Me & Moses is Tiaight

My roommate's alarm has just begun to ring, signaling the beginning of the long day ahead of us. Later this evening, he & I are headed off to Seattle, taking Kat home to Vashon Island. Brian gets done with school around 6, so there’s a chance we can catch the midnight-thirty ferry; if not we get to sit in a Shari’s for a few hours, suffering the silence of those tiring moments when it isn’t time to say goodbye yet but just close enough that that is all which is on anyone’s mind. On the way we will pass through Portland, the proverbial Mecca for many whom I know, a city which still causes me to shiver a little bit inside every time I’m there. Maybe I held Portland to too many standards as a naïve youth, as an angry, angst-driven pun-crocker, but at times it still feels that this city failed me. & as more & more friends go there, as more & more hip, tragic, literate & creative people deposit themselves in between its bridges, I further feel that Portland has simply become a catch-all. The Last Great City of the Northwest for all the elitists, all the scenesters, all the black wearing billy goats, hiding underneath their bridges & exacting a fine fee from those crossing over. I do love Portland, I spent a good deal of my youth on its streets, slinking around sheltered by the shadows of the old breweries, walking streets those wise enough had given up to early morning hours & fear of malice, learning its curves, where it was worn & tired, where it was just awakening. The crude realization is that Portland wasn’t what I dreamed it would be as a youth, & I’m fine with that, for christ’s sake nearly everything I put values upon as a youth was fallen short, myself included, why, I even took the soapbox I once used, broke it into kindling & stayed warm for a winter a few years back. I’m not idealistic about Portland anymore & that there is the problem. If I were I would have moved there years ago. Now it is just another city, not the last great one, & though I miss all the friends I have in Portland, I’m not as anxious as I once was to start a new life there.

I was a tad harsh above. “Failed me”, “black wearing billy goats”: these are rhetorical, hyperbolic terms & don’t quite explain the way I feel. It isn’t that theatrical nor is it that judging. To all my faded black t-shirt wearing friends, I apologize. I don’t relate y’all to baby eating, fee demanding, elitist kin of the bovine. & even if I did that’d just mean I highly respect you for your milk & the wonderful food stuffs we non-goats make out of it.