Oregon at Point Zero

If there is a word I have come to associate with my time in Oregon, it is the word failure. I want it to be an epic and grand failure, but that is giving far too much importance to my life.  It's more appropriate to say that it is a petty and meaningless failure, like a squeak in the Cosmos unheard and of no consequence.

Even though it provided a brief spasm of laughter for the gods, no doubt, on a personal level, this failure feels like so deep an error in perception and judgment on my part, over so long a span of my life,  that all I can do is scramble as fast as possible to raise the white flag and admit deeply and utterly that I was wrong about everything. Just let me be free of this at last.

But then there's my job, that I got here, which I like very much, and even if it ended tomorrow, it would certainly have been a huge success as far my life's goals.

I have nothing against this place or its people. In fact I love it in many ways, as much as I can still bear to do that. This is despite the fact that I know it would be very hard for me to live here, and not just because of old memories, but because Oregon is not an easy place to live in, if you ask me.

There are only a few pockets of places here that even feel like civilization, of which I am a big fan. I can go off the grid as much as anyone, but what feels so oppressing here to me is the general feeling that I just want it to hurry up and catch up with the rest of the world.

The pockets where I'm most comfortable, where I go just to hang out and feel normal here, are ironically not the urbanish areas like Portland, which are marvelous and appealing but no longer my style or vibe Instead they are the clusters of modern "Interstate culture" where the hotels, convenience stores, and big box outlets are relatively new and clean, and where it does not feel like one is living in Hillbillyville. Those are the places around here that I go just to "breathe."

Forest Grove by all rights should be a boutique hip college town right off the highway between a hip thriving urban tech center and the god-damned ocean. But it isn't. I feels like a little refugee town from a timber culture that died three decades ago and never came back, that ekes along as best it can like some place in the middle of Oklahoma.

It struck me the reason it feels so different here is that Oregon is not only rustic but poor. Wyoming and Montana are very rustic but not poor (except on Indian reservations).  New Mexico is poor but curiously feels less rustic, because of its culture. California is a golden place that is both beautiful and rotting. It is swarmed by armies of homeless, but is certainly civilized throughout. Colorado is civilization itself and as rich as Midas.

But here, even though there is less manifest homelessness than in California, outside of the pockets of prosperity it feels as if so many people are just slightly above being out on the street, and with no hope of it ever being different than it is.

It was never a rich state---its resources were timber instead of gold, for example. The scenery is beautiful but is outclassed in grandeur by the spectacles in its sister western states. But above all the industries that sustained its working classes have by-and-large just blown away into the wind. I got to see some of the very end of that old culture while I lived here.

The Grand Floral Parade---it would fun if it were a real floral spectacle, instead of just a memory of something that might have retro cool, when Portland was a really hick town. When I first moved here long ago, I was certainly blown away by the abundance of flowers in the Spring, but the Rose City monicker was an anachronism even in my day.

And I can certainly have more compassion for the hipsters that have made Portland their Mecca. After the parade on Saturday, I was standing in the parking garage looking across towards Nordstrom, and up towards the Paramount Hotel, I could see the public fountain in the big plaza by the place where the streetcar stops. I've been coming to this area for many years now and seen it just get more and more interesting and articulated as an urban environment.

On the sunniest Saturday of the year, at a particularly festive hour, the families that had come to see the parade were in the plaza relaxing. Children were playing in the fountain. I looked at the men and women. There was one guy who must have weighed four hundred pounds. He was running through the water without his shirt.  There were plenty of other specimens of folk with nearly the same body shape, both men and women, in similar kinds of joyful play.

It must be horrifying for some kids to grow up in this of environment. All they want to do is escape it. So they come to Portland and put on hipster glasses and hang around other people with whom they feel they can be themselves, in a similar kind of way. They listen and play music. Urbanity happens. Except for one day a year when have to let the riff-raff in for the stupid parade---a festival celebrating flowers that is less floral than Amsterdam on a typical Tuesday. No wonder they have to cap it off with a big naked bicycle rally.

One day Oregon will have a flower festival again without being ashamed of what it is.  They'll bring back the Rose City name in earnest, dust if off and wear it proudly. I predict the reason will be because of the desire to cater to Asian tourists, who actually like that kind of thing.