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www.kevacho.com
©2002-2024
Kevin Michael Vance
Writer - Portland, Oregon
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March 14, 2011
This city --
There is something seriously wrong with this city. I mean, really -- there is an attitude of arrogance that siphons through the air above Portland like a sick miasma. Do the majority of Porlanders understand that the brilliant television show "Portlandia" is an open condemnation of their privileged, pretentious, bullshit lives? I don't think so. I think the majority of "Hipster-doofusi'" watch "Portlandia" and say, "dude, Portland's cool". How sad.
This is the only city where drivers regularly go 15 to 20 miles BELOW the speed limit. Portland is the only place where bicyclists think they have more rights than cars, and do, I believe; think that somehow, someway they are going to win an argument against a 2,000-pound vehicle. The concept of a four-way-stop, let alone the rules governing said concept, are lost within the addled brains of most drivers. Portland is the only place where someone cuts me off, and then slows down; the only place I've ever been "flipped off" by a bicyclist when I clearly had the right of way; the only place where pedestrians would rather walk in the middle of the road, than the designated sidewalk; it is the only place I know of where mediocrity, passive-aggressive behavior, and some twisted, misguided sense of entitlement are trumpeted as if they were virtues. I went into a pharmacy today to get my prescription refilled. The pharmacist asked, "Can I help you?" I replied, "I'm picking up a prescription." She then replied, "Okay", looking at me expectantly. I looked at her. She repeated, "Okay." I said nothing, considering that the word okay means she either heard me or is telling me how she felt. Finally, the mentally stunted wench actually made the monumental effort of attempting to communicate with me; begrudgingly I might ad, and said, "What's your last name?" I almost said something to her, but I was tired, my girlfriend had kept me up all night and my chronic cough was killing me. Nevertheless, this is what I'm talking about. "Portlandia" has it right, more so than many Portlanders realize, or would like to admit. Never has a place felt so mutely negative, so abominably pathetic, wallowing in a pseudo sense of pride and purpose that is so inherently selfish it reeks of self-importance. Made doubly worse by the Elmer Fudd fashionistas strutting about in their flannel and hunter orange, the dubiously mature "trust-farian" neo-hippies with their shoe-string headbands, tie-dye, and overwhelming body odor dancing through the aisles of grocery stores as if they were three, to the "trailer-trash", truck stop, hipsters proclaiming wisdom, but in actuality, more painfully, and much more evidently, ignorant than the rest of us. The only place that would print bumper stickers stating, "Keep Portland Weird", is a place that is inherently, and to its core, NOT weird. To be brutally honest, I am so fuckin' done with this town, if it weren't for my family, and the tragedy we have endured, I would most assuredly be gone. Portland is a village that wishes it was a city. There are good people here, talented people, but they are overrun by the massive hordes of wanna-be's and posers. I couldn't have said it better than an episode of "Portlandia". "Shell art's over!" exclaimed Fred Armisen's character. What he was saying, if you happened to be really listening, was that Portland is over.
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