had happened was, my old credit union had recently been eaten by a larger credit union, and they no longer participated in this shared branch banking, and so when I went to a credit union where I thought it would work, they told me that my bank no longer did that and that I’d have to call them up to figure it out. and call them up I did!

what they told me was, there were no branch offices in Oregon. closest ones were in Seattle and San Francisco. “well, is there anything that you can do for me today?” so I got them ordering me a new bank card, which will be sent to my old place in Santa Rosa (gotta tell my old roommates to keep an eye out for it in the mail), and then they are gonna transfer me to the card member services department head. so she makes me an offer. after I explain that I’m broke, on the road, why can’t I get my money, etc, she tells me, if there is an address I will be at, then they can FedEx overnight me my money. woo! so I say, let me get a hold of my friend who I will be staying with and I’ll get back to you.

so I call up my buddy and tell him the story of my weird bank scenario, and he gives me his address, and I call back my bank, and they say I’ll have forty bucks in cash the next day. I ask her to drop a little lollipop or something in the envelope.

armed with the knowledge that money was on its way, and the address to my friend’s place, we set off on our five mile walk with all our bags to his place. wishing we had a buck to our name, I spent my last fifty cents at a lemonade stand in some residential hood so we could get some refreshment. and we took breaks every 25 blocks or so. finally, in the mid afternoon, we arrived to our destination and were greeted warmly and offered cold drinks and a nice place to rest. my friend’s roommate was moving out, so we helped her move her stuff and she got us all burritos. I helped my friend work on his truck by pumping the clutch and getting out all the air bubbles as he’s running new fluid thru the hoses. we stayed up commiserating thru the night, and the girl took some bedding and made some nice nesting space for us to crash out in.

well my buddy said that we could probably stay a night or two, and the next day, the FedEx man brought me my cash. so we were set again to get some groceries and do some cooking. she cooks and I clean, is generally how we swing things. and we made a nice breakfast. and we went to check out some cool food carts downtown for lunch. and we listened to good music and I thought about contacting other people to stay with. but as it turned out, my buddy ends up saying we can stay all week till my Eugene friend picks us up later, so that takes a lot of pressure off.

after we establish that we are going to be in one place for a while, and don’t have to be hauling around our stuff every other day, I unpack my things and let all my oodles of stuff explode out and take up all the surface area that it can, and start looking around for things to do in town that I like doing, as long as we’re going to be around. and so, I find out about an open mic within walking distance, one I’d been to the year before when I was last in town, and I get ready to go out performing by spending an afternoon cutting and folding and gluing together cases for my demo CDs, which cleverly come in these ancient 5.25 inch floppy disks that I’ve cut open and gutted to use as packages for my cd. I manage to burn a few discs and finish packaging them in time to make it to this open mic and sign up to go on 6th.

the girl has no ID but the show space is separated from the bar and they don’t hassle us getting in. I’m excited to perform for my two friends in the crowd, the girl and our host. the girl has never seen me read on stage before. so we sit through a few singer songwriter types, I order some french fries for us. some of the performers are sad and others are up beat. some sing about love and others rant about politics. one particularly interesting duo of elderly gentleman, one on harmonica and one on guitar, do an awesome set, harmonizing with each other in beautiful baritone voices like a barbershop half-quartet. when it’s my turn to go on, I got a pretty good idea of my set, a few bits I do in under ten minutes, and enough time to pitch the crowd, and a rough idea of what I’m gonna say.

“so I’m a traveling poet and I hitchhiked up here with a friend of mine and this is what I do—

…now I’m going to do a song, I’ve been trying to get into writing little rap tunes, check it out, i’ve also got these demo CDs I made on my laptop that come in a cool custom recycled five and a quarter inch floppy disk that i’d like to try to sell for five to ten dollars or whatever you could afford, if I might shamelessly promote myself at this time…”

and yeah, I gave a good set, and the girl got to see me do my thing, she’d never been out to an open mic with me before so she’d known I do this stuff but I was pleased to get to show her my routine on stage. and I was well received, miraculously cool baritone guy is holding up a ten dollar bill at me, and then a woman comes over asking for a cd and she gave me ten dollars as well, and then I smoked a cigarette outside and another dude gave me seven bucks, and at that point I was sold out of all the copies I’d put together that night. on the way out the old baritone singing guys had been talking to the girl- “YOU are his traveling buddy?” - and then one of them tipped us out another five bucks- “here’s something for the road.” and the guy told me he liked my poem and to keep it up with the writing and the songs. good night.

on the last day in town before we got picked up to go back to Eugene I scored some 1850 songs from my cool friend that we were staying with and spent all day backing things up and moving all my music library over to this sweet external 500 gig drive I got for Christmas from my step mother, i’ve always been so pressed for storage space that I have made no serious effort to collect much so it’s been cool getting back into it. plus the girl hates the dubstep that my friend from Eugene plays in his car and she was adamant that I get some more music she likes so she could listen to it on my iPod for the duration of the trip back down. but i wanted some new music as well so it worked out swell. all’s well that ends swell.

Posted at 10:52 AM