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Yes I'm from Portland

About 24 years ago, my parents decided that having sex on the kitchen table of their little rented house in SE Gladstone sounded like a good idea. I wish I could have been in the room (outside of the womb at least) when Mom dropped the ball that Dad and her were officially expecting. Now, my mother's not the most rational person or the most level-headed so I'm sure that the revelation that they're were soon to be parents probably rivaled the death of a loved one in tears shed and screams uttered. My father probably thought that having a child with this woman he'd just recently married and nursed through a nevrous breakdown might have been the best way to keep his blushing bride on the the path to recovery and mental stabilty. Regardless, nine months later I was there breathing my first breaths of Portland air and promptly coughing a lot. That should have been a sign of impending addiction to a city that rarely returns the love you put into it. Living in this city at 24 with no degree and less direction is like dating a self-centered, naive slob of a woman that thinks she's modest when in actualilty she's the most conceited post adolescent ever to hit drinking age. Meaning, it's like loving someone that doesn't have the time to return it, but promises to get around to it eventually.

In a sense, it's why it's hard to find your way in this city unless you have money or a goal. Two things that not everybody in this day and age seems to have a surplus of. You make lists in your head of ways you think you'll be able to succeed (I've always like to refer to them as "hair-brained schemes") and when those plans have the tendency to eventually fail, you tend stop trying to dig your heels in to figure out a new one.

What I've always found hilarious about Portland lies in its constantly evolving identity crisis. Over in NW 23rd we have approximately twelve blocks of an attempt to copy the Beverly Hills coffee shop and high-priced cloth scene. Down in the Pearl District, it's basically the O.C. meets the club scene. Belmont, Hawthorne, and Woodstock are all areas of town where the hipsters have tried to carve out a niche of the city to call their own and make magazine covers and travel guides. The pattern here is that the city wants to be a less glamorous California neighborhood and citizen population that wants to be what Seattle and San Francisco have forsaken: a counter-culture paradise.

For every Bar 71 and Barracuda that seems to have sprung up, Pied Cow, Voodoo Doughnut, Dante's, and the Shanghai Tunnels still hold their ground as the actual places to patron on a Saturday night. The only difficulty that seems to be developing is that the two scenes clash in such a harsh light that it's almost like gentrification with the hip scene pushing the upstarts out to the outer rims of the East side to stake their claim. With the Pearl district firmly planting a flag that claims territory between NW 23rd and Chinatown (which is still a wretched hive of scum and villany, thank god).

The trick about Portland seems to be that you actually need a counter culture handbook in your own city. Chuck Paulanick's (?) Fugitives and Refugees is among many pocket guides that highlight hidden treasures that no one who lives here on a daily basis has managed to accumulate themselves over X number of years actually living here. The one thing you'll hear most from someone trying to partake in something new and trendy in this town is, "I just heard about this new ____" thus illustrating how no one just goes out and finds these places on their own: they just go read Portland Citysearch.

posted by AmeroKafka @ 10:16 PM