PORTLAND!

What city is more smug than ours?

If you said Seattle as recently as 3-to-4 years ago, you’d still be right.

But these days, Portland is King of the Hill as far as smug­ness goes. Granted, I’ve never been to, say, Brooklyn — and I’m sure it’s smug there too — but it can’t pos­si­bly be as bad as it is here. In New York, you still have a solid bedrock of tough, hard-working peo­ple who have lived through dis­ap­point­ment, frus­tra­tion and pain and emerged with greater strength of character.

Not so here!

We are beset by con­de­scend­ing, priv­i­leged twerps.

Just look at the fol­low­ing photo, for Chrissakes, snapped secretly by a friend at the air­port the other day. It’s two garden-variety Portlanders. For all I know, they might be won­der­ful peo­ple. Salt of the fuck­ing earth.

But nearly EVERYONE in town looks just like them. Ironic clothing…ironic eye-ware…the same old tire­some song.

To be clear, I have no prob­lem with anyone’s per­sonal aes­thet­ics. I fre­quently see Portland idiots dressed up as pirates, and though I don’t think of them in pos­i­tive terms, I spend no men­tal cur­rency on their place in this world. Honestly, smug Portlanders — I couldn’t care less if your wardrobe per­son­i­fies indie-rock cliché. When it’s all said and done, you’re just another jerk I’ll go out of my way to ignore.

Here’s the rub though: these wiry, unfruit­ful clods don’t sim­ply ignore oth­ers. NO! They sneer and scoff at any­one who doesn’t fit their DIY Cool Person Template.

It has steadily got­ten worse in the 10 years I’ve lived here. It’s one effed-up milieu of shit.

More than ever, the city is teem­ing with uno­rig­i­nal, ema­ci­ated oafs who wear tight brown pants and sing loudly to them­selves at the bus stop.

Such indi­vid­u­als!

(No, I’m not going to hunt down data to sup­port my asser­tions, but I know there are data out there just wait­ing to be culled for those exact purposes.)

Frustrating stuff.

I try hard to avoid the cliché of mis­an­thropy. Misanthropy is an easy emo­tion. But the oppres­sive­ness of the cool Portland alpha cul­ture has reached an intol­er­a­ble apex. I can’t count the num­ber of times I’ve looked up from read­ing my book on the bus and some skate­boarder fuck­wad was glar­ing (or smirk­ing) at me because my dress shirt and slacks didn’t ooze awesome-fucking-street-cred.

These days, the fore­cast con­sis­tently calls for a tor­rent of fist-showers…on the faces of Portland “creatives!”

O! I wish to pum­mel these creatures!

If there was but one day a year when I could rain blows upon their smug faces w/o fear of legal reproach!

O!

What happy times those would be, friend!

So there you have it — another fatu­ous dia­tribe, and I’ve been singing the same song since 2000. A ter­ri­ble earth­quake on Belmont would go a long ways toward mit­i­gat­ing PDX’s alpha culture.

Nature? I’m pag­ing you.

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