friend of the built environment

Southwest Airlines. Where everyone is treated as an equal amount of dirt. One of the few airlines where the law of the jungle trumps the laws of customer service. I can never decide whether I like that or not…

 
Preparing to board my 6th plane of the year… 11th plane of the past 12 months…Good gawd.

 
I [...]

Thanks to the folks here at Southwest Airlines, I’ll be arriving in Portland a couple hours late. Which means I’ll be arriving in Seattle a couple hours late (meaning more like 3am or 4am).

 
This will be my excuse to drag David to Seattle for a real visit (meaning for more than 16 hours) sometime in [...]

Seattle. Geez, it’s pretty here.

 
My downtown Ramada was sort of a schitzo hotel. It’s got things like nice towels and real glasses and room service, but it also has things like no free parking, a lumpy bed and no wireless. Then there’s the fact that the in-room coffee kit included things like a coffee maker [...]

Portland. Lesbians in the morning, fags in the evening…

 
Arrived at a slightly more reasonable hour in Portland on Friday night. Checked into the hotel and took a quick drive up and down NE 82nd and noticed, once again, that Portland seems to have an unusuallly large concentration of large suburban adult bookstores. Luckily it also [...]

Portland. Facial Hair capital of the world. A city composed entirely of the same cute 20s-40s neighborhood that I covet so. A cheap city whose housing prices do not reflect their Left Coast geography as they should. A city full of fuzzy granola fags with tattoos. Portland.

 
I met up with Amy for Bread and Ink, [...]

I started to take that ‘how selfish are you‘ quiz, but was so unimpressed that I skipped most of it.

 
First of all, the majority of the questions were about one’s behavior in relation to friends, family or dates. This doesn’t really jive, since most people are in a very strong reciprocal value relationship with these [...]

One of the more understandable arguments being made in the emotionally-soiled immigration debate is that the proximity of Mexico causes a more ambiguous sense of national identification and loyalty among Mexican immigrants than did such as Scotch-Irish or Sicilian immigrants in the early 20th century.

 
One good analogy to the Mexican immigrants in America is the [...]

We made an offer on a place in Winston-Salem yesterday evening. We’ll know by tomorrow morning whether we got it.

 
It’s on the higher end of what we wanted, but it’s friggin’ huge: 2100 immaculate sqft on the main level and an unfinished full basement that would make the coolest dungeon on earth one day. Not [...]

She was the lady that taught me to love cities. She taught me to temper my value system with real life. She was real. She understood applied philosophy. I’ll miss her.

 
David has also written a (more thoughtful) epitaph.

As you may already know, we’ve entered into contract on our dream house. This is gonna be fun.

I often feel that in the 40s, Soviet Russia was a greater threat to American security than Hitler’s Germany. In the end, the US had a lot more in common ideologically with Nazism and a Euro-hegemonic German state could have been pretty easily integrated into a world order with America still in a fairly dominant [...]

Lacking any formal plans for Walpurgisnacht, I decided to take a walk. A long walk. After finishing a quick bit of month-end prep at work, I walked through the RWP* District - encompassing Presidio Heights, Pacific Heights, the Marina, North Beach and the various northeastern ‘hills’ - not always an intelligent decision due to my [...]