OK, FREAKING OUT AGAIN.

I was watching some of the first episodes of Portlandia the other day. I am after all in Portland. I kind of didn't get it at first, thinking it was too cartoon like. Then I realized it was emphasizing exactly the Portland signature characteristics that I myself would point out. For instance, are the people here really ugly or do they just present themselves in the worst possible clothes and hair cuts and heavy metal mixed with pink fluff? But then I recall that I haven't been to London or Berlin or any remotely hip places for a long while.

Portland and Ashland are the only places I have ever been where clerks and other customers will approach you in the market and tell you to put that bread back, "Don't buy it!" because it has wheat gluten in it. I get lectures all the time. People in stores don't want to sell you things they don't like. They don't want to sell you things they really like. Go figure..

Then we must take into account the pathological lack of humor about anything and everything. I get lectures on tolerance from lesbian vegans. I should support gay marriage (I do!) and should never carry a leather pocketbook. (I do!)  I get confused. I support Waldorf Education. (Yes!) but I also support free public education. (Yes!) But I dislike the Pledge of Allegiance and I don't like how   US History is portrayed in public education. How really can you talk about post slavery US without using the word "Apartheid"? All these issues and a million more are shoved in your face as daily fare in Portland. God forbid you should laugh at an issue or even mock yourself for straddling the fence on such an important issue as free dog health insurance. You see the problem?

Truth be told I am comfortable in this milieu. But I was extremely uncomfortable in another Portland scene the other day. My ride share (How else do you travel to Portland?) told me I might get a good price on a new computer at COSTCO. So Heather (dear family friend and house share with my daughter- temporarily) and A. and I went to COSTCO. I saw in a moment that there were no computers that interested me, but then they were off to find real bargains in goat cheese and organic olive oil. It was too hot in the car, even with the air conditioning on. I went and sat at the outside fast food court with a couple of hundred people. The special of the day was a foot long hot dog with a quart of soda for $1.50. A couple of hundred extremely fat people were enjoying the treat. Once again the fat was not what got to me. What got to me were the sad faces. SAD SAD SAD. And the pained walks. And the number of walkers being used by relatively young people.

It was like a vision of hell. Later that day I was buying cigarettes at another low rent store and the man who was selling them to me flipped my dollars like a dealer in Reno. Which he had been. He said he couldn't work there because it was too immoral taking the $ all day and all night of the addicts, and watching them kill themselves slowly. He didn't seem to get the irony of selling me cigarettes and others quarts of soda. Complicated town, this Portland.