Stay Weird Oregon
A Rainy Day in Portland
This song makes me think of Portland, Oregon.
If I have to tell you about this trip, I’d say this:
Take the 30-hour train from LAX Union Station just once. At least once, to experience it. And then never again because that shit is atrocious.
Don’t fuck with the Amish people who have discovered technology. They aren’t here to play.
Instant cup ramen tastes the best because of the people you share it with.
Adventuring out of the safe bubble that is California into other, foreign states within the US of A was a trip. A scandal. It felt like a betrayal because everywhere you go, splashed on whatever TV is on, we hear that California is the IT GIRL, the place creatives go to live and die and the place where dreams are made of the stars on the ground.
This is very true for SoCal (dropping a pin smack dab into the heart of Los Angeles), but what the movies forget to tell you about this shining, neon necropolis, is that it is a hell of its own.
Remove the rose-colored glasses and you get unlivable rents in unlivable neighborhoods, unhoused folk across every street, gas hitting 6 or 7 dollars, unbearable traffic at all hours of the day, a glossy veneer of happiness and success and beauty that is marred by the cruel fact that everything we love, we love as a façade.
The city is insidious and you can feel it attracting a certain kind of person like flies to honey. There is a desire to be famous. At any cost. A hunger for attention and a damned-if-I-don’t attitude.
The people here will smile at you without it ever touching their eyes and you learn, soon enough, who you should and shouldn’t share your heart and your dreams with.
It’s unnerving.
Oregon is the exact opposite.
To each city their own, with their own quirks and pros and cons, but Portland felt lived in in the best way possible.
The people were weird.
But they were also explicitly kind. They offered recommendations and hospitality with only the vaguest introduction of a name.
They offered compliments like apples from a tree, they held doors open, they smiled at you, not through you and they said as much in the way their bodies would turn to acknowledge you.
LA as big a city as it is, does not understand community. Our lives are dictated by the rise and grind of a Hollywood timeline and the ceaseless traffic that demands a car for each individual. Nothing is walkable, communities are in their modern-day diaspora, and there is an assumption that the climb to the top must come at the cost of the many.
It’s a cutthroat world to live in.
I don’t believe it being the only world we live in. But it is a prominent one.
Portland felt like a balm after having lived in LA for a few years.
Nature butted against the ramshackle architecture in a way that I can only describe as beautifully symbiotic. The rain was incessant but beautiful— soft drops falling from a cloudy sky that winked and promised weather that would ebb and flow like an ocean of dreams.
People passed each other on the streets and huddled under awnings to avoid the worst of the tears of heaven. Shops were stuffed into every building, every alleyway, every corner they could find their niche. The rain dampened everything but their spirits and I loved every second in my wet clothes.
Leaving LA, for only that moment, made me realize that the dream doesn’t have to have sunny weather and palm trees. You don’t have to give up a happy living to pursue your happy ending.
More than anything, it made me realize that a city is a city. A job is a job. The people you spend your days with are the ones who make everything worth it.
So you better make sure that whatever life you choose, wherever you choose to build it, it is with the people that make it all worthwhile :)