Sounds like Walgreens has got the supply and demand thing down cold. You bring the demand, and they will bring the supply.

What kind of customers frequent Walgreens on MLK? Maybe ICE is good for washing down lunch meats... I would need two of them if it was SPAM lunch meat.

Ah, just what my neighborhood needs, yet more ice-cold alcohol for sale. Too bad I'm moving.

I love that Walgreens, I'm in there all the time. The Safeway across the street used to be much better for drama, though. 10 years ago, drug dealers would hit you up in the bread aisle, and you could watch people attempt to brazenly shoplift entire racks of ribs.

One time I was in line, and this very loud gentleman started to get impatient with the extremely effeminate checker. "Man, I smoke CRACK," he shouted, to the delight of everyone within earshot, "I ain't one of them fake-ass Ice Cube Niggas." Everyone, both black and white, was openly laughing at this fool by now, which just made him angrier and angrier. Of course, he took out his anger on the terrified checker, calling him every homophobic epithet in the book.

Scenes like that were something you could happily participate in all day every day.

Speaking of lunch meat, though, I have to give a tip of my hat to the best, now vanished character to ever inhabit that corner, at least during my decade-long tenure in the area.

Safeway Swami, we called him. He was rail thin, smelled like a very ripe septic tank, and wrapped his head in vaguely Arab or Sufi-style rags. He lived across the street in this abandoned car totally stuffed with garbage, and sometimes hung out at the abandoned house on the corner which is also sadly long gone.

But the lunchmeat, oh the lunchmeat. Mostly, Safeway Swami loved to hang out in the little Deli seating area on hot or cold days when it wasn't so pleasant outside, gibbering this non-stop stream of jive out of his toothless mouth that I never...not once...could make out a word of.

His favorite lunch...well, his favorite food, period, was cat food, the wet kind that comes in little cans. He would sit there in the Deli, and spread that wet catfood on white bread with mustard, clearly enjoying every gum-masticated mouthful, making delighted, gibbering noises all the while.

Now, seven or eight used cans of wet cat food do not smell so good when they have been sitting open for three hours. Couple that odor with Safeway Swami's own fetid aroma, and, well, lets just say that he had the Deli area all to himself.

Safeway itself had much, much bigger fish to fry at that time, so Safeway Swami was rarely molested.

You new transplants to the "Alberta Arts" district have no idea all how much wonderful fun and highly evolved culture you missed out on...

When did Walgreen's start carrying alcohol in Oregon?