Portland sure is a small town.

[September 14th, 2005] Portland sure is a small town. I've picked these guys up at the Know, a happening place at Northeast 20th and Alberta. I don't know them, but they look familiar, in that whole bed-head, vintage T-shirt, big-belt-buckle kind of way. One is talking about having broken his sternum. If there's one bone you don't want to break, that's it, as he discovered. His back, shoulders, hips...now everything's out of whack. I sympathize.

"Christ, I couldn't laugh, couldn't sneeze, couldn't take a deep breath, couldn't do anything!" He says he broke it because of work, at a company with the word "robot" in its name. He talks about the "evil tyrant" who ran it, and I add that any company with "robot" in its name should have an evil overlord instead. Agreement all around. I'm starting to like these guys.

As we pull up to Colosso on Northeast Broadway, the guy my passengers are meeting suddenly plasters himself to my windshield. But he's doing the windshield stunt because he recognized me, not them. I get out to hug him, and then he notices the others. My friend introduces me to the people I've just been talking to for 15 minutes, which is slightly surreal. "I've been meaning to email you," he says, then elaborates on the broken-sternum story, adding a birthday and the bicycle transport of a large confection balanced on one hand to the mix. And I realize I've heard that story from an entirely different set of passengers a while back. A small town, indeed.