kontextmaschine:

Well, even as bad as it got yesterday with anxiety attacks inflicting, ah, let’s say psychic damage, the basic mood effects were still normal, not disordered anxiety, just VERY.

And so my mind’s turning to Portland, with my more balanced projective/evaluative sense. And what if it continues developing as a great city to live but just never particularly realizes the promise of the early 2010s.

Like, when I was first here it felt like most everyone in a bar was a potential friend and/or lover. Among the new crowd, who’s not suburban normie as I was fearing but still not really “keeping it weird”, there’s some promise if you go looking but like you have to look for them.

It really seems that the Portland I came to was filled with the quality people from other cities who looked around, saw that was no place for a quality life, and all came here for a personality-enriched environment.

Well, that and Oregonians who came through the 1980s collapse of the timber industry and much of the traditional… well, not “redneck”, but a PNW-equivalent small town and rural white outdoorsy good-time laboring class. And not just that group entire but a selection of the most “urbany” among that – the ones who left their collapsing hometowns in the woods for Portland and often food service, not the ones who left for other outdoors manual and vehicular work in oil fields or the service.

And they are not in fact making more people with memories of 1988, and even a purely equivalent “looking to get out of town as a 20-year-old prep cook”, economically I’m not sure that Portland would make sense as a destination even if it and his hometown elect the same governor.

Like Portland was like “the city” that kids from the country all over the northwest who were not suited to rural isolation would leave their hometowns for –

not just from Oregon and Washington itself, but the Mormon desert and the forested terrain of western Montana and Idaho, even Alaska, the logging industry collapsing just as the pipelines were being built means there’s actually a lot of AK-OR connections, you actually see a solid Hawaiian population, with their state outline, or turtle, or “808” window decals.

(Maybe the Dakotas even but you don’t notice even a high rate of them coming because barely anyone is from there to start with)

And it was funny how that worked, like they’d show up with more modern musical taste already but it would be like “dude you are 23 and married”, but they enriched the place in a way I’m not sure even (interesting!) tech types coming to make it Seattle2/SF3 would.