Thunderstorm — Oregon edition: Portland on socks

I have been very buried reading and writing and more recently learning to play the concertina at a camp in Oregon with Noel Hill where I witnessed Thunderstorm the Oregon edition. I was in a wine growing region (is there anything other than wine growing regions?). There were many trucks carrying bales of hay. There were several number plates which included the word GOD and there was a thunderstorm. I’d also like to send a special word out to that moron at 11pm who was doing line dancing type moves with his car on a road with no streetlights and out onto which, I was trying to make a right turn. I think the driver has an unrealized calling to turn upside down in jets that puff out red smoke and make patterns and should release himself from the banality of driving and head straight to a jetpack.

It was rather a bowel groaning type of thunderstorm in the Oregon edition. Just belly busting cracking noises, no lightning. I took a video of it but in the many wonders of technology it has not endured. There was a man clipping a hedge during the storm. He adeptly continued to clip it but stood under a roof awning and clipped it in between the bellows over his head.

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Portland is so full of food that I was astonished to see an advert on the window of an innocuous looking cafe that touted a hot dog eating competition. A food eating competition seems redundant in Portland because basically all day and night it is already a food competition because there’s so much good food to choose from and there’s even caravans (food carts) to eat it outside of. And as you digest it you can read a book from the best bookshop in Portland, which is a shop in a house on Hawthorne street and either called Apology or Anthology. I found some very nifty books in it.

Another pointless thing to advertise in Portland would be a sock wearing competition because that’s also well under way. There are such an array of socks on people’s feet despite the astonishing heat. My favourite foot with a sock on it sat beside me in a cafe. The man had one of his trousers rolled up to the knee and extending from it was a luminous multicoloured stripy knee high sock. His other leg had the trouser down to the ankle. There’s nothing like a sock dichotomy. It also celebrates the possibility that he’d lost the other sock but wasn’t giving up on the orphan on account of it.

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