pith…

PORTLAND, OR…PLANTING ROOTS IN A MOSSY NEW STOMPING GROUND

By now most of you, whoever you are, must be thinking that I’m dead, burnt to a crisp in a car crash on a deserted highway or at least a quadriplegic from a cliff diving accident or something, but no, I’m at least still half alive in the Great Northwest where I now call Portland home. It has been five (5) months since the great escapist road-run began and my ability to document and make any real sense out of it all has been pitiful. There is no point drumming a laundry list of excuses out of my ass because, after all, they’re just excuses which are boring and worthless.

Portland, Oregon is a weird flocking ground for eccentric liberals from all over the country who love expensive organic food, strong beer and ride bikes when the sun is actually shining, which is something like a quarter of the year. As luck has it, summer has finally descended on the city like the heat of a hundred-foot tire fire. Hoards of desperately hip “young professionals” seem to drive the progressive city, and then run amok at the thousands of bars and restaurants and strip clubs. Needless to say, I’ve managed to slide unnoticed and successfully into life here like a raven into a flock of crows. The percentage of people who are actually born and raised in this city must be less than the number of underpaid players on the New York Yankees. I can’t even count the number of transplants from Wisconsin alone, which is scary since I thought I was getting away from the people of my own soil, but somewhat comforting at the same time. To get more strangely ironic, the bar I’m sloshing around behind five nights a week is owned by a guy from Madison. Pouring strong drinks in a long dark cabin of a tavern while people eat the coronary clogging Midwestern fair of fried cheese curds and fancy bar food and love every bite. It’s not the worst work though because I make fistfuls of cash and girls/women throw their phone numbers at me like they’re paper airplanes and I’m a substitute teacher.

Life’s rough ain’t it? The real aim here is to inspire a rash of atavistic jealousy within us all, a lust for enlivenment that breathes life back into a plagued and increasingly sedentary culture. Just wait for the barrage of disjointed and fiery SCREEDS that may or may not create any sense of rationality of the past five months on the over-trodden and bastardized symbol that is THE ROAD. I’m holing up in my lofted spacious writing lair, where I can step out on my balcony to have a smoke or take a leak while traffic whizzes by on a highway twenty yards away, and climb up on my roof and see Mt. Hood and St. Helens looming off in the distance with the blurry skyline of Portland in the mighty Willamette River. This is the smoke signal and next comes a barrage of my disjointed yet lucid recollections and sneering objectivism like a hail of flaming arrows.

Sincerely,
John Dick.

The End of June, 2008