There are historic monuments that don’t hold up to personal inspection, that rattle around inside the grandiose imagery built up by cultural myth. The Alamo is one such place. You watch the 1960 movie and the fort is a distinct and memorable character holding its own against the enormity of John Wayne and Richard Widmark. The movie makes you believe the place is large enough to hold thousands.

Go to San Antonio, ask a cop where it is, they don’t know, even though the image is right there on the patch on their arm. After wandering around a bit, turn the corner on a narrow street by a mall, and you’ll stumble over it in the center of a small square, tiny and inconsequential, as if ashamed of its elevated place within the American Mythos.

The Amphitheatrum Flavium, the Flavian Amphitheatre, has no such issues. This place is fucking HUGE. It was built to party, hard. Just you, 50,000 of your closest friends and a pride of lions. Stand next to it in line to get tickets and the stone oozes gravitas, leaning over you like the front line of the high school football team hungry for pig.

Why do I call it the Flavian Amphitheatre? Because it was built by the three emperors of the Flavian Dynasty between 72 and 80 A.D. The name we know it by now, Colosseum, refers to a bronze Colossus of Nero that was placed nearby and eventually torn down for the metal.

It’s easy to just stop and stare at the place and get lost in the fact that all that finished and intricate detail was done two thousand years ago. Think of that for a minute, TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO. Eighty generations of humans have lived and died since the first stone was laid down. Kind of puts all of your petty little worries, grievances and mortal sins into one hell of a perspective, doesn’t it?

Looks just like the singing bust from the Haunted Mansion.

We stayed at a private residence, a vacation home with no internet access. It felt like stepping back in time to the early nineties. I must admit somewhat sheepishly that I did get a bit twitchy not being able to check my email or surf the web when I turned on my computer. If the way I felt was any indication, knowing my disconnectedness was temporary, the world is going to go through some SERIOUS ‘net withdrawal when the Zombie Apocalypse hits.

Here are some of the things we saw:

Cool sunsets. Every. Damned. Night. Seriously, it was getting soooooo boring after a while.

Friday morning (-ish. My son is at that age where getting up before noon is somehow wrong), we drove into Cannon Beach, to get something to eat and hit Jupiter’s, a funky little used book store in a little building behind a bike shop and a curio shop. Alas, we started out too late and the town was infested with tourists. All the day visitors had arrived and no parking was to be had anywhere, so we headed up the 101 to Seaside.

What can I say about Seaside that hasn’t already been said by practically no one? Seaside is the biggest town south of Astoria. Astoria is famous for two reasons, both film related. Goonies and The Ring 2 were both shot in and around Astoria. Astoria bills itself as a funky tourist destination, but I’ve been to Astoria and frankly the place is incredibly boring. The only bright spot in my mind is Amazing Stories, one of the most well-stocked comic shops I’ve seen. Given that Dark Horse Comics is headquartered in Milwaulkie and Things From Another World has no less than three shops around the metro area, not to mention Guapo Comics and scads of other indie shops, there’s no reason to go to Amazing Stories JUST to go there, but if you’re on the Oregon coast jonesing HARD for the latest of whatever it is you’re into, then Amazing Stories is THE place to go.

Seaside, on the other hand, has personality. Seaside is your funky Aunt Ida with all the cats and a penchant for too much makeup, leopard print tops and skin tight leggings, who smokes and calls you “Honey” before she plants a wet, smelly tobacco kiss on your cheek. Seaside tries too hard and not enough all at the same time. Seaside is awesome.

We drove in and parked in the public parking structure a block off Broadway Street. We hit Funland for an hour before heading up the street to Pig ‘N Pancake for lunch. Pig N’ Pancake serves breakfast all day so I partook of a Taco omelet. As we were eating, Ian looks out and sees a sign for chocolate covered twinkies. This peaks my interest.

After finishing up, we cross Broadway to explore a shop that would be brazen enough to sell such culinary abominations. Broadway is the main drag, if such a thing can be said to exist in Seaside, where all the crappy little tourist traps and overpriced restaurants are situated. Strolling up and down the narrow street window shopping is the thing to do and we’ve been there enough times in the past few years to have some favorite haunts. The Purple Pelican sells nice glass art and funky frog sculptures you can mount on your wall. The Man Shop is, as the name suggests, an ode to all the low brow humor one can fit on a t-shirt, drink coaster or fart machine. Timpton’s is very upscale, smelling of lavender and cinnamon and selling cachets of potpourri and throw rugs.

So, it was pretty obvious this place was new and it drew us to it like moths to a flame. The place was split into two sections. The left side was the candy shop, the right was the ice cream shop. We walked into the ice cream shop first and discovered their second crime against nature, the deep fried Twinkie. We backed away slowly and headed towards the candy shop which, in addition to the aforementioned chocolate covered Twinkie, advertised 50 different kinds of licorice.

The place was, as you might imagine, narrow aisles of bulk candy. What made it great was the variety. Candy shops are a dime a dozen on Broadway, and they all sell the same stuff, a shitload of salt water taffy and candy you can get anywhere on the west coast. Walk into any convenience store in California, Oregon or Washington and you’ll find everything the other stores carry. Not this place. I saw so many unfamiliar names, I was in heaven. At one point, I came around a corner and was able to cross off an item on my bucket list.

I discovered the band The Squirrel Nut Zippers in the mid-nineties when I walked into a Tower Records in Burbank and saw the album Hot! on an end cap. I was intrigued, in the right mood, and bought the CD without listening to it first. I’ve been a fan ever since and when I found out they got their name from a candy popular in the south, I knew that at some point I would have to get some. So when I came around the corner, I found an overflowing bin of these babies:

Yes, I filled a bag. Yes, they’re really good.

Then I bought one of these:

Yes, I ate it. Yes, it was good.

Friday afternoon I took a stroll along the beach. It was an incredibly windy day and I didn’t feel it as I walked north to Haystack Rock. When I turned around and headed back, I felt like Sisyphus pushing against the North wind. Okay, that was a mixed metaphor, but it was a Sisyphean task walking back.

Here are some of the things I saw on the beach:

Primitive forts created by the indigenous wild children of Cannon Beach.

The famous Haystack Rock itself.

On Saturday, before we headed back to Portland, we were able to make Jupiter’s. I found this:

I read Slan last month and liked it well enough to want to read some of Van Vogt’s other stuff. His style is somewhat bombastic, but he writes a good page turner.

Not that it mattered, the Weather Prognosticators were WRONG WRONG WRONG. It stayed fully cloudy all that weekend and into that Monday, but by Sunday, after a hundred or so years of the clouds and rain, we decided to bid a hearty “Fuck You” to the weather and the oh so smug Weather Prognosticators and GET OUT OF THE HOUSE.

So we did. I’ve been to the Oregon Zoo, briefly, and wasn’t too impressed. It a zoo, after all, and unless you have a hard on for listless African beasts laying around in enclosures faked to look like natural habitat, once you seen one zoo, you’ve seen them all. The cool thing about the Oregon Zoo, though, is where it’s at, namely Washington Park, which has a lot of other cool places to visit, too.

So we went to the Japanese Gardens.

Maybe it was the cloudy weather laying down a mellow atmosphere, maybe it was the fact that we drove a mile or so into Washington Park on a winding road through some beautiful, primeval forest, thereby losing, or at least temporarily suspending, our connection to the modern, hectic, world, but the vibe at the gardens was one of peace and tranquility.

Where the city is one big knot of humanity moving as fast as possible, as loud as possible, the gardens were still and silent. The moment I stepped through the gates, I felt all my tension and stress leave my body. There is just no way a person can be angry, or sustain any negative emotions for any length of time while in the gardens. The beauty of the place just overwhelms you and makes you happy to know such a jewel can exist in the middle of a major metropolitan area.

My photos do not do the place justice, but I am inspired to improve so that I can better convey the awesomeness of it.

Benson Bubblers

An incredibly ugly piece of public ‘art’ in a small square between 6th and Broadway. In the afternoons, a group of local skater boi (s) make it their bitch.

I like my fish eye. It came with a roll of cheap ISO100 film so I loaded that bad boy up and lived the Lomography motto, “Don’t think, just shoot.” I burned through that first roll pretty quickly and it ends up in a drawer for six months until this morning, when on a whim I decide to get it developed.

The results are to be expected. Only half of the roll came out, I suspect because I thought the roll was over and rewound the film too early. I really don’t remember now. Of the images that did come out, about 4 are even close to the right exposure to be seen by the naked eye. I present to you now the three that have some compositional interest.

Enjoy.

It took me a while to get this next one. It’s a shot of the dash of my Mustang.