An old Portlander vs. New Portland
The cloud of exhaustion fills my head like molten slag. Get moving, get caffeinated, get out the door into the growing claustrophobia of a growing city, expanding affluence which grinds people and places down with an unrelenting power like the ocean. Ten years ago I had a shit call center job and a dull sickly green and white apartment with all the amenities an on-the-go bachelor could ask for in 1974. Somehow I have managed to downgrade my living situation to renting a room in a rundown duplex sharing two bathrooms and a kitchen with four other burnouts, refugees of a bygone era in a forgettable port town where a slacker could ruminate on big dreams.
The world moves on and my biggest challenge as of now revolves around my relationship with the owner of the property I currently rent. He’s a bulbous resentful toad with some form of christian fundamentalist personality disorder that weighs down every fold of his overgrown body with existential despair like he’s trying to play an imaginary game of office politics with the heavenly host and losing a little bit of his mind to them every day.
Perhaps this is only the bias of my own atheism painting him into this bleak corner. However, other tenants have confirmed the eerie glow that paints his droopy lidded eyes and jowls with contempt for the world and himself. There is something metaphysically wrong with this man. However, we cannot get too far lost in the arm chair analysis of a petty property speculator.
On exiting my room I quickly acknowledge my roommates -- the kindly sad wino and the proto-intellectual meth-head -- with half-hearted greetings. I must keep moving. Too much time spent in the company of such hopeless people tends to have a carcinogenic effect.
I race out to the corner to catch a bus traveling across town for a jam session with an old high school friend. North Lombard seethes with a reckless energy that the white collar transplant community has yet to tame. I keep my head down, absently scanning the sidewalk for broken needles, keeping the bumbling transient just down the block in view, and slipping passed the group of black teens too engaged in high octane banter to notice me.
I mentally pause and take a moment to consider the term black and its place in the current zietgiest, imagining the scorn of a thousand well dressed white commuters passing in sleek efficient electric vehicles erasing this simple descriptive term from common usage while remorselessly erasing communities of color they claim to cherish and respect – homo economicus uber alles is the true law of the land after all. There is also a deeply heinous set of comparisons that could be explored regarding the mentality behind the moral posturing of the sexually oppressed and duly sexually obsessed Christian and the profound hipocracy of neo-liberal economic beneficiaries with hearts open, bleeding profusely for the world to see. The classical bloody self flagellation is a beautifully orchestrated distraction, filled with wild eyed despair and the gnashing of teeth which deflects attention from hard lined Calvinist calculations of self interest in action.
Really Ms. SaveTheWorld are you going to set up a trust fund to help the Jackson family down the street keep up with the ever increasing cost of living in a neighborhood they’ve lived in for over fourty years? NO?! Shut your fucking mouth and go home to enjoy a big glass of new age fair trade tea in your cute color coordinated yuppie home with your cute color coordinated yuppie neighbors.
Unfortunately I do not have the stomach nor the energy to pursue this line of thinking any further, at least not tonight...
***
As the bus rumbles along side streets on its meandering journey south I wonder at the creative destruction that marks every neighborhood with the trite aesthetics of privileged sophisticates. Two equal and opposite trends recur in the glossy new high rise apartments and storefronts which replicate each theme in tandem like the transposition was constructed by a clinically depressed city planning AI.
Element A is the new old aesthetic. It is a foolish attempt to impart a gritty working class feeling into a building that has clearly been renovated and/or re-purposed in the last year or two. The ceiling is removed leaving load baring beams and HVAC lines to twist and turn above patrons and employees. Fixtures are made of cast iron, and all the furniture is clear finished pine, cedar, or oak. It’s like a high school wood shop, but they’ve replace the motley community of gawky teens misusing dangerous table saws and lathes with well dressed professionals chattering aimlessly about travel, office drama, IKEA, shitty helicopter-parenting strategies for their spoiled shit factory offspring who will grow up to repeat the cycle in a sort of Zoloft overdose Kafka-esque waking nightmare until it all collapses into a new dark age.
Element B is the Apple Uber Alles aesthetic. This is where digital efficiency teaches you the wonders of perfectly rational socialist austerity. Take the basic shapes of a toaster oven, mix and match sheets of grey and glass in minimalist, rectangle on top of rectangle obsession, and bam you’ve got a new yuppie shit-box. Even the signage in the retail units that line the first floor of each building is uninspired. It looks like intern Johnny got a new assignment using his three months of Adobe desktop graphic design training to use generic flat colors and basic shapes to make you a half ass logo for your generic milk-toast housewife's curiosity shop. For all the talk of male dominance and the patriarchy in this town I’m always surprised that gentrification brings in clothes, tea/coffee, books, craft and knick-knack shops.
While enthusiastic new Portland residents would love to shout this machine kills fascists, the reality of the situation confronts us with the hard cold facts: this machine kills character, humor and the type of authenticity that one can only settle into with the passage of time...