One thought that comes to mind continuously when you are moving your own possessions into storage is “why do I have all this crap?”

In the scheme of things, I don’t own much. J. and I were able to pack all of our worldly possessions into a 5×10′ storage space. Each of us used about half the space, meaning I would need just a 7×7 plot of earth to hold my junk. Or just the space of one box, if I was an expert stacker and gravity/wind didn’t exist.

The storage facility was just a few minutes away in a nearby industrial area along the river. It was managed by a friendly man who seemed just a few clicks away from being a serial killer (Who would no doubt store bodies there with his employee discount). The space was vast, and felt a little like walking through a secret facility. The single floor warehouse was subdivided into hundreds of repeating spaces, connected by a few block-long hallways that transfered even the smallest sound along their length. In the hallway next to our space, was a electric organ that seemed unclaimed.




Moving happened over the course of Thursday and Friday, with most on Friday. J. borrowed her uncle’s pickup and it took about ten trips. The storage facility’s moving carts allowed us to unload the whole truck in a single pass. Friday was a long day as it involved moving all of J.’s stuff and the rest of mine, plus runs to leave things at Goodwill, selling a couch, dropping off some things at a friend’s house, and finding out that a few of our bigger items wouldn’t fit. The overburdens were my futon frame, a bookshelf, and two coffee tables J. had made in college. Reluctantly, we had to part ways with this stuff. It was too late in the night to sell them, so we drove them back to J.’s apartment and left them on the sidewalk. Despite how busy yesterday was, there was still time to enjoy the great weather by driving across town to get Vietnamese sandwiches for lunch. Dinner was a little trashier, and involved eating in a truck and french fries. By around 9:30, the final pieces of the move were ready. I slipped by Vespa into the perfectly measured space, rolled in J.’s bike, and locked the door. Of course, I had forgotten to take my keys from the scooter, so we had to go back for them. And once we got back from that, I realized I’d forgotten to bring my banjo and electric guitar. I had to move those this morning. Passing by J.’s place, I noticed that everything by the futon frame had been taken.

Last night, J. and I stayed in my empty apartment. It was our last night in Portland together, and we slept like logs on a soiled futon with coverless pillows that rested on the dusty floor. This morning she headed to Nashville on an early flight, while I packed my things and caught a cab for my flight to New Mexico. I didn’t even know there was an “Old” Mexico, go figure. I bet that’s also what the first conquistadors said when they discovered the lands the Navajo called “New York.” Did you know that the Navajo used to grow apples there and ship them all over the world on horse-powered cargo canoes?

Honest Injin.

As I’m approaching 30, there will likely be few times left for me to pack up all my stuff and head out in search of great adventure. I expect once more. Afterward, I’ll have to do as both older birds and trees do: build a nest and put down roots, respectively. Pretty soon, baby Niks will be popping out of my love partner’s baby hole. And baby Niks wouldn’t be the best travel partner, at least until they are old enough to carry guns. I don’t know where or when all this settling will come, but it will come. It will come if I don’t get in a plane crash or struck by a meteor.

To maintain my freedom, I strive for fewer things and no debt. Luckily wanting less and having less debt works together. Since paying off my student loan at the beginning of last year, I’ve been indebted to no one. And it feels good. With the move over the past few days, I superficially sorted out the obvious items I was hoarding but didn’t take the time to determine what I really need. A lot of my possessions are paper based: old artwork, old prints of writing and layouts and miscellaneous things. Books take up the rest, along with art supplies and a few minimal pieces of furniture. Most of my stuff has been in boxes since I moved to Portland over two years ago. And a lot of it had been in boxes prior to that. If I had the guts, I could probably weed my possessions down by half and double my weed possessions. Luckily, in the past two years, I’ve reduced the amount of things I own. In this move alone, I cleared out at least eight boxes or more of various items. When I get back to the States, I will reduce this even more.

I am not sad to leave Portland, nor was I excited to leave it either. My mood was indicative of my time there: easy going and pleasant. Portland didn’t wow me, but it had no faults either. I could image coming back to live with the baby Niks and love partner someday.

Things about Portland I will miss:

• Weather in the summer
• Farmer’s market
• Walking Everywhere
• No sales tax
• The scenery outside of town
• Picking berries
• Cheap rent
• The easy ride to the airport

Things I won’t miss:

• Weather in the winter
• The lack of ocean or great in town scenery
• The god-awful new construction all over
• The lack of multiple good places to work at
• The lack of scooter parking

I imagine coming when back to the States I’ll be living in a much bigger city. I think that’s what I want right now. I can see the people that have made them most of Portland, and they are not me.

Today I arrive in Albuquerque, New Mexico to visit my sister for a few days in Santa Fe. On Wednesday, we will be driving up to Montana. We pick my father up from the Denver airport along the way and head north to visit my grandmother and uncles. My non-incarcerated uncle is running a marathon. The rest of us will be walking the 5K portion of it. After celebrating the race, we drive back on Monday and I take a flight out to Dallas. J. meets me two weeks later, and day after we fly off to Bangkok via Los Angeles and Hong Kong.

This is the start of another great adventure. And while I’m nervous about funding it all through savings, I have to remind myself that it’s what I was saving for.

This weekend J.K. and M. visited us in Portland. I was excited about playing ball games (including xTreme™ Sokker and Power b’Ballz) outside, but the weather got wet again on the evening of their arrival day. Without balls, the visit was relaxing and mellow.

On Saturday, we went to a friend’s house to watch the first game of the Stanley Cup and see his three day old baby. The baby was small and well mannered. When our plan to order 24 tacos fell through, we got pizza for dinner.

On Sunday, we made blueberry pancakes with rhubarb topping for breakfast and prepared for a long going-away party J. hosted at her apartment. After the guests cleared, we broke out Catan for a 3 hour game of Cities and Knights. Playing on an expanded board with 5 people was dramatically more fun and unpredictable than when just J. and I play.

The following day was spent raping my childhood memories of Indiana Jones while watching its new sequel. I wasn’t expecting much, and the first half was corny but okay, but the end just swirled into a vortex of eye candy, unnecessary revelations, and sappy dialogue. Oh well, better luck next time Lucasfilm.

Today everyone met for breakfast at the Tin Shed on Alberta. The meal was large and sconey. Afterward, there was time for a little walk before the others took off to visit some work friends and head home.

After both C. and J.K. and M. left Portland for LA, I was left with one consistent friend. With J. around, the absence of a well-wishers group is less noticed. But like genital warts and boomerangs, it’s only once they come back that you realize how much you miss them. It was a good visit.

I didn’t take many photos, but here are a few:

This is what happens when you knock over a french press.

The visitors outside the Tin Shed.

Walking down a grassy alley after breakfast.

We disobeyed.

Ladybug on flower.

Gas meters.

Two birds eating chicken on the street.

J. and I leave Portland in about three days. I’m getting excited and nervous. This afternoon, we secured a nearby storage space for seven months. Tomorrow and Thursday will be spent packing, and on Friday all of our belongings will be crammed into a 5′x10′ room. Now that the day is upon me, it feels like it came out of nowhere.

Today was an unusually sunny day in Portland, so I had a lazy morning of making coffee and washing my scooter. Afterward it was around lunch time, and despite having bought a variety of Asian foodstuff from Uwajimaya yesterday (involving accidentally driving my scooter onto the highway), decided to go on a joyride for a Vietnamese sandwich called bánh mì. This cheap, flavorful meal is made up of thinly sliced pickled carrots, daikon, onions, cilantro, and meat or tofu served on a baguette. Popular bánh mì fillings include pork, paté, chicken, and head cheese. I had pork today, and washed it down with a bulletproof can of coconut juice. I was the only one in the restaurant so I read a car magazine that was lying around and tried to make small talk with the only employee. The sandwich was so good, I ordered another to go. The cost of two sandwiches and drink was exactly $6.

If this place were closer, I’d be going for lunch every day. Instead, it’s a pleasant twenty minute drive along a river, across a bridge, along a creek, through some industrial zones and quaint neighborhoods. Stupid Portland. But if you’re ever in the mood for pure, cheap deliciousness, head over to:

Binh Minh Sandwiches
7821 SE Powell Blvd Portland OR

Last night, I installed a OS X port of a first person shooter I played 12(!) years ago in DOS called Duke Nukem 3d. The port was actually only the shareware version, but I was able to open the installation package and see what files I needed to pull of my old CD and where to put them for the full version to work. As soon as I fired it up, I was taken back to the Junior Year of highschool spent sitting in my bedroom shooting pig cops, octo-brains, and hookers. Duke3d was a pretty revolutionary game at the time, as it offered more interactivity, personality, and fairly decent graphics. But what made it interesting for me was that it came bundled with the level editor they used to make the game. The editor was called Build, a cryptic DOS program that looked like a primitive AutoCAD. There were no tool palettes, no pull-down menus. Every function was performed by keyboard shortcuts that you had to memorize to be good at anything.

All of the level geometry was drawn solely from a top down view. From there, you hit a key to instantly go into a 3d view of the level where you could glide around and point to surfaces to assign textures, change heights and slopes, etc. Advanced functionalities such as water and doors involved placing special sprites called “sector affectors” and changing their parameters to suit the need.

I spent much of the summer and weekends lost in the maps I created. I had never been able to create a virtual space so quickly, and I was mesmerized. But what what made it all the better is that I could actually dial up a friend via modem and have deathmatches in the maps that we made. Each battle inspired changes to the levels: the addition of a secret passage, moving stuff around, adding extra rooms and weapons, trying to rebuild to my advantage. Some of the maps got so complicated that only I knew which switches controlled which doors and where the secret rooms were. I have fond memories of all of this.

Luckily, I saved all the major versions of my finished maps. Today I loaded them up and took a virtual trip down early 3d memory lane. I went a little overboard on screenshots, but I’m only posting a few.

One of the first maps I made was called Nexus. It was basically a dark arena with piles of weapons and various side rooms. I promoted myself in huge letters on the arena floor.

Here is view from the ground of a light tower and an endless supply of micro-rocket launchers. A player could sent a volley of rockets all over the map to light it up and find the opponent. Explosions would echo in the darkness.

Here the underground power generator for Nexus.

This map is called Water2, and is basically a water treatment plant. Canals and waterfalls are interconnected, allowing the player to move around the level exclusively underwater if they wanted to. This sign above the canal had two nicknames for girls I had crushed on. I can’t remember who they are.

In this map called Zoned, I designed two outdoor fortresses with all kinds of locking gates, safe rooms, sentry guns. Here’s a view from the balcony of one fortress to the other. It was a good place shot shoot rockets from.

A lot of my maps because a little security happy. This panel controlled the doors in just ONE of the buildings in Zoned (and it wasn’t even one of the main buildings). These days, I have no idea what all these switches do, but they all do something. It makes going through my old maps a little like solving a puzzle.

A lot of the locking doors lead to a security room with a video monitor I could use to monitor key points around the level. I could lock myself in the room and watch my opponent approach.

Here’s a view down the main alley of a map called Place II. I don’t remember what Place I was. This level made extensive use of catwalks and locking doors.

I crammed so many extra rooms into most of my levels. They didn’t add anything gameplay wise, but they made the spaces feel more real. In Place II, I put in this reading room and a full library. The same map also had bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms (including a toilet you could crawl into the sewers from), a working pool table, highway, water treatment area, water pump room, jail cells, a labyrinth, security rooms, a weird strobing cult worship room, a shrine to myself, and multiple death pits.

Here’s a small door to a secret room in another map called Station. To get in, you have to bounce a shrink ray shot off the wall so it hits you. Once shrunk, you can go through the door. I don’t remember what’s inside.

Station was the largest map I made. It was a sprawling space station of 6 different main areas, each with a different theme. They were interconnected by walkways, subway trains, and teleports convering mostly at the transit hub pictured. I have no idea how we ever found each other playing this level.

This picture is from one of my favorite levels called Interwoven. Basically, this level was about connections. Hallways connected with hallways, went outside and underground. At the time, I was pleased with the structures I could build despite the limitations of the engine. In this room that holds the rocket launcher, I had to manually shade each face of the geometry to simulate light and shadow. The engine wouldn’t calculate shadows, so you had to define them all manually. It was a pain in the ass, but the results could be pretty good.

The lower hallways had starry teleport walls at the ends. If someone was chasing you, you could shoot a rocket straight ahead and it might just hit their back.

Another great spot in Interwoven was this windowed room with indoor fountain. Its sole purpose was to fake the light coming in through windows, but I placed a rocket launcher on top of the fountain that you could pick up with a skillful leap across.

One of the maps we played the most was built between a friend and I. We called it Hightime because the precarious deathmatches took place on catwalks above a bottomless pit. Playing in this map was zen, as you had to run around and leap from ledges while shooting someone and not falling to your death.

It was amazing to go through these spaces again. I have such vivid memories of them, like other parts of my childhood. The next step will be to coordinate some deathmatch with my old friend, in Dallas, in our old rooms. Do you hear me A.? It’s time to kick your butt all over again!