A fairly okay fellow.

July 12, 2011

zentrope:

Jury duty lunch, 4th St, Portland. (Taken with instagram)

I’ve been surprised to find that I can love a city. I should clarify: take “love” in the most passionate way possible; not as a slightly stronger form of “like”, meaning to enjoy very much. It has nearly been a year since we left, Sharon and I, and it is nearly a year until we can return. I feel, each time I see even a hint of home, a pain in my chest, a deep sadness of loss. In my dreams I’m still there, just as my parents have not been divorced for half my life and all my great-grandparents not dead for a quarter. In my dreams I can’t sleep and I go for a walk toward the river, turning off at the Park Blocks down to PSU, left down to 4th and back again to Everett: it’s misting and the water on the bricks shines with the street lights, suffusing the city with a hint of unreality, of utopia made of coffee and art and science. When I wake in the morning after such dreams I feel for a small time that I must never have left home; I believe myself still to be at 21st and Everett on the second floor, grand old windows facing a fresh courtyard. Instead, as far as my eye can see, parking lots dotted by crumbling buildings: a hellscape.

I am in love with a city. It was always my ambition as a child to move on to better things: away from Bertrand, then Charleston, then Maryville, then Kansas City and Chicago, finally; until Portland. Now in Rochester I desire to go home, to stay and grow old and familiar. To catalog the trees on walks with my dogs as my father does in his woods, but donate the data to the city at large, rather than locking it away in a state database. I should like to reproduce someday, tiny human with an indeterminate accent, as unaccustomed to car travel as it was familiar to me—as knowing of Powell’s as I was of the Sikeston McDonald’s PlayPlace. To see leisure as a necessary and welcome aspect of life, rather than an evil to be eradicated through peer pressure, anti-depressants and stale caffeine solutions.

It is a place I would not mind to die, though, being currently of sound mind and body I should hate to do so. To love is very much to move beyond the fears of influence and dependence. To say, then, that I love Portland is simply to become one with a place, to allow the fluid culture of a place to make you one of it’s own and, likewise, to throw your own contribution, however slight, into that same great mixture.

Jury duty lunch, 4th St, Portland. (Taken with instagram)

I’ve been surprised to find that I can love a city. I should clarify: take “love” in the most passionate way possible; not as a slightly stronger form of “like”, meaning to enjoy very much. It has nearly been a year since we left, Sharon and I, and it is nearly a year until we can return. I feel, each time I see even a hint of home, a pain in my chest, a deep sadness of loss. In my dreams I’m still there, just as my parents have not been divorced for half my life and all my great-grandparents not dead for a quarter. In my dreams I can’t sleep and I go for a walk toward the river, turning off at the Park Blocks down to PSU, left down to 4th and back again to Everett: it’s misting and the water on the bricks shines with the street lights, suffusing the city with a hint of unreality, of utopia made of coffee and art and science. When I wake in the morning after such dreams I feel for a small time that I must never have left home; I believe myself still to be at 21st and Everett on the second floor, grand old windows facing a fresh courtyard. Instead, as far as my eye can see, parking lots dotted by crumbling buildings: a hellscape.

I am in love with a city. It was always my ambition as a child to move on to better things: away from Bertrand, then Charleston, then Maryville, then Kansas City and Chicago, finally; until Portland. Now in Rochester I desire to go home, to stay and grow old and familiar. To catalog the trees on walks with my dogs as my father does in his woods, but donate the data to the city at large, rather than locking it away in a state database. I should like to reproduce someday, tiny human with an indeterminate accent, as unaccustomed to car travel as it was familiar to me—as knowing of Powell’s as I was of the Sikeston McDonald’s PlayPlace. To see leisure as a necessary and welcome aspect of life, rather than an evil to be eradicated through peer pressure, anti-depressants and stale caffeine solutions.

It is a place I would not mind to die, though, being currently of sound mind and body I should hate to do so. To love is very much to move beyond the fears of influence and dependence. To say, then, that I love Portland is simply to become one with a place, to allow the fluid culture of a place to make you one of it’s own and, likewise, to throw your own contribution, however slight, into that same great mixture.

(Source: zentrope)

4:34pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZzgRWy71ichs

(Notes: 2)