Dude, who even knows.
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nonefriendly asked: Speaking as someone who was born in Portland at the start of the 90s and left before the decade hit its middle, it's fascinating to me how much of my perspective of the city has been shaped by what I see reflected in the media and also do they still have that members-only club Chuck Pahalniuk talked about where you go and jerk off
i’m pretty sure the entire city is that members-only club Chuck Palahniuk talked about where you go and jerk off
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Portland’s weird, politically speaking. Before I came I’d always heard of it as super-liberal. But that’s not quite right, it’s progressive as in Era - distrust of electioneering in favor of a weirdly functional libertarian technocratic welfare state, rule by white men with advanced degrees in a learned - which is not to say academic - tone, citizen input welcome on the condition that they uplift themselves to match. Very big on public services but absolutely committed to holding to budget, all the “right” social stances but I have never seen a culture so unapologetically tailored to well-educated straight male northern european small business owners.
What a horrible night to have a curse motorcycle
guess I’m practicing some banjo rolls, then
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So yesterday I was going to go to a friend’s Cinco de Mayo party at noon, and so went to bed at 3 am which is relatively easy for me but instead I woke up at 7 and couldn’t get back to sleep because I have insomnia and it’s aggravated by the intention to get up for anything no matter how trivial.
So I go over and think I’m maybe a little late even for this competition he was going to do, bring my bike into his backyard and like no one else was there so I’m like “oh, ok, I have time to get some coffee and pick up some beer and grilling meat” only as I leave I have the terrible sense that I screwed something up and check my phone and oh shit it’s only Quatro de Mayo whoo boy dodged a bullet of awkwardness there.
So I decide I’d always been intending to bike around North/Northeast in the daytime but never got to it so perfect chance. If you ride down side streets in Portland long enough you always run into a park with water fountains and whatnot so that’s nice. Eventually I decide to ride up until I hit the river and follow that. There’s a marina and stuff and I ride east until 33rd and I’m thinking of turning back down but hey there’s a specific bike path and I’m thinking I’ll ride that a while further and then turn inland.
Except that path is between the airport and the river so there’s no turnoffs until like 90th and the I-205 bridge, it’s hard to realize how huge an airport is until you traverse its perimeter under human power and this isn’t the longest bike ride I’ve ever taken but the longest in years, and at one point I’m seriously afraid my junk has withdrawn into my body but nope, just gone numb. A few passenger jets take off over me and some F-18s land on I guess Air National Guard business. Like, I’m pretty sure they’re 18s from the wingform but on the ground the canopies look bulbous and raised like a 16 so maybe they’re 2-seater trainers?
Anyway eventually there’s a turnoff through the airport parking lot, and then somehow I go up a normal curb cut, turn, and for some reason sprawl out across the pavement. Get up, wave myself OK to the bus driver, but now my palm’s scratched up and from the bruise and swelling I probably sprained some extensor digitalis. On top of all the grease from having to dislodge my chain, which was getting stuck between my rear gears and the frame for some reason.
And I’m like “what the hell even is this place” but then I remember there’s a big box center here, like to take advantage of the Washington sales tax on the other side of the bridge, and it has an IKEA, so I go get some meatballs. Except they’re not as good as I remember, and the salad is terrible, and walking the store circuit doesn’t relax me like it always did, and it’s bugging me that the people seem so much more like stereotypes of the “ugly American” than I remember but I can’t put my finger on it, I definitely see overweight dudes in cargo shorts and t-shirts every day.
So I steel myself up for the ride home only for some reason on going out I find my bike has a flat tire, which was maybe the result/cause of that fall earlier. I drag it over to Sports Authority, realize that even with the $15 charge to upgrade from 72-hour service having them fix it is cheaper than either buying a patch kit and pump or getting a cab home to my garage where I have one.
Had to wait for the bike repair guy to get back from lunch, talked with the tennis stringing guy about his growing up in farm country, we felt out some common ground on guns (he was mainly the gun guy in the store), he declared himself a “far-right-winger” who’d voted for no Democrats since Nixon and blamed the collapse of the American bike manufacturing industry on “Bill Clinton and his cronies, who came in after Reagan” for ending our long and noble tradition of defending the American way of life through protective tariffs by giving China most-favored-nation trading status (this was actually a legislative formalization of a presidential prerogative that had been exercised continuously since the Reagan administration, but hey) Held the manufacturing companies blameless since what could they do.
Rode home along Columbia. First really warm weekend, everyone was out on their porches, which makes you realize how monolithically white the neighborhood isn’t (Had a professor once who pointed out that people usually judge the ethnicity of a neighborhood on stores & restaurants, and even Little Italy in NY was at peak only 35-40% Italian by population).
Got home at 5, showered, prepared to collapse into bed, looked on Facebook, realized the party was in fact on the 4th. Headed over.
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Muscular Christianity is alive and well in our own town.
I was at a pinball tournament at the Belmont Inn, saw a guy complaining to a friend at a table about his marriage, which seems like a very traditional bar thing to do but I realize I’d never actually remembered seeing before.
The friend had that facial hair halfway between soul patch and goatee that I’d heard described as “the international symbol for ‘youth pastor’”, but that was always a secondhand experience to me so it was kind of a shock when his advice segued into a comparison to the awesome power and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. I guess youth pastors grow up with their youth and they’re “emergent church” pastors now all doing their church planting.
Not sure if the pastor was with Mars Hill but I wouldn’t be shocked - Mars Hill’s this big Seattle-based church - chain? franchise? I don’t know the terminology - that planted its first Portland branch 3 blocks from the bar.
I don’t really know the specifics of their theology - an atheist from a Catholic background (of the “Irish branch of mainstream Protestantism” type) their professed doctrine reads to me as generic Protestantism, though I’ve picked up enough to recognize that “substitutionary sacrifice”, say, is a specific thing, though I couldn’t tell you what it is or what it means for us. The rest of their website talks about doing everything for Jesus, but in a vague and nonspecific way, which is pretty much how that pastor sounded.
(interestingly, if you look around online, a lot of their critics from within enthusiastic Christianity complain of their elevating an extensive doctrine at the expense of Jesus-focus)
But their social praxis seems to be pure sexual complementarianism - men should be men, bold and strong and true, and Jesus (a carpenter and rebel, after all) should be understood as a model of masculinity, not a “Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ… a neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy.” Women should be women, gentle and caring and loyal. And together they should form families, each taking to their proper sphere.
I can’t find it on their website now, but I swear a month or two ago I saw, prominently linked from the first page, testimonials playing up the appeal of the church as a place to find worthy mates. And in both men and women’s testimonials, and more subtly, in the pictures of each testifyer, you could see the angle, a pitch to the educated urban 20-30s demographic that they can have both their of-the-moment playful hipster aesthetic AND the comfort of a well-worn way of life where all the questions have known answers.
Men - you want a cute, hip girl with indie rock glasses and hand-knit accessories AND a woman who will relentlessly support you and yield to your leadership? Women - you want a hot guy with full sleeve tattoos who plays guitar in a band but ISN’T a drifty flake who thinks of you as his girlfriend “for now”, as long as you offer more than the three girls on the back burner?
(And definitely men with women – in this complementarian understanding homosexuality is not only a sinful way of life - we’re all sinners after all - but perhaps more damningly an incompetent one)
And this is definitely how that pastor sounded - the man’s complaint seemed to be that his wife wanted more control in their relationship, but wasn’t in turn offering to bring anything more to the table, and the pastor’s advice seemed to come down to the fact that yes, this was a disordered situation, but one that had come about due to the man’s failure to exhibit strong leadership.
I dunno, maybe there is something to the idea that the twee indie aesthetic, cupcakes and yarn and '50s dresses is masking an unironic longing for a '50s way of life.
(And hell, glass house here, I’m developing an only half-joking taste for Norse paganism based largely on cosplay photos of beardy dudes working at anvils and girls with daggers and braids and mead horns standing around in nature.)
I wonder if those guys who go out dressed like pirates have their own religion. I saw a bunch of them hanging out in Director Park, like 2:30 on a Monday, maybe it was a prayer service.
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This is the first place I’ve ever been where I’ve wanted to reshape myself to fit it rather than the other way around, and I really do appreciate the way people get along, but
I’m still suburbanova professional class stock, loyalties attendant
I was in a bar once and overheard a ‘tender talk about how she and her boy made a baby, and this gay dude couple adopted it, all 4 of them co-workers, and all took 3 months off on family leave
And this is all unpaid leave, and it’s pretty much impossible to walk a dog in this town without running into 10 people looking to pick up bar shifts, and now that I look it up a single employer can insist couples go consecutively rather than concurrently
But jesus christ did my sympathies immediately go out to the owner/managers.
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So when I was noticeably more new to Portland I heard people saying of Mississippi Street “oh, that’s the hipster district”
And I was thinking “wait, there’s a non-hipster district?” (ok yes, but I never go east of 60th and only make it south of Powell or up to North for a few pinball bars).
So I went and I realized what they were getting at - it was a “New Brooklyn” theme park.
The condominiums, the halfway-there construction sites stalled by the downturn, older properties a great deal if you can actually finance the rehab.
The stores were so twee, so full of bicycle-commuting, stroller-pushing urban planners even by Portland standards, which holy shit.
The gay bankers and other new money with a “suave and restrained” (which is to say upmarketed) take on the lifestyle branding of 10 years ago, who are just sooooooo haughtily proud that THEIR 10 years ago was 2002.
The well-imagineered bars where you overhear the new generation of old money comparing their European vacations.
Oh shit it’s
NEOCOLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG
man I’m going to be proud of that for weeks.
Molly McAleer once told me I wasn’t a hipster, she had a really detailed and correct taxonomy and I was actually an indie kid. Which, yes. On the other hand, there used to be freaks and beatniks and jesus freaks and SDSers and new agers and all that but in the end they turned out to all be hippies, you know?
For some reason, local consultants seem particularly fond of using this teashop for client meetings. In my last few visits, I’ve overheard different people in sessions on
* applying to colleges
* reorganizing a nonprofit organization in response to a shift in funders’ priorities
* planning a woodcrafts-themed wedding
* psyching yourself up for a job hunt
* addressing jealousy issues in polyamorous relationships
* organizing a business selling breakfast bean mash to vegans on a low-carb diet
* turning your life around by unlocking the sexual and mental chakras
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