Chateau Purr Pal and My New Co-ops; I've Been Paid!
The bass booms through the door to my room this afternoon, as the House Daddies busy themselves on their never-ending journey to perfect Chateau Purr Pal - the name of this very strange House I stay at here in east Portland, Oregon. Terry is my friend from the ancient regime in Madison. Back before I shaved my head. Terry and his partner Krys are the House Daddies - aka this place belongs to them. Upstairs there are renters, downstairs there are three humans, four cats, a snake, an occasional rat for the snake, and so on. We are pretty much smack dab in the middle of town, and the room I occupy looks out onto the garden and decent sunsets. The square footage of this room, reincarnated as a lofted tiny house with space, a kitchen, and a bathroom would be supercalifragilisticexpialicocious.
Chateau Purr Pal is a mostly cat-themed Victorian with a big gargoyle perched atop the place to menace visitors who don't know enough to avoid the front door. The words "the Purple House with the gargoyle" are often enough to elicit recognition of this place among the native Portlanders. The vice president of a local natural foods co-operative with ties to housing co-ops described it as "the weirdest house he'd ever seen . . . " which makes me especially proud to be in residence. In fact, the place is a mass of the eclectic: reused bits of Portland seem to weave together this odd collection of books, cats, gardens, hippies, and a six-man shower modeled after a gay bathhouse in Chicago that I have of course NEVER been to.
CPP is about THE greenest place and lifestyle I've ever lived. Travel and shipping here is based on the bike or the foot. There isn't even much need for Portland's famed light rail - the Max. And I have not even driven a car since January. Its a super decent antidote to fifteen years of taxi driving. Besides, most times you wanna be outside here. Today, for example, is massively sunny - pushing 85 degrees. Thanks to global warming, the idea of an all-the-time rainy Portland is kind of a thing of the past. There is definitely a rainy season here - but its just a steady rain that's pretty easy to bike through. Thunderstorms are rare and pleasant, and it's quite something to not have to worry all summer about whether the weather will turn violent. Of course, the whole place could shake apart in a devastating earthquake at any moment - so there's that little psychosis for you.
The experience of being unemployed for seven months was depressing and crappy and I have now survived it. One thing is for sure, I really have benefited from not giving in to the urge to get a shitty job just to have money coming in; and I have the House Daddies to thank for it. I really wound up in an interesting place in Portland's co-operative economy. Rather than worker co-ops - it's food co-ops that are the big thing here. There are three in Portland, and I am working for one of them while helping to organize a fourth. The learning curve in Portland has been steep all along, and this stuff is no exception - but it is creative steep more than the drudgery steep of unemployment. All this is good for me, and something I needed and wasn't getting in Madison anymore.
So, Alberta Co-op Grocery - that's the name of the place I have been working for about three weeks now - is a fifteen-year old natural foods store in NE Portland. Within the last couple of years, Alberta ditched their unitary executive in favor of a consensus minus one collective management structure of about 30 workers. Fascinating.
Meanwhile, Alberta is great field experience for my volunteer job as board president for Montavilla Food Co-op - which is the startup natural foods co-op here in East Portland. At this stage in the game, Montavilla is an organizational effort and fundraising campaign to create a new natural foods grocery co-op owned by the people here in East Portland. Given that Portland expects 400,000 new migrants over the next 20 years (many of them to East Portland) Montavilla is in a great spot to lead the way in showing people co-ops.
While the paychecks accumulate and I pay back rent to the House Daddies, I will still be broke for a while. Until I have a little disposable income, Portland will remain kind of dull and unexplored - but there is a lot of work to keep me busy between the two co-ops; and as the return to a normal working life gets me all stable again I already know that I will be planning some potential coolness.
Chateau Purr Pal is a mostly cat-themed Victorian with a big gargoyle perched atop the place to menace visitors who don't know enough to avoid the front door. The words "the Purple House with the gargoyle" are often enough to elicit recognition of this place among the native Portlanders. The vice president of a local natural foods co-operative with ties to housing co-ops described it as "the weirdest house he'd ever seen . . . " which makes me especially proud to be in residence. In fact, the place is a mass of the eclectic: reused bits of Portland seem to weave together this odd collection of books, cats, gardens, hippies, and a six-man shower modeled after a gay bathhouse in Chicago that I have of course NEVER been to.
CPP is about THE greenest place and lifestyle I've ever lived. Travel and shipping here is based on the bike or the foot. There isn't even much need for Portland's famed light rail - the Max. And I have not even driven a car since January. Its a super decent antidote to fifteen years of taxi driving. Besides, most times you wanna be outside here. Today, for example, is massively sunny - pushing 85 degrees. Thanks to global warming, the idea of an all-the-time rainy Portland is kind of a thing of the past. There is definitely a rainy season here - but its just a steady rain that's pretty easy to bike through. Thunderstorms are rare and pleasant, and it's quite something to not have to worry all summer about whether the weather will turn violent. Of course, the whole place could shake apart in a devastating earthquake at any moment - so there's that little psychosis for you.
The experience of being unemployed for seven months was depressing and crappy and I have now survived it. One thing is for sure, I really have benefited from not giving in to the urge to get a shitty job just to have money coming in; and I have the House Daddies to thank for it. I really wound up in an interesting place in Portland's co-operative economy. Rather than worker co-ops - it's food co-ops that are the big thing here. There are three in Portland, and I am working for one of them while helping to organize a fourth. The learning curve in Portland has been steep all along, and this stuff is no exception - but it is creative steep more than the drudgery steep of unemployment. All this is good for me, and something I needed and wasn't getting in Madison anymore.
So, Alberta Co-op Grocery - that's the name of the place I have been working for about three weeks now - is a fifteen-year old natural foods store in NE Portland. Within the last couple of years, Alberta ditched their unitary executive in favor of a consensus minus one collective management structure of about 30 workers. Fascinating.
Meanwhile, Alberta is great field experience for my volunteer job as board president for Montavilla Food Co-op - which is the startup natural foods co-op here in East Portland. At this stage in the game, Montavilla is an organizational effort and fundraising campaign to create a new natural foods grocery co-op owned by the people here in East Portland. Given that Portland expects 400,000 new migrants over the next 20 years (many of them to East Portland) Montavilla is in a great spot to lead the way in showing people co-ops.
While the paychecks accumulate and I pay back rent to the House Daddies, I will still be broke for a while. Until I have a little disposable income, Portland will remain kind of dull and unexplored - but there is a lot of work to keep me busy between the two co-ops; and as the return to a normal working life gets me all stable again I already know that I will be planning some potential coolness.