In a word, the people. By the time I left, I discovered that the best way in the world to freak out a Portlander was to hold the door open for one, because they're simply not used to random acts of courtesy. The city itself looks like Gary, Indiana with trees, but I described the population as "resembling a horrible cloning experiment involving the main characters from the Britcom The Young Ones, only with far too many Ricks and Mikes and nowhere near enough Vyvians. All of the Neils are working for Powell's Books and the music stores, and Mr. Balowskis fill the city council." I got tired of bicyclists riding on the sidewalk and mowing down pedestrians like Cossacks on a mission, pedestrians who'd jaywalk out in front of traffic and glare at motorists with this "How dare you?" expression, MBAs who'd kick out their apartment windows during big parties and then sweep the broken glass out into the street from the fourth floor when pedestrians walked on by. I got tired of the Portland Coma (where nobody can be bothered to get off their asses to do that film/magazine/Web project they've been talking about until someone else does most of the work, and then stab that person in the back and take the credit. I got tired of crappy daily newspapers, crappier weekly newspapers, and a neverending collection of goofballs who demanded the rights and privileges of real journalists because they put out a zine some time in 1989. I got tired of bicyclists throwing tantrums in the middle of the road because they didn't get the respect they thought they deserved, motorists who were simply compelled to tailgate under any and all weather conditions, and cops that couldn't be bothered to come out for burglaries and domestic disturbances unless you said the magic words "gang-related activities" (which was Portlandspeak for "at least one person under the age of 30 who displays slightly more melanin than Edgar Winter") but who could take a month to seine the Willamette looking for an imaginary caiman. (With the last, the original idea was that someone claimed to have seen a caiman, and I never got an answer as to why they said "caiman" and not "alligator", along the riverbank, so the search went on for two weeks to find this critter before it attacked a child or dog. Then, as the November chill started in, and the police showed TV reporters "caiman tracks" on sandbars that were obviously goose tracks, suddenly the caiman had to be found because the river was getting too cold and they had to rescue the caiman before it died.)
Most of all, I got desperately sick and tired of the defensiveness of Portlanders when they'd ask "So what do you think of our city?" and you'd tell them the truth. For me, the sign of a great city is one where you bring up obvious flaws and the locals go "You know, you're right, and you forgot this and this and this, but we're working on it." You don't know how proud I am to live in Dallas these days, where now you can criticize aspects of the city that need to be criticized with nobody other than the SMU brats throwing tantrums about how "You're WRONG!" In Portland, though, far too many of the "Keep Portland Pretentious" crowd willingly wear colon-colored glasses the whole time: you bring up any of these issues online, and you're guaranteed to have at least one Portlander pitching a fit about how "I've lived here ALL MY LIFE, and I've NEVER heard any of these issues!" I guess it's that Portland drove off anyone who didn't hear the siren song, because I've run into more enough fellow escapees that not only commiscerated with me, but related horror stories that made me shudder.
To put it another way, Portland was so foul that even with the cloudy skies and the local non-human wildlife, I caught the film The Whole Wide World nine months after I moved there and found myself insanely homesick for wild sunflowers and the buzz of cicadas. That was understandable, but a viewing of the neo-Nazis and giant bugs in Starship Troopers made me homesick for Houston. Even Houston locals don't get homesick for Houston. If I'd found myself getting homesick for Lewisville, Texas after seeing Deliverance, I would have put a bullet in my hole right then and there.
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Date: 2008-06-13 09:40 pm (UTC)Most of all, I got desperately sick and tired of the defensiveness of Portlanders when they'd ask "So what do you think of our city?" and you'd tell them the truth. For me, the sign of a great city is one where you bring up obvious flaws and the locals go "You know, you're right, and you forgot this and this and this, but we're working on it." You don't know how proud I am to live in Dallas these days, where now you can criticize aspects of the city that need to be criticized with nobody other than the SMU brats throwing tantrums about how "You're WRONG!" In Portland, though, far too many of the "Keep Portland Pretentious" crowd willingly wear colon-colored glasses the whole time: you bring up any of these issues online, and you're guaranteed to have at least one Portlander pitching a fit about how "I've lived here ALL MY LIFE, and I've NEVER heard any of these issues!" I guess it's that Portland drove off anyone who didn't hear the siren song, because I've run into more enough fellow escapees that not only commiscerated with me, but related horror stories that made me shudder.
To put it another way, Portland was so foul that even with the cloudy skies and the local non-human wildlife, I caught the film The Whole Wide World nine months after I moved there and found myself insanely homesick for wild sunflowers and the buzz of cicadas. That was understandable, but a viewing of the neo-Nazis and giant bugs in Starship Troopers made me homesick for Houston. Even Houston locals don't get homesick for Houston. If I'd found myself getting homesick for Lewisville, Texas after seeing Deliverance, I would have put a bullet in my hole right then and there.