If I were (ahem) the type of guy to crave this kind of superficial attention and exposure, I'd probably devote my blog from here on out to those kinds of posts. But really, how many times can I say DILLIGAF over and over?
Checked out of the Clackamas Inn this morning and spent the day inside working. The job lately has been sort of a drag. I'm supposed to be starting a new phase of refactoring of the app I'm working on for the Big Publishing Company, one in which I'll be given a solo freehand to make some wide ranging changes that I suggested, and which they readily signed onto (because I know what the hell I'm doing).
But there have been so many small brush fires to put out from our recent server upgrade that each morning brings some kind of "cat up a tree" incident for me to deal with. Should have seen that coming with my Super PHP-based Gamma Ray Vision (now with Bluetooth). Fortunately I have solid co-workers who understand there is only so much they can expect from the Internet Man of Steel. So the Big New Push to Krypton has to wait until after the Fourth. I'm not complaining, just sort of longing to get on to the next thing.
Spending the day in the Starbucks near Clackamas Town Center (a much nicer neighborhood than where I was staying---more traditional middle class suburbanish) had the side effect of making me oblivious to the giant heat wave that had rolled into the Northwest during the middle of the day (must have been Lex Luthor at it again). When I finally went outside again around 3 PM, I was roasting within seconds. Any temperature above 75 around here starts to fee positively inhospitable, and the forecast called for it to go much higher than that.
I planed to head back towards East Portland, but I forgot the the Golden Rule around here: never get on the freeway. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but on a Friday afternoon this time of year, that might as well be the rule. Slow creeping speeds being the Kryptonite of my old Bimmer, there was no way I was going to torture it and me with the stop and go crawl along I-205 in between semi trucks. After only a minute or so, I slipped out of traffic into the far right lane and accelerated with glee towards the next exit ramp.
I had no idea where I was going. I was in the mood just to feel some open road below me, to open up the throttle, and to get the air rushing through the windows and over the radiator of the engine. My car loves that kind of driving, so I'm rather forced to let it have that from time to time.
After a few requisite stop lights, I found an increasingly hospitable stretch of asphalt while climbing up along winding Mt. Scott Road, in between the cemeteries there, and dropping down on the other side into the hidden-pocket-in-the-hills community called Happy Valley. I've known a few folks that have lived there, and I could see why. It's a nice standard suburban community draped over the rolling hills amid the fir trees, with recently built civic features like schools and fire stations---not the worst place to be around here, although a bit too rural and off-the-beaten-track for me. No Starbucks in sight. Nor anything at all commercial for that matter.
Then I just kept flowing frictionlessly in the car, taking the most immediately gratifying open path at every intersection until I was zipping along Foster Road past farms and fruit stands selling strawberries and freshcut flowers---the Oregon Dream. Letting myself get purposely lost (since I had an atlas with me in the trunk), I found myself rolling into the little community of Damascus, where I stopped to rest in the parking lot of a Safeway at the intersection with the main highway.
This sector of the Portland exurbs feels like "average America" to me, the kind of semi-rural community of ranchettes mixed with isolated newer housing tracts that one sees from coast to coast, neither abjectly poor nor opulently rich.
Having yet time to kill, I followed the most open road further east, into the world famous little town of Boring, the name of which is a bit of false humility, if you ask me, given that its a not-so-bad little hamlet outside the city on the way to Mount Hood. It actually had a bit of charm for a town like that, and it didn't appear as if every other house was a Meth lab. But to be fair, I passed through there 25 years ago (long story) and at that time it probably lived up more to its name. Quite a conversion since then.
Actually-sorta-interesting, Oregon, I decided I'd call it.
Because who wants to be boring, really? This day and age, that's the worst possible thing to be (outside of the unpardonable Church of Postmodern Marxism sins I rattled off in my last post). Boring is definitely the worst thing for a blogger to be. So I have to keep moving forward, like my car through the hot humid summer air, gobbling up experiences so I can I tell you about them here as if I'm Candide with a Corvette.
So it turns out that socioeconomic commentary on the geography of the Portland suburbs only gets you so many hits, as least my version of it. But I'm not yet ready to see my page hit counter go back down to its previous average. Just one more fix please. Fortunately I left off a few folks in that long list of public figures whose opinions I'd rather just never hear again (to put it mildly). I suppose it behooves me to mention them here, while the topic is fresh in my mind:
...Michael Bloomberg, Christine Lagarde, Samantha Power, Ann Coulter, David Suzuki, Naomi Klein, Paul Ehrlich, Barney Frank, Matthew Yglesias and anyone else who writes for Slate, the New York Times (aka the "toilet paper of record"), ,Jonathan Kay, Jennifer Lopez, Alec Baldwin, FEMEN (although they can still show their bare breasts if they feel they need to), the Westboro Baptist Church, Joel "Romans 13 tells us to submit to all authority" Osteen (a real special place in Hell for him perhaps, but it's not for me to judge)...
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