kontextmaschine:

The bar that was showing The Good Guys (2016) last time I was in is showing Freeway (1996), different bartender I guess they’ve just cultivated a neo-noir sensibility for movie night.

Which knowing this bar (it’s where I captained a Sunday league pinball team for several years!) is a big change, they’re updating to keep up with the neighborhood and clientele by investing in staff, which is wise

A character is “the I-5 Killer”, and I bet the other people in the bar don’t realize that the really serial-killer part of I-5 in the 80s-90s was the segment between Portland and Seattle.

Local burger chain that’s like, the local burger chain (before the burger-and-beer-to-go one Hooters bought out!)

[“Hooters” is an operation specializing in taking food service concepts to scale, that’s just their recognizable success]

with a sticker on their drive-thru window awkwardly explaining how their local supplier puts trace amounts of sesame seed in the buns now

In the last two weeks talked to three neighbors who were here before me and even one who showed up after who seemed earnestly surprised that the neighborhood was getting nice and young people were showing up, making me realize it was not in fact universal knowledge that this would happen a decade after I bought Karafuto

What does this even mean?

Slingshot Lounge

SE Foster Road

Portland, OR

Portland’s new charter has the city newly divided into 4 precincts electing 3 councilors each (no longer holding administrative portfolios). There’s three plans thatre pretty similar, they have

• everything east of 82nd
• North and inner northeast
• Inner southeast
• West-of-the-river plus some portion of the east side

This last one is where the plans really vary, the included area is either

1. Sellwood, which kinda relates better to downtown as a streetcar suburb than the rest of the eastside where you have to get past a railroad moat, through an industrial area, and then you’re still kinda nowhere
2. Lloyd Center, where they first thought the freeway crossing would make for a new downtown in the ‘60s, but still serves as a beachhead of inner city life with new towers and a baseball stadium potentially replacing the mall
3. A few blocks in all along the bank of the Willamette, the areas once relating to a working waterfront which in either industrial use or redevelopment will consist of a distinct zone

kontextmaschine:

This bar’s getting.… more busy after 11. I haven’t seen that for years, that’s the sign of a young adult clientele with social circles that include food service workers. That’s a very good sign.

we are so back.

This bar’s getting.… more busy after 11. I haven’t seen that for years, that’s the sign of a young adult clientele with social circles that include food service workers. That’s a very good sign.

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.

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.

Sure enough, with the anxiety at normal I have an assessment of neighborhood future hitting between the golden glory I do at zero anxiety and the miserable outcomes with the anxiety disorder, that the neighborhood continues to develop but none of it is particularly for me and when I examine that – “Why are you scoffing at this restaurant for 35-year-old yuppies? You’re 45 and rich. What do you want? What do you want?” dont really have a sense of what would be, at least I have a house I can walk to a few places to eat from that’s appreciated well – in a way swamped by everything else I inherit – but honestly if that’s my criteria I should maybe go somewhere with taller buildings

Actually you know what given this crowd maybe that should be my standard offer: hit me up when you’re passing through town and we’ll go to the CIA airfield Air & Space Museum and see the Spruce Goose, a Blackbird, and a Titan II!

If it’s summer and you don’t have to get back on the road that day we can go to the attached waterpark!

Foster-Powell bars no longer underwhelming on weekends as all the cool kids go to bars further in, before too long people’ll be coming here.

One interesting thing around Portland these days is no form of personal motorized transport below the Vespa level – this includes underbones, 2-stroke motorcycles, dirt bikes, mini bikes, pedal bikes, rental scooters, e-bikes, and I suppose Segways – has established a norm around not using them drunk.

Wait, no, I bet those guys who go down the street standing with like one wheel between their feet do, they at least wear helmets.

Bartender tonight I’ve seen around since I first came to Portland, and on the one hand genuine honor and deference to him but on the other like, you’ve been a sempai the whole time but I’m 40 now and I’m here cause it’s the bar within walking distance of my house with the best burgers, what’s your excuse?

Well, the sting of all these neo-hipsters reviving all the things from my young adulthood I liked not registering me as a peer is softened by the way that after the personality change charisma boost they seem to register me not as a sad aging guy who shouldn’t still be at the bar but as a tribal elder (and I suspect I’m eligible for the girls to register as “daddy” now)

Like I feel like I should pivot this into some sort of “it gets better” takeaway message but no, I can’t realistically promise this to anyone else, this is ridiculous.

Summer already but it feels like spring only went past mid-April for like two days there and then gave up and stayed

headspace-hotel:

xylophonetangerine:

Stalin’s USSR = most woke nation to ever exist. You heard it here first, folks.

Imagine, for a moment, trying to figure out what the fuck is being measured on a scale where the USSR is a 10 and Portland, Oregon is an 8 without the excruciating knowledge of the hyperspecific neuroses of fascists over the past decade

Slavic evangelicism, surely

One thing about Portland streets being so full of independent small businesses is when a situation shifts and a long-established business suddenly meets headwinds it is far more likely to burn down than an outpost of a faceless national chain :(

Dude I am the youngest patron in this brunch restaurant by a good 20 years

Lot of parts around this neighborhood look like parts of my hometown, and I’d gotten used to that, but the other day found a part that looked like I remembered from my time in LA, and that threw me.

(It had been built around the same time, and the house architecture, cinderblock store architecture, early mass-automotive collector streets and the earthmoving capacities for what steepness of slope you could go straight up were all the same)