It’s being at a bar with 70s-born Oregonians and hearing them laughing comparing the teachers their friends were fucking in high school. Hearing a table of teachers at another bar laughing about how it’s always the gym and music teachers getting caught.

It’s reading, in the Gen X alt-weekly when I first came to Portland, about how mayor/governor Neil Goldschmidt had been fucking one of his employees’ teenage daughters in the 70s and “Neil and the babysitter” was an amusing open secret among the city elite. And then about how then-mayor Sam Adams fucking his (male) high school intern might get the boobs worked up but the real scandal was how his budgeting overemphasized capital outlays instead of operating costs.

It’s thinking about the profusion of strip clubs Portland is so proud of and how before the ‘90s takeoff of porn chic, sex workers were regularly attributed to being abused by their dads

(and kind of having a sense of hypersexuality and how that would work, and picking up how some aspects of the locals’ culture made most sense if there had been more hypersexual kids in the social economy growing up)

and honestly, how “oh and there’s a big downtown scene of angry runaway street kids” was taken for granted and anyone living east enough in “Felony Flats” is assumed to be a methhead and Portland’s sense of the default citizen was basically as a functioning alcoholic