poorboyoftroy

Portland has a very distinctive retail infrastructure, one that elicits strange, public rituals and leads to experiences of unbridled, non-value add whimsy. An example of this: rounding the corner at SE 32nd and Hawthorne, one encounters a small parking lot dominated by a red, double-decker bus that houses, you guessed it, a coffee shop. It has tables, like a restaurant Tov Coffee  is much like every other food cart in Portland: larger than food trucks in other cities and just as questionably mobile. But Tov is so much more than a "mobile" retail space for upscale casual dining: it's its own vibrant, fully immersive world. Close, but not too close, quarters I was overwhelmed by the density of build-out and human activity in the back-half of the lower-level. Two baristas, a commercial espresso machine, and at least 3 people waiting on drinks -- it shouldn't all fit, not this comfortably, but it does. The custom purple paint job, which extends ...

While visiting Portland over the winter holidays, my brother and I made a pilgrimage to the tiny village of St. John’s on the northernmost tip of what is still, surprisingly, Portland proper. I say surprisingly because to get there, you must wend a path through what are, to SW/SE Portland residents, the already far flung expanses of upper industrial NW beyond which surely, I thought, the city simply ends. And then...you keep going. Doing so takes you past the dense catchment of current and repurposed factories and warehouses on and around NW 23rd and up the bipolar stretch of Hwy 30 that runs along the train tracks. The city persists, it turns out, amid the lush, looming hillside of Forest Park and a sparse population of very active industrial buildings and port facilities. It all takes time, covers substantial distance, and I remain incredulous: by the time you get to St. Johns, it feels like you should be anywhere other than Portland. St. Johns Bridge, courtesy of ZnE's Dad (lov...

...at the seam by some sibylline strength at imperceptible speed.  Projecting that sound on to a two-dimensional plane dangling in front of the Walmart semi storming south carelessly through the corner of SE Morrison and Grand, he saw the gaping seam transform into a portal on the other side of which lay the perimeter of space and time.  There was no more proper way to conceive of death than as a radical repositioning of the self.  Best not to dwell on its organic realities.  Never a process, always a new geography.  That was death. But he didn't pass through that plane, not this time or any time before.  The adrenaline that had flooded his system for a split-second subsided as he realized the semi had passed and that he had, regardless, remained firmly planted on the sidewalk, toes akimbo.  Most Portlanders, being non-native, couldn't remember a time when this neighborhood had not been the province of pedestrians but of commerce-serving trucks that...