Spring thoughts about eating in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

There are definitely spring feelings stirring in me. We had a week-long snowy freeze-up, good only for giving our puppy the experience of going out for very short walks in it, and now, as I always predict before the fact, I am able to have the impression that I am looking back on winter, even though there’s really a ways to go. Even so, that doesn’t explain the change. The spring shift just happens. The glimpses of light outside just matter more. There is a sense that I am going to do things, that things are going to happen. There is at least the illusion, or delusion, of mysterious impetus, or of thinking in terms of impetus.

(The descent into winter has a more passive feeling, which goes well with seasonal affect disorder and the coming of the dim; as the sunlight wanes I feel like I am going to have to accommodate myself to things.)
(The reaction-video thing from August on has probably gone along with that, because one thing I’ve been indulging in is nostalgia. It’s not exploration, it’s revisiting of past loves. Who would watch someone else react to a movie they haven’t seen?)
(Curiously each end of the oscillation has me thinking the rudest things about the other. The autumn me thinks the spring me is a bit of a fool, distinctly going through a not very bright phase. The spring me thinks the autumn me is flattened and defeated.)

Here is another day when I have gotten up insanely early to write in Prosebox. Am I going to try to make this a habit again? I don’t know, I’ve been wrong before, many times the last few years, but it would go well with the spring gear.
The main thing I have to get used to again is the possibility that I’ll have nothing important to write about and that I’ll just write pointless rot. But the old rule from my time in Open Diary is that I can’t say anything important if I’m not talking. So get used to it. Write some rot, and sometimes there will be something else.

During the time when the ice locked us all in for a week, I felt forced to actively think about what gives me joy. And naturally the best ideas, or the clearest, were from the “foolish” spring and summer time. What I mostly came up with was from what you might call the lower self - food. Good cooking with the right ingredients to hand. Going to a terrific restaurant. The personal delight of A Good Book, A Good Beer, and A Good Burger taken in combination. (Many of these memories date from Portland’s golden age of eateries, before Covid and the pulse of inflation tightened things up for restaurants and tightened their menus and disappeared many of them. You never know something was a golden age until change has put the cap on it.)

(I have one epic tale of the Good Book, the Good Beer, and the Good Burger that I ought to tell. Not just now.)

One thing I did during the snow (it was ridiculous, the “snowed-in” pressure I felt; I mean, I wouldn’t have been going out anyway!) was to update my personal recommendation list/memory-nudger/navigation guide for brewpubs and eateries in Portland. I’ve kept it up for the last few years. Not a soul has asked for this list, I’m no “expert”, it’s just mine, a reminder list, but I wrote it as if for other people and I showed it in Facebook, and maybe someone somewhere will save the images and use it someday when they visit Portland. It makes me happy to think so.
I had to remove a few places that have closed, which made me brood; I added some new places I’ve discovered that now have to be on there; and I caught and corrected some changes in hours and details.
I finally decided to add to the list one place I’ve never been, a little sushi place that looks like it’s been transported straight from Shinjuku, Tokyo, that I always used to hurry past and promise myself again that I would take Gwen to. Since then I only hurry past and feel the promises. I’ll never go in. The little glowing sign is another one of Gwen’s memorials. But it belongs on my list.

Here is the current state of the thing, in two images, the “finder scope” map and the actual list with the addresses to plug into GPS navigation. (This gives me me the opportunity to test a free image hosting site I just found.)

The actual list:

The “finder scope” map:

I should say something about the beer-centric nature of the list. Portland introduced me to.... well, first Portland introduced me to the fact that beer does not have to taste terrible. (A frequent thing about American visitors to Portland is that they will not try the beer, because people have said to them “No, try this beer, you’ll like it” over the years and the beer has always tasted awful and they are not going down that road again. The fact that “normal” beer in this country can taste like something you’d clean your engine with gives a true glimpse of the power of American advertising. But I digress.)
I was going to say that Portland introduced me to what I guess is a sort of German way of drinking beer. You don’t drink beer to get drunk; you have beer with food. The point of ordering a beer or two at a restaurant, I’ve found, is not just to enjoy the taste or try a new one, and, again, not to get drunk; it’s to just slightly depress my critical faculties so that a good meal seems the best meal ever!!!!!

This goes along well with a sort of happy-hour avalanche that happened in Portland where one of the finest restaurants in Portland started putting really good food on their happy hour menu. The formerly rather basic happy-hour menus of Portland took off. And they dragged the general state of cuisine along with them… and, golden-age-over or not, this is still a great city to eat in.

All right, that’s enough rot. :-) Let’s see if the image links worked. - They did!

Last updated February 14, 2024