Alberta Street Fair

On Saturday Arch and I went to the Alberta Street Fair. It was very sweet. A little spread out but still good. I actually love Portland street fairs. In San Diego street fairs are a lot of chiropractor booths and t-shirts that say extremely clever things like, “Who Came First, The Chicken or The Egg” and there’s a chicken with a bashful look on his face and an egg smoking a cigarette. What can I say, great minds come from San Diego. Like the band Ratt.

Speaking of hard rocking bands, we checked out this band at the fair. These kids are in the School of Rock here in Portland and are all teenagers or pre-teens. They played the Rolling Stones, AC/DC, and Janis Joplin. For each song, new musicians got up and played. It was really great and made me recall my own music lessons as a public school kid in California. They consisted of all of us sitting at our desks with a laminated 8 1/2 X 11 sheet of paper that had been photocopied with a piano keyboard. We were to press pictures of the keys according to the instructions that were illuminated on the painted-white cinder block wall from an overhead projector.

To this day my fingers long to tickle the one dimensional, plastic keys every time I hear the buzz of fluorescent lights and smell a gentle breeze of ammonia. I’m a regular Glenn Gould, let me tell you.

We also ran into Don P. at the street fair. He was manning the Personal Telco booth, which was some lawn chairs and cardboard signs. Personal Telco is a really cool project. It’s that thing that happens when you go to several cafes in the city and there’s free wifi. Personal Telco are the people who have set it up.

And then this happened. That’s a hot dog. I ate one. And as Arch and I were sitting on the curb consuming our cured meat wrapped in intestinal casing, I reflected on the fact that since moving to Portland, I’ve consumed probably 25 hot dogs. Prior to moving here, the last time I ate a wiener was when I was eight years old and at a Padres baseball game.

I don’t know what happened; what made me decide that the hot dog, instead of being a repellent example of humanity’s mistaken mastery of the food chain, is actually DELICIOUS and MAGICAL. And I eat them whenever they are available. Better, when going to certain pubs, they have posh hot dogs with pepper inside, or grilled onions and several different types of mustard with which I can smother my hot dog.

That hot dog is called the Destroyer. It was a German sausage with sauerkraut and spicy mustard. YUM! The bun was just a regular bun and it was cold, which sort of lessened my enjoyment, but I still reveled in the glory that is cheap protein wrapped in pure carbohydrate goodness.

HOORAY HOT DOGS!