Eat, Walk, Jet!

Okay, so, this is me and Isaac commuting from his house in Westmoreland, a neighborhood in Southeast Portland, Oregon, to downtown Portland. Our big joke on this trip, and in this video, is how I’m somehow a quintessential Portland hipster: beat-up jeans, a mismatched shirt and blazer, PF Flyer sneakers, a messenger bag, and a 1965 Schwinn. If you listen closely, you can hear Isaac pointing all of this out.

I actually used to commute by bike when I live in Portland. I lived in Southeast and used to ride neighborhood streets to the Hawthorne Bridge. We’re treking a similar route, actually heading downtown to Ike’s office. It’s right off Pioneer Square, directly across the street from the Meier & Frank building, where I was once an advertising copywriter for Meier & Frank, a department store chain in the mold of Filene’s, Macy’s—all the classic department stores.

Meier & Frank was my second gig in Portland, probably from 1999 to the summer of 2001. Then I left to work for 800.com, which is where I met Isaac. He was the consumer electronics copywriter (DVD players, stereos, speakers, etc.). I wrote about movies and music. (I often wrote about DVDs and CDs that I had never seen or heard. In retrospect, the funniest part of my job was that I would have no information at all about a CD except its release date, so I figured out a safe way of writing about new releases. This often involved saying things like, “_______’s new album, ___________, is their follow up to the multi-platinum __________. This time around, they build on ________’s sound to deliver 12 tracks of pure ________ _________ that fans of their last album, ___________, are bound to love. Guests include __________, ___________, and ___________. “

No matter how often I harassed the buyers, I couldn’t get more info. And they seemed perfectly happy with my system, even if it did rely on 0.00% knowledge of the music in question. The main approach was the fact that most of what we promoted was base corporate product that really needed no introduction other than “You loved this band’s heavily promoted third record, so we know that’s enough to convince you to buy this one. You know what you’re getting. There are no surprises here. It’s safe as milk.”

I still had a lot of fun at that job. Great people. Really nice office. Intricate security system.

(Recorded by Isaac on his iPhone.)