Had a few worst-yet-in-Portland bad service industry encounters lately, some were them exercising comprehensible prerogative in ways I’m not used to in Portland, Where Everyone’s Aggressively Reasonable but some of them were just gratuitously hostile reflecting a bafflingly confrontational understanding of the employee-customer relationship

I mean I guess that’s what a labor shortage and thus seller’s market looks like for one, also I’m realizing the background context, that the timber industry and thus rural Oregon emptied out in the 80s and a lot of the more “town” types relocated to Portland

And over the time in between the real git-‘r-done types left for pipeline work in Alaska, or drilling in the Marcellus, or the military, which they knew was just more of the same fixing/driving/operating dangerous heavy machinery outdoors

And so you were left with basically people who were fine in the slimmed-down city, people that were too fucked up to escape but were basically propped up in a context of low rent, people who actively wanted to live in Portland, and all their kids

So your 45yo lifetime bartender in 2011 was someone who had grown up immersed in a rural working-man’s culture that fell apart in high school but it was all good, she owned a tiny house in North and you showing up just put more money in her pocket. A lot of newer businesses I realized were local-boy-made-good chasing a come-up in the 2000s but the Portlandia era rescuing them after a crash.

Like, when I got here I lived with two high school dropout kitchen monkeys from fucked up childhood situations, and everyone in that world had it together enough to not fall below the level of kitchen worker, which apparently it’s possible to do, but not enough to climb on to something else but that meant you were okay, your life and scene were okay

And now I definitely feel that divide across the counter, between service workers and anyone so not- as to frivolously interact with businesses to spend my disposable cash on things I like, and like, okay in a sense we are kinda rivals then. I don’t think any of those kitchen guys still live inside city limits, sure not in that black-turned-artsy-hipster neighborhood