I Live Here Monday - Matrix Rain Talking

Well, winter has arrived.  Rain, rain, rain, flooding, muddy floors, etc.  In everywhere except the Pacific Northwest, rain does not require an entirely different wardrobe.  You can wear a nice warm jacket, and use an umbrella to stay dry.  Here, though, rain doesn't fall-it hovers.  You walk into it, so if you're not wearing something waterproof, you're going to end up soaked.  Umbrellas are just a fun way of shouting "tourist!"

Good rain jackets have hoods.  Hoods which do weird, weird things to us:

Summer!  Two friends are walking and chatting, enjoying the day.  They can observe each other's body language and reactions using their peripheral vision or, when necessary, a head turn.  They understand each other perfectly, and they end the day happy.

But then... the rains come.  Plants die, clouds flip you the bird, and they start living off just coffee and beer.  Of course, they still go for walks with friends, because it's Eugene and outdoor activities are required.  But!  They keep getting into fights because they can't see each other.  They are pretty much invisible to the other one.  Maybe one of them even got hit by a bus ten minutes ago; the other one won't know because his hood is in the way.  They can turn their heads as much as they want, but those hoods obey the jackets, so it will not turn with them.

After a couple days, they learn that they need to turn their whole shoulders in order to see each other.  But a simple turn makes them FACE TO FACE, which is considered a confrontation.  People here don't do well with direct confrontation.  Feelings of fear and anger and sadness are aroused, leading to processing.  Lots and lots of processing.

To avoid all this, they have to twist their bodies both to face the person they're walking with and away from that person, so as to avoid confrontation.  This means that during conversation, their bodies are twisted like Neo's in the Matrix when he's dodging bullets.  I don't even want to think about what it does to their backs, but it sure is a great core work-out.

I live here Monday - I probably have your stolen stuff

There is a lot of petty theft in Eugene.  A.  Lot.  I don't want you to underestimate the amount of theft and vandalism here, just because it's a small-to-medium city, the population density is pretty low, people tend to be well-educated, and there are lots of butterflies and green trees and happy, smiling children.

There's also enough meth to fuel China's work force for a month.

Over the past few months, I have noticed a strange trend.  In the narrow and seldom traveled gap between the buildings next to my building, freshly stolen items often appear.  It's never anything too valuable, just bike wheels and workout clothes and, once, a complete set of Spanish flashcards.

Why does all this stuff end up in that alley?  Well, I have a theory.  Have you heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?  It's a bunch of garbage (a bunch = hundreds of thousands of square miles) that is stuck in the middle of the ocean, slowly disintegrating.  It ends up there because it's kind of a dumping ground for the ocean currents:

I think that the alley behind my office is the Great Eugene Dumping Ground for Valueless Stolen Crap.  Check it out:

The high pressure zones of rich professionals and cars, which are just asking to be broken into, provide the valueless crap, but they also push the petty thieves with their stolen goods away from the business district of downtown.  At that point, the thieves start going through the bags they've ripped off, and unconsciously get stuck in a loop they're very familiar with¹ - Public Defender's office to the various required counseling places to the drug dealers in the alley(not pictured).  They are forced off the actual streets by the nerdy looking bicycle cops, drop all the crap they don't want to keep behind my office, then break the loop and run off towards the bike path.

After not too much time, the ANGRY RED ARROWS OF METH! force them back to repeat the cycle day after day.

Anyways, what I'm saying is that, you know that bike you had stolen?  I probably have the cast-off pieces of your destroyed lock.  The bike is long gone, though.  Sorry, dude.

¹Am I saying that there is no hope for these people?  No, there are a lot of really dedicated workers trying to get them out of this loop....  On the other hand, I once watched a fight break out at the halfway house because they guys living there didn't agree on how to best water the lawn.

I Live Here Monday

My awesome and less profane friend has an awesome and less profane blog, Stowaway.  She has a weekly feature called "My Kind of Town Monday," which made me want to do something similar.  I don't really take nice pictures, though, or really love the city I'm living in.¹

Also, I don't think I can commit to another weekly update, with the other two crappy weekly features I have and the wine club wines that I have to drink every month and waking up every day...  I'm a busy person, basically.

On the other hand, sometimes shit gets hilarious here in Eugene.  So, I will have a whenever-I-feel-like-it Monday feature called "I live here" Monday, and I'll talk about a funny sight that I saw or how a crazy transient² greeted me or how I bought a snobby Eugene ten dollar beer and then spilled half of it down my shirt, making my shirt worth twice its former value.

Here's the first thing you need to know about Eugene:

People here love college football.  Really, really love it.  In a survey that I just conducted³, 72% of respondents said they loved Ducks Football more than their first born children, 14% didn't have any children because they had traded them for season tickets, 11% just screamed "GO DUCKS," and 3% were total NPR-listening nerds who are about to get beat up and have their gluten-free tempeh sandwiches stolen.

So, if you visit the place I live, I suggest you learn how to do the Oregon "O," which is a totally innocent suggestion and absolutely does not mean vagina in sign language.

¹How many Eugenians did I just offend?  It's not terrible, it's just... uh, not my kind of town.

²We don't call them homeless or hobos or bums here... we call them transients.  This is because we assume they are transitioning between homes or maybe between cities.  This is wishful thinking.  At best, they are transitioning between hits of meth.

³I did not conduct a survey.