747 SE 30th Ave. #3

It’s never been a really hard thing for me to move out of somewhere. I can remember moving out of my mothers house and looking at my room when it was bare of my belongings and feeling relief, and excitement that I had finally grown up, graduated high school and was going to pioneer Europe and then the Wild West with a crazy friend and a diesel engine Mercedes full of my shit, sitting in the driveway purring waiting to go, to make a break for what we’d never seen. I can remember moving out of my house in Tennessee when I lived with my Dad for awhile and I felt so good about leaving that little farm house in 9th grade because I was going home, I was going back to Georgia. I certainly never missed a damn thing about my dorm room in college, that ones hardly even worth noting except for the fact that that’s where I gained Krispin and Abe, two the best friends a man could ever hope for. Last summer I was in Georgia and when I moved back to Oregon I lived with my dearest friends in their basement and I can remember how that felt too. When I left there I was excited to have a place of my own, I was going to miss seeing the boys on such a consistent basis but it was good, again, I felt like I was growing up and I was madly in love with a woman and things were scary and exciting.
Right now I’m sitting on my bed, looking at what’s left of this place I moved into last October. The kitchen is bare; the bathroom is butt naked outside of a roll of toilet paper that I own. My room is full of a few things that have yet to go, the living room holding only a small table and a lamp, and the back room still has some clothes, my bike, and a couple guitars in it. I’ve never been in a room that was so empty physically but so damn full emotionally. I’m alone right now. I’m happy but I’m so damn sad. As crazy as this little hole is, it’s been my home for a year now. I’ve never lived in a place where so much love was bred. From Andy and Eric, Whitney, Davis, all of my Southern friends that have shacked up here at one time or another, to the Sunday “Family Time” crew, and Laura, Laura and I became Laura and I in this place. I’ve had the best Valentine’s Day of my life in this apartment, phenomenal parties with phenomenal people, I’ve cried my eyes out, seen the Lord, been too drunk to talk, all in this little apartment. I learned how to cook and feed myself, pay rent, maintain (to some extent) a livable household. It’s in the best place in this country, and I will miss it severely. I feel like the twenty years spent outside of this apartment and the growth I did during those years doesn’t begin to compare to the growth I’ve done in this apartment, this is where I grew up, this is where I learned what a man is and what I need to do to become one.
I just wanted to say thanks to all of you that helped make this place a home and a wonderful place for all of us to be. We certainly had the time of our lives in this little hole. I know you will all miss it terribly and I will certainly join you in that. God Bless 747 SE 30th Ave!

-Trippe

Happy and Sad, Sad and Happy...

It’s funny how the happiest times of your life can simultaneously be some of the saddest. The last few months of my life have been some of the greatest months known to me in the entirety of my twenty years. In the last few months the relationship that I am in has turned into something that I never thought I would be blessed with. I have had more fun and have been falling more in love with that person than I ever have with anyone else in my whole life. I love her more than even I will ever actually be able to comprehend and what’s funny is that everyone around us is excited. The excitement rolls from her parents and aunts and uncles to our friends and peers and counselors and all the way down to her second cousins who are less than ten, this is a really good thing and I don’t think that anything could stop it.
Laura and I met last spring, right at the end of August when I had just gotten out of a less than smoothly ended relationship and I knew full well that the typically wise thing to do after getting out of a semi-serious relationship is to give it some good time before you dive into another one and I had every intention of doing so until I saw her, in her green one piece bathing suit, squatted down on some steps on the telephone with a boy who turned out to be her older brother, thank GOD! We sat at that pool party and watched as everyone else swam and I read and she knitted. Despite the fact that we’d been speaking to one another for a total of about fifteen minutes we began to create this totally false, yet phenomenally realistic scenario that consisted of us being an old Catholic married couple watching our thirteen children (the other attendees at this pool party, all of them over 18) splash around in the pool and making comments about how proud we were of them. We hit it off immediately and tried like hell to avoid this ever becoming something serious because we were both terrified but despite our best efforts, we couldn’t help but be who we were and we couldn’t help feeling how we really felt about each other. We started dating about two months after that day.
We’ve had some pretty interesting times, some of them were grueling and miserable and the other were flawless and beautiful and everything that love is supposed to be when you’re young and realize that you’ve met the only person that you could ever really imagine spending the rest of your life with. We’ve never been more in love than we are right now and it will be the same tomorrow and I pray that it will be more “today” than it was “yesterday” for the rest of our lives. I said all that to say, I am definitely happy and have probably never been more so.
The other side to that story is that I am in Oregon and will most likely raise my children and love my wife here for the rest of my life. I am more than excited about that and have thought about it thoroughly and feel like I’ve chosen wisely but that doesn’t change the daunting fact that I am from Georgia and I am in Oregon and despite my best efforts, I cannot get those two damned states to move closer to one another, neither of them will stand for it which is probably ultimately a good thing because who wants to be in the Midwest?
As it would happen in my life, being that I have never had triumph when I have not also had to endure travesty, the entirety of my flesh and blood is across the United States of America. Every relative I have, every aunt, brother, mother, father, sister, nephew, niece, cousin (save for the one who temporarily sleeps on my futon) is in the Deep South and again, I am in Oregon with the one I love. Unfortunately, since they are there and I am here it is hard for them to express their glee to me when I announce that I’ve found the woman I want to marry in Oregon, which has made for an awful hard week for myself. I totally understand their dismay, they feel as though they’ve lost me, which I think they will see that they have not, I’m just a little less frequently in their presence and from their end it’s not looking any brighter, and on the other end this sweet, sweet girl of mine is saddened by the thought of my family not liking her because they could see this as her taking me from them, again, a very hard week for myself and seemingly everyone else around me. So anyway, as I sit here, off of a worthless day of work, drinking a less than decent beer, I thought I would share w/ you all why I am so happy and so sad. There is nowhere I can go that I will not be missing someone but in turn there is nowhere I can go that I will not be with someone I love. I think that I am a lucky man and I will not be dumb enough to forget to mourn over the absence of my family but I’m also not going to be blind enough to forget to celebrate the fact that I’m about to build one of my very own.

God Bless you, every last one.


Trippe Davis

My Friend (and yours) Arthur

http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p151/tripped2323/Portrait_of_Arthur_Konig.jpg


I should be getting skinnier right now. In the past few months I have grown perpetually fatter. It’s something else, it really is. It may be the first thing I have really succeeded in this year to date. I can get fatter! I don’t know how much I weigh or exactly how much I weighed before this year but you can tell by the seeming existence of the small child inside of me (though it doesn’t of course actually exist) that I have grown fatter. Yes! I do know why I’ve gotten fatter and again, YES I do know how to reverse the process but at the moment NO I will not take action! Yes, I know. I know that, that seems extremely stupid if you have such a large problem, pun intended, and you have the solution it would make immense amounts of sense to solve the damn problem. Most of the time I’d be down for that but in this instance the solution requires effort and not just mental effort but physical exertion, exertion of which I do not wish to exert. Beer, Mexican Food, and the convenience of disgusting fast food keep me pleasantly plump.
I’ve never actually had a certifiable gut. I do now, have a gut, a legitimate gut, surrounded on the sides by a fleet of love handles and above by a flat chest that exalts it even further. I’ve spent a large portion of my life with an extremely flat stomach, very, very firm and fairly fun to look at. After a few years of no swimming teeming with excessive laziness, reading, eating, and drinking alcoholic beverages I formed a little pooch. That’s what I’d like to call it, that’s what it used to be, a little pooch. I fear now that the pooch has pooches around it’s pooches and has created my gut, whose mane is Arthur. Be nice to Arthur you jerks. He’ll be around for a while. He’ll also be gone, I’m going to rid him of his fame the moment you all become attached, and you will he is mesmerizing.






Ft. My friend I found on the internet named "Arthur" (Top Right)

THIS CITY WAS MADE FOR LIVING!

This City Was Made For Living


This city was made for living. This city is made for lovers in love, for walkers to walk and riders to ride. This city lets homeless people sleep in store fronts. There are few things like bouncing down the streets of Portland at 2 am with Rufus Wainright blaring through your headphones and into the solace of your mind while you walk and dance through the streets you know in the daylight. At night things are different. I passed things I’d passed so many times and saw things I’d never seen.

The stoop where a girl basked in the sun hours earlier as I walked my girl to her car and kissed her goodbye knowing that the girl on the porch was probably burning with envy over me and mine, because we are a beautiful thing. Love does not boast and I am not doing such, simply stating a fact. It is truly majestic to bounce through streets, lights’ changing in time with my footsteps, crossing streets is in my favor, and the cars stop for me.

A good friend of mine taught me something a long time ago. He didn’t mean to teach me this but I watched and I learned. When your life is whatever it is the answer may simply be to put on headphones and walk, regardless of the weather. There’s tons of corny sayings about dancing when nobody’s watching and all that bullshit so don’t dance, move, dance sounds intimidating. Freedom is in headphones and moving feet. Freedom is in smoke when you want it, not when you need it. Life has been the most indescribable blur as of late. I can’t see or comprehend anything, I simply move and hope that I don’t forget to breathe as I do so. The only bits of clarity anymore are the glimpses of Jesus’ face and Laura’s hands, her hugs. I know nothing but at least I know that. I know a lot.

Oh! The night. I saw a tree tonight somewhere off of Belmont, it was swollen in the middle and since my ears were deaf to anything past my headphones I had to stop for a second because I thought the tree was actually a tree, and a man leaning against a tree. I continued to walk toward “him” and quickly realized my misconception so when we finally got face to face I looked him square in the eye and threw up a peace sign as hard as I knew how. It’s late. I’m gonna wake up in the morning with my unwashed hair and put on my blue jeans, the same pair I’ve worn thirty other times since I last washed them and I’m gonna live my motha fuckin’ life.

I hate sin it makes me so mad cause’ it’s so stupid and God made us so smart. Sin is a cycle and we choose to be stupid so we fall into it and then we feel bad about it so we sin some more to make ourselves forget but we only forget long enough to sin and then we wake up and realized we sinned, again, and then we feel guilty until the next time we sin and find some ignorant solace. We should stop sinning, peace is not there.

I got too much on my mind to write it. I feel like the last two weeks of my life happened in one day, one damn day. I let all this stuff happen but I forgot to let it out, now my blue jeans stick to the back of my knees while I sit here and try to write it out, my blue jeans are distracting me, sometimes distractions are so nice, this is not one of those times.

Today I walked. I’ve been sinning a lot lately, probably because I tried to get rid of all of my sin at one time and that is hard. The thing is in the midst of all of this I may have found my favorite form of abstention, my new habit. I’ve found that despite what I used to think, I really like to walk. Today I drank some beer during the Super Bowl and felt half bad about it for various reasons that some of you don’t deserve to know and so I went home and when I did I started to get depressed, I almost went to bed at six o’clock. Instead I thought I would just sin some more and then I said, “this sucks!” and I put on my blue jeans and my cowboy boots and walked to Burnside St. to ride the bus to Powell’s City of Books. After I left Powell’s, which is downtown, I walked. I walked for miles and miles and my feet hurt. I was looking for peace. I ended up walking “for what must have been days but could find no relief.” I ended up going back to the bus and coming home but since then I’ve walked three more times, all over the place, places near where I live that I’ve never laid eyes on that are truly glorious. I just want Jesus to talk to me. I just want to shut up long enough to hear him. I just want to push me away long enough to obey him. I want to love.

BEER OF THE WEEK!

ALRIGHT FOLKS!

It's beer of the week time! Every weekend, like I said, there will be a new one. Unfortunately I haven't posted anything between this weeks and last weeks beer of the week so it looks bad but don't frown upon me. lol.

This week's beer is undoubtedly St. Pauli Girl.

Now it was a tough decision, almost. There were a number of Black Butte's consumed at my house this week, one of which was spilled on my sheets by my graceful girlfriend as her and her friend sat on my bed talking. This sounds like a negative thing but in reality was a blessing in that I hadn't washed my sheets in way too long and myself and other boys had slept in my bed unshowered way too many times! Therefore, with a little beer in the bed, i was motivated to excellence and I went to Laura's house and washed my sheets along with most of my other clothing which entailed spending the day without Laura (she was working) but with her parents (they were both off) it was a fabulous day and I now sleep on clean sheets!

The reasons St. Pauli Girl has won the race are many, i'll give you a few. First and foremost, in the midst of drinking Black Butte this week I felt myself consistently going back to St. Pauli Girl after one BB. It's crisp, light but not light like Coors or Bud, and brewed in Germany, so it's got good roots.

The other big reason is that St. Pauli Girl has consistently been the beer of choice for the past two years when my father and I (though rare, which makes it even better) find ourselves on the back porch in Charleston, SC smoking cigars and drinking beer.

Now, what is also awesome about that is that as of this week my father will officially be in Oregon on January 24th, through the 31st. I am ecstatic!

The last reason that St. Pauli Girl is the beer of the week is because it is currently on sale at the Plaid Pantry which is the closest place to my house to buy beer, exactly 1 block. 10.88 for a 12 pack. You can't beat that with a stick!

Leave me something people. If you've never tried St. Pauli Girl, I encourage you to indulge.

BEER OF THE WEEK!

Ok Folks, from now on, there's a beer of the week!
I'll be putting it on here sometime between Friday & Sunday every week. Monday starts the new week, thus invoking the consumption and whatever beer is around at the right time, or whatever beer gives an extraordinary taste, buzz, or peace, wins the prize. Feel free to give your opinions every week and I'll see what I can do to truly name the beer of the week. This should be fun, i'm excited about it!

This week, the week of the 25th through the 31st, the beer is definitely Red Stripe!
"For over 75 years Red Stripe has embodied the spirit, rhythm and pulse of Jamaica and it's people."
Brewed & Bottled by Deshoes & Geddes Limited Kingston, Jamaica, this beer has done it for me this week. I've had a lot of different beers in my day and definitely have my consistent favorites. Until this week I probably have consumed Red Stripe twice, maybe. However, the other night when Danny & I were drinking and smoking and reading brilliant literature and trying to write our own, in my kitchen this is the beer that was being consumed. It is also the beer that has been consumed in the nights following that one.

Leave me your love, or your hate. Your opinions on this weeks beer & we'll see who wins it next week!
Happy drinking and please, drink responsibly. lol.


Grace & Peace,


Trippe Davis

I want this

"You see I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across---not to just depict life---or criticize it---but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way. It is only by showing both sides---3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to."


to Dr. C. E. Hemingway, 1925



Ernest Hemingway wrote this to his father. It is my goal in life as far as writing goes. It made me so happy to read this. I don't care if none of you can appreciate it, I'm in love with it.


-Trippe Davis