Portland. Facial Hair capital of the world. A city composed entirely of the same cute 20s-40s neighborhood that I covet so. A cheap city whose housing prices do not reflect their Left Coast geography as they should. A city full of fuzzy granola fags with tattoos. Portland.
I met up with Amy for Bread and Ink, then we drove up to Multnomah Falls to take in some scenery - something which doesn’t usually do much for me, but which was necessary if only for the vast quantity possessed by Portland.
I spent a lot more time driving around Portland’s neighborhoods and exploring the places people actually lived than last time, when most of my time was spent downtown and in the far south of the area. I was very happy with what I saw, and my mind even ventured to feel a bit more attached to Portland than to Seattle.
Like most trips I take, I tend to evaluate a place I visit with the mentality of whether I would like to live there or not. I think I really need to get over this. The grass is always greener and I always find myself sad that I “can’t” live there.
There is no perfect place. Some places might have a higher concentration of things one likes, but no place is ideal and I’ll probably never find a city that meets my every aesthetic, economic and practical desire. I really need to remind myself of this more often, but especially when I visit the Northwest.
David and I have coveted a relocation to the Northwest for years, but the practical applications of such a desire just don’t work at this point in our lives. As Sister Betty once said, no place is sparkly-shiny. Every place is just someplace else. I think few of us actually spend years travelling, find our favorite city, and settle there because it’s our favorite city. Most of us settle somewhere that is a practical compromise between various other desires in our lives. I really need to travel and visit places and enjoy my time as a traveler and visitor, and stop being such a “surveyor”.
And if I’m incapable of achieving this sort of detachment, might the only answer to be for me to stop travelling entirely? Alas, I never travelled as a child, and only started seeing bits of the world outside Central California when I was in my mid-20s. This may have exacerbated the problem, since it meant I was an adult and had to make informed and responsible choices without having any experience about what was ‘out there’.
In the end, this whole post is mostly rationalizations and excuses for this particular breed of psychologically self-destructive behaviour in which I all-too-often engage. It’s an easy way to shrug it off for now as a developmental problem, and not have to analyze it further at this time.