Things to know if one is ever in Anchorage, Ak:
1) If you are looking to see outdoorsy-type hipster dykes at work slanging lattes and serving tofu scramble, the place to go is the Snow City Cafe. It is on the corner of 4th and L, downtown, across the street from the Cook Inlet. It is also across the street from
2) Pablo's Bicycle Rental, where you can rent a tandem bicycle to ride with your partner's mother, who has a bum ankle and cannot front the full weight of a typical bicycle without experiencing searing leg pain. You can also talk with a 30-something, mostly queer gentleman from Mexico-cum-San-Diego who, while adjusting your bike seat with a lug wrench, will look up at you, crack a smile with his wrench between his legs, and say "I can't work my tool right!" Family, family everywhere.
3) If you ride down the hill to the inlet from Pablo's and make a right into Resurrection Park, you will find the Anchorage Coastal Trail, which runs for 11 miles down the bay, past mudflats and high cliffs and flora with leaves the size of dinner platters. While on this ride, you may pee in the woods and be happened upon by British tourists while zipping up your jeans. If this happens, you must smile pretty and walk right quick back to your tandem bicycle and proceed to dance like a back-up vocalist for Sly and the Family Stone, to disarm them and make them forget that, a moment ago, you were urinating three feet from where they are now standing and that, if the wind blows correctly, they may be able to discern that you have been drinking far too much coffee, because every three blocks in the metro area there is a
4) roadside, drive-thru espresso stand, with an appropriately kitschy name, typically derived from regional wildlife that will kill you if you stand in their way -- bears, moose, and the like. They are all independently owned, and none of them serve soymilk or regular coffee. Do not be disappointed, for this may be the only time you can buy espresso at a place which utilizes the pun 'calf-e' and believes correctly that this makes good business sense.
5)Good business sense, in Anchorage, seems to rely on keeping a high quota of local microbrews on the menu. Drink them all, and ride the bike trails home. You will not be sorry, although you may be mildly injured. Unless you are the victim of a bear attack, in which case you will be either comatose or dead. And then, you will have died a happy wo(man). I've also heard mace works on bears, if you spray it right in their snarly faces and run really fast. Try that.
5) The world's 101st largest bear is housed downtown, at the 5th Avenue Mall, taxidermied in an enormous glass case which forms an immediate border between the luggage and shoe departments in JC Penney's. Go there. You will be awe-inspired, amazed, and surely swayed to buy a duffel bag or a pair of sensibly heeled loafers.
6) Also, in the 5th Avenue Mall, on the bottom of four floors in the middle of a shoe store, a woman died by her own hand. She threw herself off of the fourth floor balcony, and the piles of Lugz did not break her fall effectively. Alaska has a very high suicide rate on account of a severe lack of Vitamin D and because Inuits have a very difficult time metabolizing alcohol and white folks cannot deal with living in a place wherein they are so obviously complicit with a genocidal imperial legacy. Many Alaskans are libertarians, which means they do not do well with feelings of guilt. For them, the motto is "give me imperviousness or give me death." Most choose the former, but there are a handful who go for the chalk outline.
7) If you have the opportunity, head to the combined bowling alley/laundromat/bar in Eagle River called "The Homesteader." It is the only bar in Eagle River (15 minutes north of Anchorage), and it is very busy. It has undergone three expansions in the last twenty years, and on any given night it is full of folks getting down to Cash/Carter, Usher, Little Richard, T-Pain, and Rihanna. The dance floor is sunken and smooth-waxed. A guaranteed good time. You can do your laundry afterward, pitcher-drunk on Pyramid Hefeweizen. Don't bother sorting your whites.
8) You may find yourself staying at your big brother's place, attempting to make friends with a cat named Emma, after a well-known and long deceased radical lady, who hisses at you when you tell her that she is misdirecting her kitten-rage, that you, a fellow prole, are not the enemy. She will begin to come around, particularly if you bring her outside and encourage her to do her kitty-business on the hoods of expensive SUV's owned by folks with outdated frontier fantasies of becoming forebearers of their own fiefdom.
9) You may also find yourself, noon-time, sitting in your brother's pajama pants thinking you should shower and take a bus somewhere you have not yet been, which is what you will do, as soon as you finish this coffee and blow your nose.
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