The upside to having your site violated by some script kiddy is that you find pictures you thought you’d lost forever with really great fucking stories behind them.

I WOULD have written about this before, except it happened in my first month of LJ and I hadn’t quite gotten the hang of entertaining blogging yet. I wish I HAD been more thorough, as I started this journal precisely as I started on my Adventure Toward Becoming an Adult or Shamble From Parental Home In Shambles or My Life As A Trainwreck or Who The Fuck Are You Kidding, You’re Not An Adult or whatever you’d like to call it; it’s when I first decided I couldn’t handle California any longer and struck out north with whatever I could fit in my car, and started writing half-assed, angry entries with really no mind toward archiving adventures in awesome.

Along the way, I stopped at some fantabulous roadside attractions like the Oregon Vortex Mystery Spot, and spent a few days in Portland with a complete internet stranger because you can’t spell ‘adventure’ without some of the components of the word ‘danger’. Justin and I had a delightful time, we took over the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in robot costume and invaded a submarine.

So, one evening, we went to a bar at the top of one of the higher buildings in the city, and got absolutely shitfaced. To the point where we probably should not have even been allowed to WALK anywhere, but walk we did. We walked all around downtown Portland, stopping in at every coffee shop (and you’d best believe there are a LOT), drunkenly asking each barista if someone had turned in our umbrella that we’d left there earlier, you know, the collapsible black one? Oh, the umbrellas we collected! After a time, our biggest challenge was not getting umbrellas, but finding suitable hiding places for the ones we’d already collected and trying to keep straight faces while asking for yet another. We had umbrellas up our sleeves. Umbrellas down our pants. Umbrellas stuffed in shirts.

Then…we ninja fought with them.