Portland: Rose of the Northwest
![[UPDATED with animal identified]One Spark. Just One. And there will be a massacre in the streets.](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/1tAIGv9e.jpeg "[UPDATED with animal identified]One Spark. Just One. And there will be a massacre in the streets.")
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
Gerard Van der Leun
When all Earth’s seas shall Levitate,
Dark shawled within the skies,
Upon our eyes will Starfish dance
Their waltz of Blind surprise.
The sun will Rise within wine Dark
As Argonauts imbibed,
Whose drunken arms embrace that sleep
Where Phaeton’s horses Stride.
Upon all of Earth’s wind-sanded shores,
As dolphins Learn to soar,
All we once were on the land
Shall be sealed behind the door
Of Ivory and Chastened Gold,
That the Mystery solved complete
Shall never til the seas’ Long fall
Wake mariners from their sleep.
— Van der Leun
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
— The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot
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its a beautiful thing
Hilarious!
Well, it was a decent place forty years ago. There was a bit of a pipeline between several of Oregon’s unis and my alma mater’s School of Design back in the day, so I came to be friends with a few Landscape Artichokes, and would visit them infrequently after their graduation when I found myself on the left coast. The trajectory of its decline was visible in 1978, and unmistakable by the middle of the 80s, though even a cynic such as myself would have been hard pressed then to limn the depths to which the Rose City has descended, and they don’t look to be nearly finished.
I was born in Salem. Mountains and Coast. Unbelievable scenery. That a community of Fools, Halfwits, Arsonists and Thugs now roam freely is catastrophic.
It’s surprising how fast Portland declined. Up until the shutdown the wife and I enjoyed the many fine restaurants and bars. I never felt unsafe. And I work third shift in the central city. Until Gov Brownshirt shut that down and loosed her minions. Destroyed a food and hospitality scene that made life enjoyable. Turned the city core into Mogadishu on the Willamette. The sad part is how sanguine the majority of residents are with the situation. We’re now looking for a place in the hinterlands. Cash our retirements into ammo and supplies and pray the people come to their senses before things devolve into open gunplay.
Regarding the virtual fire drill:
I’m reminded of Bob Newhart and Norman Fell in Catch-22.
“I’ll be happy to see them when I’m not here. If I am here, then I’m not available for them to see me.”
Catch-22. It’s the best catch there is.
Acquaintance lives there, says it’s 10 miles from where they live, and they still do business a few blocks from ground zero. DW and I were there two years ago, and it was a decent downtown, but you could tell it was rotting under the skin.
They are continuing to enable their own destruction. It’s akin to suck-starting a shotgun.
Portland?…..or Orc-land? Meh.
Booking my trip to Portland as we speak!