Portland is an interesting city, full of pockets and blind spots and tunnel vision. For example, I live in an area that is made up of a great diversity of people, but the salient factor seems to be desperation. Smokey dive bars with lottery games and tinted windows occasionally give me a glimpse inside to see creased, gray faces staring right back at me. Run-down hotels like The Unicorn offer safe havens for junkies to be left alone by cops I never see. Thrift stores carry dingy clothes I wouldn’t spend $1 on, but for some reason I keep going back, hoping to find something valuable amongst the throw-aways. And then there’s the trendier inner-southeast section, peopled mostly by struggling 20-somethings, people who seemingly make up their life from the ways they spend their hard-earned money: hip cafes, bars, vintage clothing stores, bike shops, food co-ops. Or else it comes from doing things to make up a mental resume advertising their trendiness: diy projects completed, art galleries visited, cult movies seen. This demographic is still a bit of a mystery to me, although I assume (with a little chagrin) that we probably have a lot in common. Finally, at least for the east side, there’s North Portland, with Alberta Arts, the Mississippi district, and probably a number of other areas I don’t know yet. In my imagination, these areas are filled with people of all backgrounds, realistic people who know what really matters. People who have looked both desperation and hipsterdom in their faces and walked away to find their own meaning in life. Do such people really exist, I wonder? And can I really find them in this semi-fictional area of North Portland? Or is this too a place of clichés and superficiality?
The other possibility, perhaps a little scarier, is that these real people exist everywhere, camouflaged to fit in with their surroundings, requiring a few well-placed magic words to melt away their disguises and show me the beauty of humanity underneath. This is scarier because it means that it is up to me to make the most of my contact with people. That there is no perfect district that will give me the key to living the life that I want to live, but that I myself hold the key. Perhaps this is what fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast were really about…that people are only monsters as long as you see them that way, that everyone has blue blood running in their veins. Is this possible? And if so, do I have the strength and courage to seek that out in people? Or will I be happier to just keep relocating until I find a place to live amongst people who are “like me”? I’m not completely sure that at this point in my life I am stable enough to resist the influences of my environment: desperate environs tend to making me feel drawn, malnourished, exhausted. And being surrounded by hipsters will probably convince me pretty well to spend my time looking for things to enhance my coolness. So I’m going to imagine that North Portland is the fairytale land that I’m looking for and check it out some more. There’s no harm in testing hypotheses, right?
