If you live in Portland, Oregon, you have been instructed to be weird.
KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD, as a slogan, is annoying on a few levels. One, the mantra was flat stolen from Austin, Texas. Not only did a local merchant commandeer the KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD phrase but trademarked it too, and commenced selling bumper stickers. Also, it seems to refer to what is now a sort of manufactured eccentricity. Yes, we have a naked bike ride every year. Yes, some dude plays flaming bagpipes in a Darth Vader mask on a unicycle. Yes, people knit sweaters for trees and street signs. It gets to be old hat. Are we the most-tattooed city in America? I do not know. The whole country is inked. If we wanted to be weird, we’d be flaunting our Original Skin.
Still, there are some things that characterize us, including a disdain of certain kinds of pretense and fashion, in favor of other kinds. Men’s facial hair is never to be clearcut. You are expected to roll down your gear-side pants leg if you’re going to the symphony. But it shouldn’t cost much to fit in. That’s a good thing, I contend.
That might even be a clue to whatever weirdness we do effect. It didn’t use to cost much to live here. If you were a young person you could roll in and do a rotation on friends’ sofas and live on three-dollar burritos and do pretty well for yourself. If you wanted to do something artistic, you could probably afford to. Get yourself layers of flannel, economize on soap, stand in line for a half-hour for a technicolor donut with bubble gum sprinkles, and you’re good to go.
You’re not going to have to adhere to normal urban standards of comportment or couture. Your fancy hairdo is just going to get wet anyway. People overcome by artistic tendencies or aspirations can come here and art-away, and It helps that no one is vetting the art. In fact, no one is paying much attention at all.
You could set up your card table on the sidewalk and sell your swirly orgasmic-goddess doodles to, eventually, your friends, and do quite well for yourself.
Problem is, now it does cost a lot to live here. And so many people have moved here to be weird that it’s a real struggle to find a new way to do it. A street tree with a cardigan on it now just looks as normal and disheveled as the residents camped under it.
Also weird? We don’t seem to have a lot of mass shootings, for a city our size. Less massive shootings, yes, plenty, more and more of them all the time. It’s getting downright loud out there. I was wondering why we haven’t had much in the way of genuine massacres. It would be nice if Portland had passed that ballot initiative requiring eighteen-year-old white males to be registered with the city and stay in the basement until they turn twenty-five, but the ACLU had a fit over that, and we’re ACLU people here.
Well, I have a theory about our poor showing in the mass-murder Olympics. I’ll tell you next time.
Hmmm… It seems to me that if a person moves to a city BECAUSE they feel they have PERMISSION to be weird, they are not really weird. They are wanna-bes. The TRULY weird would be perfectly happy being weird no matter where they are — even in middle-America. In fact, they may not even see themselves as weird; they are just being themselves. And knitting sweaters for trees seems like trying too hard.
It would be for me. It took me three months to knit a pussy hat.
I crocheted my pussy hat…
I just started knitting. I signed up for a local class. I seem to be making a scarf — so far — (which isn’t weird, because “a scarf” is the one thing, and apparently the only thing, anyone can make who just learned how to knit) — and my scarf, all 30 stitches wide (but mystifyingly sometimes 29 or 32) and nearly 14 glorious inches long — so far! — knitted while watching the feckless McCarthy be denied 14 or 15 times — is bewilderingly shaped like the state of California. Both sides. I like it.
Not sure “feckless” is the best term to describe Mr. Speaker. I’d say, given the scope of his concessions to the weirdest wing of the GOP, he’s plenty fecked.
I know! I got a kick out of it when he stated that this all shows that he never gives up. No, he doesn’t. But he DOES give in!
From Reuters:
The 57-year-old Californian showed tenacity in pushing through 15 rounds of voting and dismantling what had been a cadre of 20 right-wing hardline opponents, finding compromises that would pull most of them into his camp. He told reporters on Friday night that he would be a more effective leader because of the drawn-out process. “Because it took this long, now we’ve learned how to govern. So now we’ll be able to get the job done,” McCarthy said.
Okaaaaaaayyyyyyy… so the GOP has learned how to govern, in four days. And admitted they didn’t know how, before, apparently. On that, at least, we can probably all agree.
OMG. You guys have completely cracked me up.
A cliff hanger!
It’s not just McCarthy that’s fecked, it’s the whole country. I couldn’t decide whether to say ‘fecking country’ or just ‘country’. I fecking despair about the state of ya’lls union these daze. (Fer feck’s sake)
i once knitted the world’s ugliest orange scarf—-it soon also became the worlds lo————————ngest scarf. OMG. A giraffe with a sore throat could have wrapped it round and round and had some extra …Orange wasn’t even an important color for me….. not high school colors, not my fave,,,,,,go figure?
That can happen if you don’t learn how to stop. Which is a thing.
See Like Water for Chocolate
Not twenty-five. Twenty-eight, minimum. I speak from
experience.
Yours?
Loved this piece, Murr. Staged weirdness is no weirdness at all. When someone tells me they’re a non-conformist, I figure it’s the best indication that they’re not. If you have to SAY you’re a non-conformist, you’re trying too hard. You’re just doing the opposite of whatever you consider to be “normal”. That’s not non-conformity, it’s just, as my British colleagues used to say, “bloody-mindedness”. As an adult I look back and realize why I was considered weird growing up. But at the time, I was clueless. I was just being me! And I always thought other kids who were trying hard to be contrary were anything but weird. They were just acting out. I had a couple of childhood and adolescent friends who were a lot like me. I never thought of them as being weird either. I just considered them tolerable, where other kids weren’t. Weird isn’t something you DO. It’s just who you are.
So right! I knew a used car dealer who said (mostly about people with bumper stickers or message t-shirts that would read “sexy’ or “juicy”): “If ya have to say it, ya ain’t it.”
I was an only child, so I had no siblings to model myself after or be teased by,so when I went to school, I just was me. I cried easily. I wouldn’t make fun of others because I knew how it felt. I liked dressing up, and didn’t wear jeans or smoke in high school. It seemed to me that the “non-conformists” were the biggest conformers of all. It never even occurred to me to try to act like them, though. Thank goodness!
I don’t know if I’m weird or not. How can you know what it feels like to be someone else? On the other hand, Vicki sent me a T-shirt that says I AM A GODDAMNED DELIGHT and I’m stickin’ by it.
In my years absent, since ’80, I’ve seen references to the ‘keep Portland weird’ thing’. I never gave it much thought, my time here, ’69-’72, and ’76-’80 seemed odd enough, but not sure if they were ‘weird’. Cary and I enjoyed living in a nice apt, 1811 NW Couch, 140/month, thanks to my GI bill, and her being a social worker just a block from PSU. Our friends could certainly qualify as weird…Gary, who insisted that we were being watched by IRS people, and Cary’s odd friend, Tamara, who insisted we have crystals in our windows, but overall, pretty mild stuff.
Our landlord, Mr. Crawley, out in Boring, who wanted us to buy our rental house and large lot for 10K was certainly weird…he had some idea that we youngun’s were the answer to the problems of 1972…boy, that’s a weird thought.
And now, back to this year, Portland seems much the same, with the addition of violence, which seems to concern only the right wing nuts.
I expect this is my nesting place, fairly good health care, doc’s are way too young, but so is everyone.
I don’t know how weird any of that is, but i literally laughed out loud at 1) your landlord’s name: Mr. Crawley, and 2) that he came from Boring. It sounds like a modern Dickensian novel! 😂
Hayden S. Hawley, no idea how I remember that for over 50 years, but it does roll trippingly off the tongue. The location was strange, we were only about a mile or so from the west side of Sandy, and a half mile from the Sandy River, but a ‘Boring’ address….star route 1, a mailbox. It might have been indeed Dickensian, but it was the opposite of Scrooge, he wanted to give us ‘more’, we demurred.
It should be noted that around here we do occasionally see headlines like “Boring man sentenced to five years.”