My plan was to go to a friend of a friend's house in North Portland off of Alberta Street for the infamous Last Thursday Art Walk. I was planning on biking up there and had scoped out the route on my rather ragged bike map. It would be a long ride, but I've been escorting my parents for the past week and a half, and I'm sick of driving. I'd ride.
Just before I went to yoga (I needed some decompression time after the said week of solid parentals), I checked online to follow the scandalous account of the SC governor on the NY Times. This morning was the headline that Farrah Fawcett had died, which wasn't a shocker, as I'd read about her struggle with cancer; however, the new headline was neither SC Governor nor was it Charlie's Angel: Michael Jackson was rushed to the hospital. I did a bit of facebooking and came back to it, now the King of Pop was dead. Woah.
Is this true? Regardless of his Wacko Jacko Bizarro world, MJ is still freaking amazing. He makes everyone want to rock out. He's the last cultural icon that rocked so many people's worlds.
My little cousin posted something on facebook about "lamenting our culture that focuses on the deaths of celebrities and not the betrayal of a leader." My first inclination was to respond and say "what are you talking about???"; hardly anyone outside SC care about a SC governor's peccadilloes: THIS IS THE KING OF POP! Then I realized she was born in the 90's and didn't really comprehend the enormity of the situation.
Anyways, I continued reading the news bulletins on NYT, and I saw that Portland, OR., was having a bike memorial starting at the Steel Bridge and continuing onto Alberta. MY EXACT ROUTE. You know I boogalooed to get down there.
Wow, what a ride. There were not that many people, but it was an awesome sensation to pick up with a bunch of strangers and rock out to MJ blasting from some ghetto bike speakers (pictured in the park photo). I rocked out all the way from Steel Bridge to Alberta and 20th. I was headed to 26th. We stopped right in the middle of Last Thursday mayhem and had an impromptu dance party to "ABC" and "Beat it." I swear I better be in the news, because I stuck to the bike speaker like MJ grabs his hoo-hoo.
Wow. Just amazing. I totally am in love Portland and love being here! We took over multiple lanes of traffic, and people just stopped and honked and danced and "EEee-heeed" along with us. Great, great town.
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