Portland Entry#3: Downtime
It's pouring again "and I wonder, still I wonder, who will stop the rain". Being Canadian has done nothing to temper a man from the cold. 52ºF in the afternoon is unseemly at best, rude at worse. I thought the city of roses would be more polite. Plus there are the goddamn frogs. You think it was plague. I hear them day and night. It's a frog orgy and the backyard is Studio 54.
I decided to keep close to the fire and enjoy some fine works of literature. I read the first two volumes of Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan, Alan Moore's Watchmen, Brian Azzarello's Hellblazer, and finished it all off with a few chapters from Phillip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. I’m a sucker for weird shit reading and Transmetropolitan is certainly that. It is about a distopian future where pistol packing Spider Jerusalem (based roughly off Hunter S. Thompson) tries to destroy the system through inflammatory journalism. It's muckraking on PCP. The Watchmen is a classic that completely transcended the genre yada yada yada..... just fucking read it. Hellblazer contains a lot of naughty words and should be intended for mature readers only.
I love Phillip K. Dick's work but I wasn't sure I was going to like A Scanner Darkly. I began reading it because Hollywood finally caught up with it and I don't want tinseltown changing the pictures in my head. The book plays with the duality of the cop/ criminal psychology and how one isn't far from the other. However, simplistic observation stops there. I've enjoyed this book thus far but I have difficulty explaining it. Drugs may help.
If I lose my mind on this trip, it will be because of the fucking frogs.
I decided to keep close to the fire and enjoy some fine works of literature. I read the first two volumes of Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan, Alan Moore's Watchmen, Brian Azzarello's Hellblazer, and finished it all off with a few chapters from Phillip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. I’m a sucker for weird shit reading and Transmetropolitan is certainly that. It is about a distopian future where pistol packing Spider Jerusalem (based roughly off Hunter S. Thompson) tries to destroy the system through inflammatory journalism. It's muckraking on PCP. The Watchmen is a classic that completely transcended the genre yada yada yada..... just fucking read it. Hellblazer contains a lot of naughty words and should be intended for mature readers only.
I love Phillip K. Dick's work but I wasn't sure I was going to like A Scanner Darkly. I began reading it because Hollywood finally caught up with it and I don't want tinseltown changing the pictures in my head. The book plays with the duality of the cop/ criminal psychology and how one isn't far from the other. However, simplistic observation stops there. I've enjoyed this book thus far but I have difficulty explaining it. Drugs may help.
If I lose my mind on this trip, it will be because of the fucking frogs.