young man roams the badlands
for some reason I never bothered to post this when I arrived home...
Seattle was dreary but amusing, Portland was fantastic, but it was time to come home. Despite my tendency to procrastinate, I guess I have a pretty low tolerance for absolute leisure. After a point, I genuinely start to feel increasingly empty if I'm not making something, writing something or otherwise scratching through a line item from my ever-lengthening to-do list. Portland was a perfect place for a sabatacle. After my second day there, I'd already realized that as beautiful as the place was, as temperate the climate felt and as friendly the people seemed to be, I was not ready to make this place my home. I quickly gave up the semi-futile occular wanderings across the classifieds for jobs and apartments and set myself to solitary, meditative walks through parks and playgrounds, in forests and fields, and on streets and sidewalks. I hiked along the winding trails of forest park and mauraded through the dirty midnight streets of Old Town. I climbed to the top of Mt. Tabor and considered a tour through the Shanghai Tunnels, the remains of a former incarnation of Portland burried beneath the city, but was thwarted on several occaisions. I sat down in Powell's on the fourth day of my trip and read the entirety of Chuck Palahniuk's Fugitives & Refugees and sat in the corner of the literature section, copying notes with a sharpie onto the stack of free postcards I'd picked up. I could not find the Mannequin Museum. I could not locate the underground swimming pool. The burlesque house was nowhere to be found. And I missed the zoo bomb - wrecklessly coasting down the big hill at Washington Park on childrens' bicycles while drunk and full of pizza. Chuck's Portland turned out to be almost as hard to find as tunnels supposedly underneath it.
I did make some friends though not any actually from Portland. I gave up on trying to go out at night to save money (another cost-saving measure akin to eating nothing but trail mix for two weeks) and instead found myself retiring to the porch of the hostel each evening at dusk to smoke and chat with other wanderers.
Over all, my trip was a refreshing sojourn, a fine sabatacle and little else in terms of any of my relocation plans. That seemed to be the concensus among the quorum of rolling stones I kept council with each night: It's an amazing city, an intense urban wildwood where I certainly wouldn't mind settling, but there are too many obstacles to my doing so right now...
