Neighborhood Landmarks

1. House Full of Hippies

    There’s a house on the street that dead-ends against the alley behind my building that is just chock-full of hippies. This is interesting to me, because it’s a relic of a time before this neighborhood started gentrifying, when its hundred-year-old bungalows could be profitably rented out to working class people; up on the hill, where my building is, the gentrification is complete, and four-bedroom houses go for three quarters of a million dollars — but down the hill, where some of the streets aren’t paved or don’t have sidewalks, that’s not true yet. And so there’s a tumbledown orange house that always has shirtless dudes and dreadlocked chicks hanging out on the porch, smoking cigarettes and spliffs, working on old vans, talking about nothing, smiling more than seems rational, and waving at anybody who walks by. If one were to taxonomize these hippies, they appear to be of the huge-jeans, neon-torch, all-night-rave variety, rather more than banjos-and-acid variety or the urban-organic-tomato variety.

    The presence of hippies is Portland’s true valence; though the place is stereotyped these days as a haven for skinny jeans, Buddy Holly glasses, ironic sundresses, striped socks, and bad moustaches — and those are here in quantity — these can be found in almost any coastal city anymore. No, what makes Portland different to Seattle or Oakland or Brooklyn or Boston (aside from a distinct lack of tech douches) is that its counter-culture roots are showing, as the dropouts and weirdos who washed up here during the Nixon administration have long attracted fellow travelers to come here, hang out in backyards, sell junky trinkets at the Saturday Market, loudly play Barry McGuire on street corners, and generally not be hassled by anyone. Even when I was a kid, when Portland was a little city with a high proportion of rednecks, our ethos of not hassling people attracted hippies, and hippies remain at the foundation of a lot of Portland’s self-image: they’re why every food truck advertises its locavore friendliness, why bikes take prominence over cars on many urban streets, and why, to this day, young people move here figuring they’ll just make it work, find some like-minded people to flop with, apply to every job listing on Craigslist, and not worry too much about stuff.

    There’s a lot of anxiety in Portland right now that the no-hassle ethos is going the way of the dodo, and that we’re going to go corporate and lose our souls — that Portland is going to turn into San Francisco. I get that, I do; I drove by my old house in Sellwood yesterday and one of the neat little bungalows across the street had been knocked over and replaced with one of the cookie-cutter monstrosities that are taking over a lot of the neighborhoods on the east side. It was horrible. But I also think that things change, or they die; I think that Portland’s instincts contradict (if we’re so green, why are we so against building denser, better-engineered housing?); I think the core conservatism of many people who fancy themselves extremely liberal is a symptom of a broken movement. Realism isn’t a notable quality of Portland.

    Anyway, my neighborhood still has a house full of hippies, and around the corner there are a few more, the kinds of places that don’t get painted very often and always have people out on the porch. If there’s a way to keep that, I’m okay with it.

2. Pocket Park

    A few blocks from the house full of hippies is a little tiny park in the middle of the block on a sleepy residential street, about as wide as two houses and stretching from 27th to 28th under the shade of some big elm trees. This park is key to understanding my neighborhood.

    Back in mid-century America, there was a frenzy for building freeways, as white people moved to the suburbs in droves, leaving behind poorer and more ethnically diverse neighbors who often didn’t have the political clout to keep their houses from being bulldozed to service the fleeing middle class. In Portland, I-5 was driven right through the heart of the city’s traditionally black neighborhoods on the north end of town, and I-205 carved through the poorer outskirts of southeast. A planned downtown-to-Gresham freeway would have gone straight up Division Street, the main drag in my part of town. The city got as far as buying out certain older houses and bowling them over, with it in mind that these spots would one day be where the struts that supported the freeway would go. Most people assumed that this was a fait accompli, and for years the neighborhood decayed, as property values plummeted and many places became derelict. The spot where my own building sits was once four big houses; you can see on either side what they must have looked like, because the ones that remained were eventually renovated and restored, and hang there like architectural ghosts.

    Then, in the early 70s, a bunch of idealistic young U of O grads teamed up with pissed-off neighbors and managed to put a match to the freeway plans. The story is long and interesting and I had once intended to do a radio piece about it but got distracted; anyway, the upshot is that within a few years, Portland had a bunch of money to fund buses and trains, and this neighborhood was no longer slated for destruction. The spots that were once intended to hold up a freeway were now little scars on the city, as though the neighborhood had caught the chicken pox and not been able to resist scratching. The apartment building I live in now was built here in 1975. The pocket park was turned into a pocket park. The city was saved, thank God. This is one way in which I think the no-progress types were right; why should we have paid to build a giant road that only serviced people in Gresham? Screw that.

    The neighborhood remained dowdy and lower-middle-class for a long time after that; in anticipation that it would one day die, Division Street itself had become a string of dive bars and auto body shops; its most notable landmark — one that’s still there — was a porn theatre that served as a gathering spot for sexual adventurists and closeted gay men. It was the kind of place where a teenaged kid might be able to find a long-haired guy in an army jacket to sell him weed. But it was also the kind of place where a lesbian bar could flourish and nobody batted an eye. That’s the thing about cities, a thing that’s wondrous and disastrous all at once: dereliction provides a kind of home, a place for people to hide if they feel the need — but it can also feed on itself, and a city can die. You can (kind of) solve one problem by trying to create a society in which no one feels the need to hide. The other? Well, sometimes the patient just has cancer.

3. House of BBQ

    There’s a house about two blocks east of me where they barbecue every night from late April till it starts raining again in September. I don’t know the people who live there, or why they are so committed to outdoor cooking, but I thank them for it. There are few things more pleasant than walking on a hot evening beneath rustling trees obese with leaves and smelling the twinned odors of charcoal and meat; it calls on something deep in our animal brains, and lets us know that all is well, there is food, it is safe, we are surrounded by our tribe. Many nights I walk by their house before dinner, just to get myself ready, even if I’m only eating rice and beans myself. It’s a warmup, like playing catch before the game, or stretching your achilles before a jog.

4. My Patio above the Alley

    Upon which I sit and sing to my city.

We Could Be Heroes

    The holidays can be a rough time if someone you love has recently died. I don’t think this insight is really going to blow anybody’s mind, but I’d never really experienced it first-hand until last year, when Christmas marked the one year anniversary of the moment when I realized my foster brother, Jesse, was in the midst of a manic episode — a manic episode that was followed by a bottomless depression that resulted in his dying in a murder-suicide, in which he killed his five-year-old daughter, as well. Now, two years later, I’ve hashed through the events that followed so many times that I can type them without really feeling the whooosh that I’m sure you just felt when you saw the words “murder-suicide” on the page. It’s not okay — it will never be okay — but it has become normal, in its way. How I feel about it changes from day to day. Lately it’s been rage. The rage is omnidirectional and it’s been destructive to my personal relationships. I think it’s made me a harder, less forgiving person, which I don’t like but can’t change.

    Lately, I was deposed as part of a lawsuit stemming from Jesse’s death. I suppose I probably shouldn’t talk too, too much about that, because it’s still pending. But it was a destabilizing experience. To have a stranger ask you, again and again, for details about a friendship that you can barely bring yourself to think about (or stop thinking about), is disorienting. I said things aloud that I’d barely allowed myself to think before. I was legally required to say those things out loud, in a room full of people I neither knew nor trusted. Afterwards, I managed to contain my tears almost until I got on the elevator. For some reason it seemed really important that I not let any of the lawyers see me cry.

    I guess because it’s the holidays, and because of the deposition, I’ve been thinking about Jesse a lot lately. His final months have tended to color my memories of everything about him with a tinge of nihilism. I think about driving him home from school one day nineteen years ago, a gray Portland afternoon, the day we became friends, and it feels meaningless, ugly. I think about making a ceremonial bonfire of his old notebooks on a bridge over the Clackamas River, and then stomping it out in fits of laughter, and it feels meaningless, ugly. I think about his wedding day, the first Christmas after he moved into our house, and especially the day his daughter was born — meaningless, ugly. This is where the rage comes from, I think. I no longer feel sad, I no longer see the tragedy. I just see the pointlessness of our whole friendship, of the love I poured on him and his daughter, of the time we spent together, and it pisses me off.

    And so, because I do not wish to feel this way, I’m going to tell you a story about the two of us that, no matter what happened after, mattered. It’s not a big story, but it’s a true story. This is a Christmas gift to myself, to remember this.

    I can’t remember the year anymore, or even the month, though my memory is that it was the kind of cool, gray, but dry day that you only really get in like October or maybe April. Jesse and I were driving down a road on the west side of town, out towards Beaverton — much more his part of town than mine; before his father died and he moved in with us, he’d lived out close to the Portland-Beaverton line, while I had spent nearly my whole life in urban Southeast Portland. That side of town is ribbed with high green hills, which are in turn lined with winding busy roads that stream down toward the basin where Portland proper lies gridded over the flats. I can’t remember anymore what we were doing over there. I can’t remember what we were talking about. I can’t even remember which one of us was driving. I can remember, with vivid acuity, gazing through the windshield as we approached a curve in the road. Car after car glided left, around the curve — but the car in front of us didn’t. It just kept going straight, as though its driver had decided to release the wheel and see what would happen. What happened was that it disappeared over the lip of the road. I remember thinking to myself that the most remarkable thing was how unremarkable it was — it happened soundlessly, slowly, almost as if it were the most natural thing in the world for every tenth car around that curve to slip into oblivion beyond its edge.

    We pulled over, along with many people both in front and behind us. As I got out of the car, I took in the situation below: beyond the lip of the road lay a steep, ivied slope studded with Douglas firs; the car that had gone over had slid sideways down this slope and smacked into one of these trees with its passenger door, pinning the car’s frame heavily against the trunk and leaving the wheels spinning ineffectually at ground upon which they couldn’t quite gain purchase. Just visible through the driver’s side window was an elderly woman, who appeared to be helpless to shove the door open against the pull of gravity.

    I remember Jesse peeling off his jacket and saying to me, “Dial 911.”

    “What are you going to do?” I had been busy coming up with excuses not to go down there — the one I’d landed on was that she might have done something to her spine and it probably wasn’t a good idea to move her.

    But Jesse was already gone, sliding down the uneven slope on his huge feet. I watched him for a second, and then pulled out the little flip phone I had in those days. For the first time in my life, I called 911. It made me unaccountably nervous. When the operator answered, my voice quaked. I told her an old lady was down in a gully in her car and might need rescue. The operator asked me where we were. I couldn’t quite remember. I think I told her we were at 17th and Taylors Ferry Road. Once we had hung up, I went back to the lip of the road to watch what was happening.

    Jesse had reached the old lady’s car, pulled open the driver’s side door, and stood against it, propping it open with his back as he heaved the woman out of her seat. Then he hoisted her over his shoulder, more or less like a sack of potatoes, and began climbing up the slope toward the road. I could hear him apologizing for the indignity of it even as he did it.

    Before he reached the top, a siren sounded, and a firetruck appeared up toward the top of the hill — but then, before reaching us, it veered off onto a side street. I realized, suddenly and with complete certainty, that I had given them the wrong location. It would be a few minutes before they realized it too and followed a daisy chain of other 911 calls back to the actual scene of the accident.

    Before they got there, Jesse had hauled the old woman up to street level and set her down on the hood of our car. He was asking her a series of questions that I suspect were meant to test her for concussion — though he was by profession an operations manager for a mortgage company, Jesse had always had the aspect of a cop or a military person, and cultivated many of the skills needed for those professions. These included hand-to-hand combat skills and a strong grasp of human anatomy.

    They also included the instinct to approach disaster in an attempt to help. I have long held a theory about human beings, one that is crude but, I think, true. This theory posits that there are basically three types of people: people who run towards a fire, people who run away from a fire, and people who stand and watch a fire. Most people, for sound evolutionary and psychological reasons, fall in the latter two categories. I am, I have discovered repeatedly, of the stand-and-watch school, often of the stand-and-watch-and-try-to-remember-how-I’m-going-to-phrase-it-later school. But Jesse wasn’t one of us. Jesse was the sort of person who ran towards a disaster, to see if he could rescue anybody from it. The truth is that a lot of the actions Jesse took in his life fall under an aegis that we name heroism. He was proud of that.

    On bad days, I let that taint how I feel about heroism. I’m already cynical about such concepts, and if Jesse hadn’t been such a regular example — this was not the only time I saw him do this sort of thing, though it is the most dramatic — I probably wouldn’t believe it was a real thing. I already have a tendency to think that our ascription of moral virtue to the performance of heroic acts is a bit . . . generous. But then maybe I’m just resolving the cognitive dissonance involved in the fact that I am the protagonist of my own life, but certainly not the hero.

    I’ve been reading Amanda Ripley’s The Unthinkable, about how people respond in various disasters and why. Toward the end of the book she starts digging around in a database of heroes — the sorts of people who run toward a fire in hopes of helping. They have some things in common: they tend to be male; they tend to come from small towns; they tend to have good relationships with their parents; they tend to have friends from all walks of life. Jesse and I each had two of these things: we were both male; he had friends from all walks of life, and I have a good relationship with my parents. But there’s another variable that he had and I don’t: he believed that he could control what happened to him. He had a romantic, almost mystical image of himself as a powerful person — powerful physically, mentally. His childhood had been traumatic, and I think his adulthood was largely about wresting control away from those who held him captive as a kid. Me? I’ve been riding the waves my whole life, just trying not to drown. No one really hurt me as a child. But I also don’t really believe I can change anything. I believe in basically immutable systems.

    There are several facile readings of those alleged insights that could lead one to explain the manner of Jesse’s death. But that would be reading life like a novel, and if there’s one thing I believe above all others, it’s that life is not art and attempts to make it so are destructive. This is just a story about two young men, one of whom is dead now.

Detours

1.

    I had sworn to myself that I was going to finish this draft of the novel — something close to the final one — by the end of this month. That gives me tomorrow and the next day to wrap it up. It’s not going to happen, I tell you what. Not because I haven’t put in the work — I pumped out 64 manuscript pages this month, which amounts to about 80 pages in printed form, which would bring the book in for a landing at about 390 pages, which is about what I was shooting for.

    Unfortunately, those 64 manuscript pages include a still-unconcluded detour in the plot that I assume will be cut out on revision, but which I don’t think I can move on from until it’s finished. The novel is ostensibly about a 32-year-old former investment banker trying to get over a bad breakup, and it’s told in a florid, keyed-up first person that I landed on in an attempt to simulated the kind of anxiety that I experience a lot of the time. The problem, in no uncertain terms, is the first person aspect of it. I’ve never really liked writing the first person very well, the evidence of this blog aside; I find it limiting and tiresome after a while. I’ve been working on the book for five — almost six — years, and I’m heartily sick of my main character’s voice. So when he sat down across a table from someone else and began to hear their story, I knew I was probably going to wander off track for a bit. I just didn’t expect the wandering to go on for 8000 words, and a week and a half of work. Now, instead of writing the final scenes of the book, which were finally starting to seem inexorable, I’m following another character, a minor character, for page upon page upon page. I can’t decide if I should worry about this. The fact of the matter is that I’m no longer in a place where writing at all is a surprise. I need to be finishing this thing. Ugh.

2.

    When you run a long distance it pays to map out your route so that you finish close to your front door, or at least close to an easy way to get back to your front door. I failed to do that yesterday, and it was . . . well, it was awful.

    I had it plotted out, I thought, so that I would hit mile 15 somewhere around the intersection of SE 26th and Clinton, about six blocks from my apartment, which would leave me a brief walk up a gentle slope to cool down before I collapsed in a heap of sweaty clothes and sore muscles. Instead, I got sidetracked somewhere in northeast Portland, and found myself huffing to a conclusion at the base of a bridge more than a mile from home. This is an awkward distance. I can’t bring myself to call a cab to take me such a short distance, and catching a bus would probably only prolong the journey. So I had to walk it, limping, grimacing, and swearing the whole way.

    I’m trying to remember if the long distances were this awful when I last was doing serious running. Yesterday I spent the last two miles exhorting myself out loud, “C’mon, goddamn it, you can do this, fuck, do it, come on, you’re going to make it,” over and over again, as I shuffled a couple of 11+ minute miles. I don’t remember hitting that point until I was going much further than 15 miles before. But then again, I don’t know if I would be doing this if I actually remembered what it was like to do it before. I remember being thin and having a lot of energy and feeling good about myself and dating a lot. I think it’s possible that I simply forgot how fucking hard it is to run a marathon. And it is. Hard.

    Then again, maybe yesterday was just one of those days. By mile five my left ankle was bothering me. By mile seven this muscle that’s been bothering me for weeks — the tensor fasciae latae — was really starting to burn. This muscle is near the hip, and it’s obscure enough that I’d never heard of it before it started hurting me, but I sure as hell know what it’s called now.  By mile 11 my pace had seriously slackened. As I was coming over the river, still 2.5 miles go, I’d reached the point where it felt like I was running in slow motion. Even if my pace was off, how is it that those last 2.5 miles took more time than some years of my life seem to have? I was checking my watch and the GPS on my phone every few steps. And sometimes you just have those days. Last week I felt pretty good for the whole long run.

    I don’t really have much else to say about that, except that I feel better today than I did last Monday, despite the run itself having been far worse. Who knows, man.

Programming Note / A Very Portland Protest

Programming Note

    As I’ve been working on the “#NeverForget” episode of the Touched with Fire Podcast, it’s become clear to me that my previous ideas about how often the show would come out were . . . overly ambitious. I was able to slap together the pilot in a few days because it doesn’t use any archive tape or interviewing — most of what was involved in that was writing, foley, and then troubleshooting. (Look up “phase cancellation” if you want an extremely dull lesson in what can go wrong if you treat your mic cables poorly.) This second episode has been considerably more work. I spent most of this afternoon listening to the Morning Edition and Talk of the Nation broadcasts from 9/11, broadcasts I listened to largely live. It’s been a harrowing experience — to hear Bob Edwards shaken and, in his own words, “vulnerable”, inspires a particular form of vertigo in me I hope never to feel again — and it’s time consuming. And I have hours of CNN to pore over, and a bunch of Fresh Air interviews to listen to. It’s gonna take the bulk of the next few days just to log the tape I need to log.

    The upshot is that “#NeverForget” will not be ready for tomorrow, and I think it’s wise to basically say that the show is going to come out every two weeks. I sort of anticipated this, as you may recall from the first entry I wrote about the show. So there you have it: rather than turn out bullshit, I’m going to give myself an extra week for every story. This also means that season one will probably stretch until sometime next spring, as I still intend to put out 10-12 episodes before regrouping.

    I anticipate that “#NeverForget” is a project I’m going to revisit for the next year or so. I anticipate an episode that is a mix of archive tape and narration and runs about twenty minutes, which is probably toward the long end of what you’ll ever get from Touched with Fire. But I’m going to spend the next year doing interviews, in anticipation of expanding it to an hour-long special that will contain less autobiography, to be released on the 15th anniversary of 9/11.

    I’ve avoided the subject of 9/11 in my writing for a long time, because the day and its aftershocks leave me so heartsick to even think about. If I try really hard, I can get back in my own head on 9/12/02, the day so close to the first anniversary when the Bush Administration made absolutely clear its intention to start a war that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, and to sell it with advertisements that were smeared with the blood of those who died on 9/11. It is . . . unpleasant. I remember it as a sort of waking nightmare that seemed like it would never end. I’m not 100% sure it actually has. I just got used to it.

A Very Portland Protest

    I was listening to these tapes this afternoon on my iPhone, as I walked around my neighborhood, when I found this.

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    I’d noticed it before. It’s a spot where a house, probably kinda derelict, was bought and knocked over by a construction company. My neighborhood has a lot of houses in it that were kind of allowed to go to pot back in the 70s, when a lot of people thought they would be claimed through imminent domain for a freeway, and have since ended up in very bad shape indeed. A lot of these houses could probably be refurbished into really cool places — some of them have — but it’s probably just cheaper to knock them down and build new things. You see the new ones studded through the neighborhood. They all have a similar sort of slanted-roof design that doesn’t really fit in very well among the 100-year-old bungalows that make up the bulk of the neighborhood, but that’s to be expected, I suppose.

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    This draws some protest, sometimes, in the form of people who wish to “save Portland homes”, a tag you see grafitti’ed on construction signs around my neighborhood sometimes. I have to say, I don’t feel a lot of sympathy for the “save Portland homes” people. Old houses are not in any danger of going extinct in Portland.* Most often, you see this grafitti on signs along Division Street or Belmont Street, where old houses are being knocked down in favor of condos and shops. In this case, I find it almost entirely misguided. I think that one of the many lessons of history — especially of 20th century American history — is that cities change, or they die. The change may be weird and frightening, but it’s better than the alternative. I have no desire for Portland to turn into Cleveland or Detroit. Some of how you prevent that is to knock down the derelict and replace it with the new. A city by its nature must be a palimpsest.

*I realize that in some degree this is about gentrification, about which I have mixed feelings. Gentrification does in fact atomize communities, usually consisting largely of people of color. Portland’s historically-black neighborhoods up north have undergone an almost literal whitewashing, as young, white people have filtered in and made the rents too expensive, and the house sale prices too tempting, for people whose families have lived there for generations. But painting “save Portland homes” in a sign isn’t a program to change gentrification, so that neighborhoods can simultaneously become healthier and remain diverse. It’s just another bullshit Portland quasi-protest.

    Anyway, I have more sympathy for this protest than the others, because this isn’t about houses — it’s about trees. A signal feature of Portland’s east side neighborhoods is that they’re heavily foliated, both with towering firs, and with fat swishing elms and oaks. A house is a house — it’s mutable, the people inside it matter more than the building itself. But a tree is a tree. Trees take decades to grow. They live longer than any human. And they give Portland something it otherwise wouldn’t possess: grandeur.

    Portland is, in most ways, a small, cloistered, homey place. It lacks the rampant vitality of New York or Los Angeles. It lacks the history of Memphis or New Orleans. There are some hills in the west, there’s a mountain in the east, but in many ways, it could be a place that’s no different to any other big-ish city in America. It’s got almost exactly the same population, in the city proper, as Las Vegas. Do we want it to be Las Vegas?

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Las Vegas Suburb. Photo by Alex McClean

    So I think it’s important that Portland keeps its trees. Far more important than that it keeps its houses. I’m kinda with these people. What kinda shitass outfit buys some property and immediately starts cutting down 100-year-old Douglas firs? This isn’t a timber company. This is a housing company. Build a goddamned house around the goddamned trees, dicks.

Some Thoughts on Social Isolation

    I haven’t done a very good job of integrating back into Portland since I came back here. Some of that is that I haven’t really been here very much — I’ve spent maybe half of the last year in Bend, actually — but most of it is that every time I start building up a head of steam, I let it collapse. I fell out of the rotation at XRAY, the radio show I was helping out with seems to have petered out, I don’t fit in terribly well at the other radio station at which I work. I had gotten used to thinking of myself has having recently got back to town — but once you “get used” to that idea, doesn’t that mean it’s not true anymore? It’s been almost a year and a half since grad school ended, and almost nine months since I started paying rent on my place in Portland. And still I’m in a kind of socially isolated world, where the only people I really see are the people I buy stuff from, and occasionally my brothers.

    It’s a very, very dull mode of living, especially when a lot of the work you do (ie writing) requires solitude as well. Evenings, in particular, are a problem. Unless I’ve got a date — suddenly almost never, in the last couple of months — I have little to do but read, watch TV, and desultorily play video games. It’s not terrible, but it’s lonely. And lately, it makes me feel like I’m failing to reengage with my life, though the reasons seem a little obscure.

    I’ve always had a vague sense that I make a bad first impression. Probably this is mostly social anxiety — but the cruel irony of social anxiety is that being worried about making a bad impression can lead to making a bad impression. Occasionally it filters back to me that such-and-such a person finds me chilly and remote. I think this is because, especially when I’m out of practice, talking to people I don’t know very well stresses me out so much that I opt out of it. That’s where chilly and remote (or, depending on the interlocutor, stuck-up and full of himself) seems to come from.

    Now, I’ve made friends before. Not that long ago, even. But I feel like I’ve forgotten how. It’s dismaying that such an essential skill can go missing, even if only temporarily. What if it never comes back?

    I’ve been trying to take some steps to make myself do it. I bought a ticket to next week’s Moth. I used to do the Moth all the time; it’s how I made most of my friends in New York, who are generally among my favorite people. Somehow, though, that has felt trapped in amber to me, a thing that a younger, skinnier, more outgoing person who lived in New York would do. I wonder if maybe I was putting the cart before the horse, or something.

    And — let’s be honest about this — a fair amount of it has to do with my weight. I have been struggling to lose weight for the last few months, with much less success than I anticipated from resuming serious distance running. I managed to shave off somewhere around 15 pounds so that I’m now merely overweight, as opposed to geniunely fat. That’s nice, I guess, but all summer I’ve been running, and trying to be good about my food and beer intake (with less success), and the fact of the matter is that not another ounce has come off me. Sometimes it seems like I’ve actually gained weight in the last few months. Who runs 25 miles a week and gains weight? Me, I guess.

    When I’m not feeling good about how much I weigh, it gets in the way of everything. It exacerbates the social anxiety. It makes me not want to get up onstage. It means that I get up every day and the first thing I do is look in the mirror and think, “Well, you certainly are a fat sack of shit,” which is not exactly the kind of thing one thinks to himself before he strikes out and makes deep inroads in the social world of a new (or new-old, as the case may be in PDX) town. It means that I’m reluctant to fill out a profile at a dating site, which is the easiest way of meeting women in a new place, in my experience.

    Live Wire comes back in a couple of weeks; that’ll be good. And I’m trying to remember a story from my life that fits the theme “Betrayal” so I can go in the hat next week, but the fact of the matter is that I’m not a very complex social animal, and I don’t know that I’ve ever been betrayed, per se, because to be betrayed one would have to have a whole bunch of complicated balls in the air and have something go awry, socially-speaking. I’m sure I’ve betrayed other people, but I’m too fucking dumb to know when it might have been. Maybe I’ll have to go out and do something shitty to someone in the next few days so I’ll have a story to tell. Anybody want to volunteer?

    And now that we’ve reached the bottom of this well of self- pity, I’m going to wrap this up. I don’t have a bow to tie on this little rant, other than: maybe I never should have moved away from New York.

Haunted Cities

Los Angeles

    I’ve always liked Los Angeles, a position that is borderline heretical if you’re from Oregon (or any of the other places I’ve lived, now that I think about it). There are a lot of things wrong with it, of course, most of them to do with the sprawl. But it’s a haunted city, where the present lies atop the past as lightly as the dust lies atop the buildings — it sometimes seems like a good rain might wash it away, and leave behind one of its previous iterations. It’s the biggest city I’ve ever been in where I can point at a street-corner and say, When my father lived here, this was an orange grove. When my grandmother lived here, it was a sandy desert.

    As you can see, it’s also haunted by my family, which is true to one degree or another of almost every city in California. I like to imagine my grandmother here during the War — the big one — when she arrived from Nebraska on a bus. Did she have dreams of glamour? I’ve never known, and I didn’t think to ask until it was too late. She was a thin, pretty Irish girl from a minor railroad hub called Falls City, and over the years I’ve heard her make reference to nights out dancing, to seeing Glenn Miller play live. These are just the vaguest hints of what it must have been like to be young and single in LA as it boomed with movie and military money during, and just after, the war. At some point, she met a handsome young man of American Indian extraction who hailed from Nemaha, just up the road from Falls City. He had been with the Coast Guard before the war, but was being seconded to the South Pacific with the Navy now. They fell in love. I’ve never been clear on whether they married before he shipped out, but by 1943 he was back in the States and the knot had been tied. In spring 1944, my father was born. In summer 1944, the handsome Indian man — my grandfather — fled, and never really came back.

    But there was that time in Los Angeles. If there hadn’t been, there would be no me.

Fresno

    Anytime you bring up hot weather around my parents, they will mention one of two family reunions: the trip back to Falls City in the summer of 1980, when I was an infant and my sister was 15 and my father had a broken arm and the Quigleys suffered through a heatwave so awful it has its own Wikipedia entry; or the trip to Fresno in 1983, where the Chandlers have been stoically weathering temperatures north of 110 every summer for generations, and I learned to swim in a pool behind our motel.

    I have no memory of Fresno as it was then. I was too small. It was half the size it is now, a busy metropolis of about 200,000 in the midst of some of the country’s most productive farmland. With prodding, some people can be provoked to talk about “the old Fresno”, a place of commerce, a solid, not to say stolid, mid-sized city in mid-century America.

    Fresno isn’t like that anymore. I was there a couple of days ago, on a stop along the route from Los Angeles to Portland. It was a 111 degrees the day that my brother and I came tooling into town in a U-Haul with all his worldly possessions in the back. The next morning I got up to go running before the real heat began. After a couple of wrong turns, I was treated to a sunrise tour of the grim reality of a city that has not only grown but mutated since that family reunion all those years ago. I ran past tumbledown shacks and vacant lots, places where rusted toys and other detritus were gnawed at by leashless dogs. Somewhere along the way there was a set of barracks, abandoned, adorned with Christian crosses. As the heat rose, a thick, ecru fog began to collect in the air, so that by the time I finished I felt as though I was smoking cigarettes and running simultaneously.

    There’s another element here, less poetic, but more important than the musings that precede this. Fresno has doubled in size, adding a layer of desiccated slums, because it has added an underclass of Hispanic people, people systematically kept poor and disenfranchised by an agricultural economy that increasingly produces a few huge winners and very many losers. It’s sad. It seems as though there must be a solution. I don’t know what it is.

Weed

    When I was a senior in high school, I starred as George in John Steinbeck’s stage adaptation of his own novel, Of Mice & Men. This was the first time I was introduced to the idea that there was a town somewhere in California called Weed. My castmates and I all found this hilarious, for the reasons I imagine my loyal reader can guess. Little did we know that the town was named not for a plant but — and I confess that this is a disappointment to me — for a timber baron named Abner Weed. Oh, well. The name remains funny, and almost every time I drive through the Siskyous I make a point of stopping there. It’s actually kind of a pretty place, high up in the mountains near the Oregon border, a little outpost of a few thousand people borne up against the pine forest.

    It is haunted by the curse of little freeway towns all over America: no matter where you go in Weed, you can hear the roar of traffic not far away, people in machines from far away going somewhere else far away. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to grow up in a place like that, where the commerce consists largely of gas stations and restaurants designed to cater to through-drivers, and the sound of cars is a constant reminder of how insignificant you and the place you live in are. What percentage of people from places like Weed make it their business to escape? Is that more than you get in other little towns? Do people ever leave Weed and come back to stay?

Ashland

    When I was in the fifth grade, my entire class piled into a school bus and trucked the six hours down I-5 to Ashland, where every year one of the world’s most famous Shakespeare festivals is mounted. We had spent several weeks in Mrs Dundon’s class reading, not the plays, but comic book versions of the plays, written in simplified language. I remember reading Othello in comic book form, thus eliding everything about Shakespeare that makes it artful, beautiful, or at all worth caring about. To this day, that’s the only time I’ve read Othello.

    We stayed in dorms at what was then Southern Oregon State University, and is now Southern Oregon University. I don’t remember much about that. I do remember going to see Merchant of Venice in some kind of modern dress — were they wearing trench coats and fedoras? That sounds right. This would have been 1991, so maybe that wasn’t a cliché yet.

    We were given a very stern warning before the play began: any fidgeting, or noise, or moving around too much, was strictly verboten. I’m not sure that the consequences were spelled out, but I got the idea that the punishment would be something in the neighborhood of summary execution. And yet, somehow, I neglected to use the bathroom before the show. Then I neglected to remove my coat — a very cool neon windbreaker — after we sat down. When the lights fell and the actors entered, I suddenly realized that I was in big trouble. I needed to pee, and I needed to take off the coat. Oh, how I needed to take off the coat. I was hot, and then I was itchy, and then, in the way of children, I was crazy. I was dying either of boredom or suffocation or a burst bladder or something. I was far too young for Shakespeare, of course, but I was a pretty smart kid and I might have been able to make a go of it if I hadn’t been, you know, concerned that I was going to die. But then, if I took off the coat, or got up to pee, I was dead certain I would die. It was a classic rock or a hard place: die of heatstroke and urine overdose in the theatre, or leave, go pee, and take off the coat, and be beheaded by Mrs Dundon upon returning.

    I somehow survived until intermission, which I was pretty sure made me a great hero of some kind. Somehow, I have no memory of the second half of the play, either. Did I fall asleep? That seems possible. Ugh, what a waste of money that trip was.

Portland

What a bunch of fucking hippies.

The Disappointing Truth about Living in an Obscure Place

    Portland International Airport is — let’s face it — kind of shitty. I have an emotional attachment to the place because it’s been the start of so many adventures for me: when I moved to New York, I boarded a plane here; when I went to France, there to live in deep sunflower country outside Lyons, I boarded a plane here; when I went to Ireland alone, I boarded a plane here. And landing here, especially in spring when coming home from the frigid, gray landscape of Minnesota, has always had a certain verdant poetry to it. When I was younger, before 9/11 and the security lines, I used to come here just to hang out, so taken was I with the romance of the place.

    But in truth it’s nothing to write home about. It’s chintzy and ugly, and parts of it are truly grim, especially down by the A gates, where it’s just shuttles to Seattle and all the faces wear sour, stomach-pain kind of expressions. The famous carpet is famous for being ugly. The new carpet that replaced it is just as ugly. Yeah, there are brewpubs and a branch of Pok Pok, but on the whole the place is redolent of the 70s, a time when the city’s population was stagnant and the place was mired in a kind of conservatism of spirit. (That conservatism still haunts the place. I have never lived in a place where people seemed so oblivious to the fact that cities change, or die. I’m looking at you, “Save Portland Homes” graffitists.) The place stinks.

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The famous PDX carpet.

    I think maybe I notice this now because I’ve been in so many airports, so many of which are built in a modern, monumental style that seems to befit the purpose of such a place better. I mean, for the love of God — this is a place where you go to fly. To fly! This is as close as most of us will ever get to experiencing a miracle. The space should be miraculous. The Denver airport feels that way. Sky Harbor in Phoenix — though it services a city that is notably lame — feels that way, especially as the sun goes down over the desert horizon. SeaTac, SFO, JFK. These places feel right.

    PDX is more of a piece with LaGuardia, which inspired a fantasy I once had, one which has gripped me ever since: under New York, there are portals to hell, and they manifest as horrible places on the earth’s surface, places like LaGuardia, and Union Station, and the Atlantic Avenue branch of the US Post Office. It’s not as genuinely horrible as LaGuardia, but it shares with it a similar sensation of having been forgotten about forty years ago, and then buried in the collective subconscious, so that none of us ever think about it except when we’re there. Holy shit, I used to think whenever I got to LaGuardia. This is still here?

    I realize that part of the reason PDX remains small and dingy is that it’s not a hub of any kind. SeaTac and Denver and Phoenix have flights spidering out of their many terminals all over the country and the globe, all the time. I am, for instance, flying north from PDX in about 45 minutes, so that I can change planes at SeaTac and go to Los Angeles. There’s no reason, practically, for my local airport to be anything but a weigh station. But I wish it was. I come from generations of cynics on one side and pragmatists on the other — I haven’t believed in a political ideal since John Kerry defeated Howard Dean all those years ago. Normally I’m not suceptible to this kind of thinking. But an airport should have, if nothing else, grandeur. This is where we go to FLY.

They're Very Tall

    The ambulance pulled into the parking lot outside my building maybe twenty seconds after I walked in my front door. I live on the second floor, and a big picture window looks out of my living room down into that parking lot, and my view was excellent. It stopped, its lights flashing, and first one, then two, then three EMTs got out. The first one, the driver, walked up to the apartment below mine. One of my neighbors — not one of the ones who live downstairs — was sitting on a folding chair, waiting. She let the EMT in. A minute later, the other two had got a gurney out of the back of the ambulance. They got it unfolded, latched what looked like an oxygen tank to it, and began to push it towards the apartment downstairs.

    I called my mom, I guess because she seemed to be the person most likely to know the people downstairs. That was the idea, anyway; she’s met them a few times. Neither one of us could remember their names. They’re very tall. They live in Connecticut most of the year but they come out here to visit their grandkids in the summer. You can usually tell when they’re in town, because the 20-year-old luxury car that usually sits idle in their designated parking spot will disappear sometimes. Their grandkids are around a lot when they’re in town. Last winter one of them had to have heart surgery, and they stayed around for several months. I have to keep my TV quiet after about 11 when they’re in town, because my building was cheaply made in the 70s and they can hear everything.

    The EMTs didn’t appear to be in any hurry, and by the time whatever was going to happen had happened, I had got distracted somehow. I never saw who they wheeled out on that gurney, if it was anybody. By the time I went to let the cat out, about an hour later, the ambulance was gone. I haven’t figured out what happened yet.

    A couple of times today it has occurred to me that the people downstairs might be having one of those horrible days you never forget — the day someone dies, the day you go to the hospital, that kind of day. I was walking down the street earlier, approaching the parking lot, and I thought: Downstairs it’s something different. The last time I had a day like that was more than a year ago, and while I was alone in my apartment feeling shattered, the people upstairs were moving their furniture. I remember, I could hear them dragging it around most of the day. I didn’t have any coherent thoughts about that. Thinking about it now makes me lonely. Thinking about someone downstairs while I’m upstairs working feels lonely, too, and sad. But I’m not going down there.

    I mean, I don’t even know their names.

A List of Pop Culture Blog Titles that I Considered after This Weekend’s Smoke Out / An Announcement

1. A List of Pop Culture Blog Titles that I Considered after This Weekend’s Smoke Out

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The Portland skyline from my back porch, Saturday morning. Usually those skyscrapers are crystal clear.

bold = drawn from a thing I like

* = drawn from a thing I don’t like

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The Portland skyline from my back porch, Saturday afternoon.

Of a Fire on the Moon; Smoke on the Water; Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer; Fire and No Rain*; Bat out of Hellfire; Smoky Joe’s Café; Catch a Fire*; When We Kiss, Fire; Burn Baby Burn; I’m on Fire; Ring of Fire; Lake of Fire; World on Fire; Portland’s Burning; A Song of Smoke & Fire; Smokin’ in the Boys Room; Smoke Gets in Your Eyes; Smokestack Lightning

2. An Announcement

    After rather a lot of dithering and inability to commit, I’ve decided to announce the creation of the Touched with Fire Podcast. The first episode will, barring unforeseen consequences, “air” two weeks from today, and episodes will replace Monday entries on this blog.

    Part of the reason I could never get started before is that I felt restricted by every single thing I’ve tried, so this is going to be a bit of a hodgepodge, kind of like this blog. If you’ve heard The Memory Palace, the production will probably owe a lot to that show. If you don’t know that show, it’s a series of short, historical anecdotes set to music. Listen here. Unlike that show, I will be using archive tape and a higher incidence of personal narrative. As it evolves, it may sometimes involve interviews with people I find interesting, or more traditional, 99% Invisible-style explainer journalism.

    I have basically two goals for the show:

    (1) To feature the strong voice I have developed for myself as a writer over the years. You can expect cynicism, dumb jokes, erudition, and a little bit of poetry. The show will be narrative — no navel-gazing, no overwrought cultural analysis.

    (2) To operate as something I’m not totally sure I’ve seen before: a sort of audio memoir. The show won’t always be intensely personal, but it might be sometimes. But it won’t just be another guy blabbing into a mic. There will be real production values.

    (3) To come out regularly. To start with, I’m going to shoot for once a week. If that turns out to be too much, I’ll scale back to once every two weeks, but given the way things are going right now, I think I should be able to do this.

    Anyway, if you are one of the two or three loyal readers of my blog, I suspect you’ll like the podcast. If you do like the podcast, I’d ask you to tell other people about it — unlike the blog, which is sort of like writing practice, a method of keeping my skills honed for other, more important work, the podcast is intended as a primary outlet for my audio work. So I want people to hear it.

    Also, I’m thinking of calling the show News of My Awesome Life, though it’ll probably end up just being called Touched with Fire.

It's All Weird, All the Time

1.    I had a whole bunch of ideas about what I might write today — most of them speculative, about my cat’s daytime perambulations and her dietary habits thereon — and then I ran into this story while at work and just couldn’t resist. If you’re not a clicky-the-linky sort of person, here’s a summary of the dazzling details:

    A 46-year-old man named Royce Savoy busted into a JC Penny store in Eugene by crawling up into the ceiling space, and then crashing down through the roof into the store, like some kind of cut-rate fucking Doc Ock. Cops think he was trying to steal things — though why, exactly, he felt the need to crash into a store that was open for business in order to steal from it only Mr Savoy himself knows.

    It’s unclear if he stole anything — he was seen by one employee and left a trail of clothes strewn behind him as he walked quickly out of the store — but one thing is clear: he wasn’t done for the night. About an hour later, he crashed through the ceiling of another business a few miles away. He was spotted, and someone called the cops, who pieced together the details of his crime spree.

    But that’s not the best part. The best part is how cops figured out what his name was. Apparently, while crouched in the ceiling of the JC Penny, waiting for his moment to strike, he put down his backpack. He forgot it there when he jumped. When he realized it was missing, MR ROYCE “MENSA” SAVOY WENT BACK TO THE JC PENNY TO ASK IF THEY HAD IT. When they said no, HE LEFT THEM HIS NAME AND PHONE NUMBER IN CASE IT TURNED UP. Apparently, Savoy realized his mistake eventually, because by the time the police found his backpack in the ceiling, he had disappeared. Nobody knows where he is now. First smart move of the whole caper, if not the most spectacular.

2. That dildo party I witnessed above 26th Ave the other day? Apparently it’s become a pandemic. Not only that, but the news as reached Austria (where the only comment is, “Witzig :) !”, apparently meaning, “How funny!”), Russia, and Indonesia (Google translates this headline as: “Hundreds excited Dildo Gelantungan in Power Cables.” Gelantungan appears to have something to do with monkeys, which could be fitting.). Guys, we’re famous!

3. I think my cat eats food left out by other people when she goes out. That’s all I was really going to say about my cat. I’m going to have to put up signs with her picture, saying, “Don’t feed this little glutton, she’s already overweight.”

This Ain't No Time to Get Cute

    I was going to write an ambitious post about the many significant Julys 4 of my life this afternoon, but then I encountered a traffic jam. I suppose it’s evidence of my cossetted life that the traffic jam basically ceased to be a part of it when I moved out of California twelve years ago,* but the truth is I only really deal with them a couple times a year. Whenever I find myself in one there’s this sensation of — What? How is this possible? WHERE DID ALL THESE FUCKING PEOPLE COME FROM? DON’T YOU PEOPLE HAVE JOBS AND FAMILIES?! DON’T YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO DO OTHER THAN DRIVE YOUR CARS?!?!??!?!?!?!!? It doesn’t matter that they’re all saying the same stuff about me inside their own vehicles. The outrage wins. Every time it wins.

*Don’t quote me on that. Writing this blog has been a lesson in how quickly one’s memory erodes. You could tell me that I left California ten years ago or fifteen years ago and I’d go, “Yeah, that sounds right.” I remember when my parents would struggle with dates from their own lives I’d go, “Jesus, what happened to YOU? How do you not remember that?” I had no idea how hard it is to pack more memory into less space as you age and your brain ever-so-slightly decays.

    This one started just as I hit PDX metro, headed north on I-5 having just taken a pleasurable, scenic drive over the North Santiam Pass from Bend. I had been contemplating idly the loveliness of the valley in summer, and thinking about the poetic things I would write about the various Julys 4 I have experienced. I was thinking about how to best convey the arresting complexity of my feelings about Independence Day, and patriotism, and America in general. Also, I was thinking about what song I would blast from my open windows as I came over the Ross Island Bridge.

    That’s when I hit the wall of cars, inching along northward — into town in evening rush hour, which I found mystifying. Maybe if I were more familiar with driving around here, I’d understand why northbound traffic south of the city is terrible at getaway time — is everybody going to Vancouver? From Salem? Does this mean something troubling about where our state workers live? — but as it is, I was confounded, set adrift on a sea of traffic with all my outrage. All my poetry and complexity leaked out along with the steam shooting from my ears.

    Now, I’m pretty wizardly with the streets of Portland’s east side, a result of years of trying to be cute with shortcuts. The shortcuts almost never work, but as a result of trying to take them I cannot get lost over there. I’m sure there’s a street or two on that side of the river I haven’t driven down, but they’re few and far between. But I was on I-5 south of the Marquam Bridge, stranded in the west-side suburbs, which might as well be the surface of the moon as far as I’m concerned. And so it was inch, inch, inch, and with each inch I became less the artist and more the grouchy old ass I’m daily turning into.

    I know most people hate talking about traffic, and I’m sure all y’all didn’t care about my traffic story, but it’s been on my mind a lot lately. I’m curious about traffic, and interested in it — I’ve read books about it — but one thing that I’ve come to understand with expanded information is just how far I am from understanding it. This has turned out to be true with nearly every field, over the years. The more books I read the more I understand how many I’ll never read. The more I learn about baseball the more I see how little of it I’ll ever truly get. And the more traffic there is, the more I see how impossible it must be to fix.

    I read Tom Vanderbilt’s book on the subject about a year ago,** and one of the things that really struck me about it is that we appear to be infinitely thirsty for freeways: build one up, say, SE Division Street from downtown to Gresham, and traffic actually won’t get any better on any of the other freeways in town — people will just drive more on the new one. It suppose there’s an eventual saturation point, but nobody has figured out what that is. Give us the opportunity to drive, and we’ll drive. Add a freeway and you won’t relieve a traffic jam — you’ll just create another.

**or rather, I listened to the audiobook

    I use that example advisedly, of course, because in a couple of days I’m going to interview a guy named Jay Howell, who was one of the people who was on the ground for the Mt Hood Freeway fight forty years ago; that freeway would have shot straight up what is now (the very posh) Division Street and — no joke — plowed under the lot where my apartment building now sits. It’s hard to fathom.

    The infinite yen for freeways is evident in archival reading I’ve done about the fight, by the way. People who supported the freeway didn’t seem to care about relieving the congestion downtown, which was the nominal reason for building the freeway — in interviews with The Oregonian, people repeatedly say they just want a fast way to get to work. The freeway revolt that prevented the construction of the freeway was uncannily prescient, it seems: the PDX of today, known for its smart planning (despite its mysterious traffic jams), is built on a foundation of good decisions taken for reasons somewhat orthogonal why the decisions were good. That I’m sitting here now in a beer bar on Division Street, as another rosy sunset crashes resplendent over the trees, the pedestrians, and the traffic, is basically a coincidence.

Brad Pitt, His Smile, His Ass.

    I’ve been distracted lately. I keep trying to concentrate long enough to write a blog post about anything on my list of backup ideas, but none of them appeal to me. (This may be because the list is a series of semi-sensical sentence segments. Including: “money is a social construct”; “brad pitt, his smile, his ass. and brotherhood” — I think that one is somehow about A River Runs Through It; “dogs on leashes”; and “a bunch of dithering about race and gender” — which is basically what this blog has turned out to be in the last two weeks already.) I wrote that thing about DFW yesterday mostly out of desperation, because I’ve been able endlessly to write about him in the past, much to my own consternation. It worked, even if my loyal reader was almost certainly alienated by the long passage in the first person collective and didn’t read the rest. I know I wouldn’t have, and I wrote that shit.

    Yesterday I went down to talk with Val Bellestrem, who works at The Architectural Heritage Center in SE Portland, about a radio project I’m working on and trying to figure out how to pitch.* Val is a native Portlander, about ten years older than me, who wrote his master’s thesis on Portland’s freeway revolt of the early 70s, in which a bunch of liberal pols and a loud minority of Portland residents managed to put the kibosh on the Mt Hood Freeway,** which would have run from downtown out to I-205, and maybe all the way to Gresham. That story is sort of an urban legend around the city, especially among those few of us who grew up there, and it was pretty fascinating to talk to an expert about it.

*Pitching is by far the most difficult part of freelancing for me, and I hate it. It has nothing in common with making radio, and very little in common with written journalism. Of course, that’s not why I hate it — I hate it because I hate being rejected.

**Side-note: if the freeway had been built, I wouldn’t live where I do. It was meant to be four city blocks wide, plowing straight up Division Street. My building is under that right-of-way. In fact, I suspect — though I don’t know — that my building is where it is because the neighborhood was badly degraded because people assumed the houses would soon be condemned and allowed them to become delapidated. My building dates to the mid-70s, shortly after the death of the freeway. I’m willing to bet a developer bought some old crappy houses, knocked them down, and turned them into the crappy apartment building I live in now.

    The urban legend goes like this: legendary urban boogeyman Robert Moses — the guy who wanted to knock down Greenwich Fucking Village, the most beautiful and historic part of the greatest city in the most important country in the world, so suburbanites could go from Long Island to Jersey in their cars — designed a freeway system for Portland back in the 40s, when freeways meant progress and freedom (and a convenient way to transport troops in case the Nazis / commies / Canadian Mounties decided to invade). One planned freeway was the Mt Hood Freeway, which would have decimated several of the oldest neighborhoods in Portland. Though many of the freeways were built, including ones that destoryed historic black and Jewish neighborhoods, in SE — in my neighborhood — people stood up and said STOP!

    The truth is of course more complex, and more interesting. I’m not going to go into the entirety of the details here, but I do want to clear up a few things, in part in hopes of clarifying how I’m going to make the piece:

    1. Val was very clear that the Robert Moses thing was almost entirely a myth. It’s true that in 1943 the city fathers of PDX invited Moses to cook up a plan, and he came and spent a few days doing some studies and then drew up some pretty basic stuff. 

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Image courtesy of the City of Portland

    If you look at that map, and then a map of Portland’s actual freeway layout, you’ll notice a few things. Most salient is that Moses’ plan for Portland was extremely modest. There’s no outer ring, the eastside freeway that currently mars the view across the Willamette from downtown is several blocks off the waterfront. There are other advantages, too, which I’ll save for the radio, but here’s the important bit: there’s no freeway running up Division Street. On a fundamental level, the Mt Hood Freeway wasn’t Robert Moses’ fault.

    2. In fact, there’s pretty strong evidence that a majority of the public — not only a majority, but a heavy majority — favored the construction of the Mt Hood Freeway. The Oregonian conducted a poll that showed a 60/40 split in favor. Mayor Neil Goldschmidt had polling showing a smaller, but stil clear, majority that would have voted in favor of such a freeway, had a vote been held.

    3. The alleged people’s uprising, which fits nicely with Portland’s self-image, in fact was something other than that. There had been strenuous objection to previous freeway construction, and nothing happened. Some of this, I suspect, is because most of the residents of SE Portland were white, whereas those who objected to the shattering of NE Portland by I-5 were largely black. But the main thing is that there was a shift in the political culture in the corridors of power. Without several young, some female, local pols, who took up residence on city council and the Multnomah County Council, no doubt the Mt Hood Freeway, like the ones before it, would have gone through. My neighborhood wouldn’t exist. Hell, following the butterfly effect as far as it could go, I might not exist. (Or at least not live in SE Portland.)

    Anyway. I fear I’ve ruined the radio story now. Maybe not. I’ve still got a coupla interviews to do before I throw in the towel. And maybe 99 PI actually will be interested, right?

Short and Stupid: Part of an Ongoing Series

    Well, here we are. I warned you this would happen. It’s time for the first in what I imagine will be a series of short and stupid blog posts. This is where the rubber meets the road on the quota thing.

    I spent the whole morning worrying about interviewing somebody. I mean, pacing around the apartment, checking my questions list over and over again, dreading the moment that it came. And then I drove up to NoPo, and the interview was both easy and relatively brief. Hours and hours of worry for 30 minutes of tape, probably 2 minutes of which will end up in the story. Ah, well. That’s the way it goes.

    I’m having difficulty with this story, conceptualizing it, I think because my contrarian nature keeps getting in the way. Most people accept it as an absolute good that Portland didn’t put in any more freeways than it did back in the 50s and 60s. We even ripped one out, which is all but unheard of. And I guess I agree with that — my own apartment wouldn’t be here if the Mt Hood Freeway had actually been laid up SE Division Street. But then I’d just live somewhere else and I wouldn’t know the difference. Wouldn’t I?

    I dunno. I think maybe the good thing about denial of the freeways is less about the freeways qua the freeways and more about a certain attitude in Portland that persists and makes it the place it is. Yeah, it’s ripe for parody. And, to quote my brother Andy, there isn’t a big city in America that’s nearly so up its own butt as Portland is. But I love it.

    Here’s an example of that whole up-its-own-butt thing: when it came time to ask the woman who I was interviewing if she was from Portland, I had to preface it this way: “I realize this has gotten to be a loaded question these days, but are you from around here originally?” I mean seriously. This is the 21st century. Nobody lives where they grew up. Why should we, the few, the native Portlanders,* be the only ones to pretend otherwise?

*In truth, I am not a native-born Portlander. I was born in Corvallis, about 90 miles south. We moved to Portland when I was 4. My dad told me once that he and my mom always intended to go back to Corvallis one day. Why we didn’t is a long, involved, and kind of interesting story, which is why I’m not going to tell it right now, in this short and stupid blog post.

    And here’s another. Whenever I meet someone new in this town, I find myself — almost against my own will — going out of my way to somehow let everyone know that I grew up here, unlike all the, ahem, Californians who are around everywhere. When I met my friend’s new girlfriend before the MLS All Star game last summer, I wedged in a totally pointless reference to having gone to Portland Beavers games as a kid, just so that she would know that I was from Portland and the fact that I was just moving there was about having gone exploring, rather than come invading. And, oh, my God. Who fucking cares? I actually think that Portland is a much better place for all the newbies around. The Portland of my youth was a sleepy backwater without much going on other than the scenery. Now it’s full of restaurants and clubs and breweries. There’s a radio scene, a lit scene. (I don’t really participate in the lit scene. I probably should.)

    Leave us not forget that Portland inspired the Dead Kennedys classic “Night of the Living Rednecks”. That was then. Now, when famous people are mean about Portland, it’s done with love. 

    Anyway, speaking of being up our own butts, I’ve now been writing aimlessly about my hometown for several paragraphs for basically no reason. It’s so hot you guys. And I don’t think that’s liable to change.

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    Anyway. I’m done for the day. Maybe I’ll have something interesting tomorrow. I’ll catch ya on the flip-flop.