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Opinion AberRant
 Ore-Goner
Lately, I’ve noticed the strangest thing. Apparently, I LIVE IN PORTLAND now. How did I get here? Where did my house go? Where are all the places, and how do you get there? Where do you go for food? How do you get money if you don’t have a job? You can see how all these questions have captured my attention, and the whole thing is wearing me out.
Here we are in this little apartment, which leads to even more questions. Exactly what are the people upstairs doing each night at 2:00 a.m.? Who the hell is smoking outside our window? There’s no place to stand outside our window. How are you supposed to get your clean laundry from the laundry room back to your apartment without dropping a pair of thong underwear on the sidewalk? And, most importantly, was that woman really having that great a time in the sack for forty minutes? Forty minutes? She must be a lesbian.
Why won’t the dogs pee when they’re on a leash? Why won’t they pee on the ivy? There is no grass outside, just cement and stones and ivy, because apparently WE LIVE IN AN APARTMENT IN OREGON now.
I think I have an answer to the money question, and to all of the apartment questions. See, right off the bat, Ann got herself a job. She goes there five days a week, bada boom, bada bing, they pay her money. What we need to do is get me one a’ them jobs, and then we’ll have more money, and then we’ll buy the first house we see, as long as it is more than two rooms and it has a square foot of grass. Actually, I have had a couple of interviews and I have a couple more lined up. One of them is a callback. But speaking of job interviews, why does my weight always change? Why do I always have to buy a new suit? Why do suits cost so much? Communist China has it right, man. Uniforms for everyone. It would be so simple.
To help you understand my fractured frame of mind, you might like to know a little about our neighborhood. To get to our apartment, you drive pass the disturbingly-named “Golden Touch Family Restaurant.” Continue past “Tobacco Town.” Cross the overpass and look for the tiny house that says, “G Girls Private Adult Entertainment.” Just past that, you will see a sign for a restaurant that has no name, it just says, “Szechwan Food.” I’m not sure there really is a restaurant there, because most of that building is actually taken up by the “Boom Boom Room.” The sign has red and yellow flames licking up into the black lettering. That’s how you find our street. Turn at the Boom Boom Room. If you miss that and go too far, you will see what is probably a sister business, “The Big Bang.” It has the same flames and black lettering. Make a U-turn, which is OK everywhere here because the streets are so odd anyway. Go back past “Baby Dolls Modeling and Lingerie” and look again for “The Boom Boom Room.” I told all of this to my niece, who is a half-proper Mormon mom but also my blood kin. She is thinking about borrowing the Boom Boom’s font to stencil Love at Home or Families Are Forever. Someone suggested a new town motto: “Portland: Come for the woods, stay for the woodies.”
Here are some things I’ve learned about Portland. It has: many white people with dreads; aging hippies; new-millenium hippies; medical marijuana; many, many people on bikes, going up mountains, for chrissakes. (Note: People on bikes don’t necessarily look to see if it is safe to cross the street. Apparently they just use The Force.) Portland has polite drivers. It is so bizarre. I’ll be at a stop sign on a hopeless intersection where there is no way that I will ever be able to get into the traffic stream, and someone will just stop to let me in. This has happened time and again. Nobody ever does that in Utah. In the last two decades in Salt Lake County, I was the only person who ever stopped to let someone into traffic. And this politeness seems to come without a hidden agenda. Can you believe it? They don’t want you to join their religion or anything. They just want you to recycle.
Although there are a million cool things to do here, we have not done much—OK, any—fun stuff yet. For Ann’s birthday, we ran some errands, picked up some food from Wendy’s and came home to have a coma. A coma that gets to be interrupted by getting up, getting dressed, leashing the dogs, taking them outside to consider if they might like eventually to pee, or not, or maybe they were just thirsty, or they heard a sound, like the people upstairs or the 40-minute lady.
Hopefully by the time you hear from me next, I will have an exciting new job. And then, we will get a house. It will be a good-sized house that was built in the 70s and has avocado shag carpeting and Calvin Klein soft-porn faux-wood paneling. There will be a fenced yard for the dogs and plenty of room to gather in the kitchen and make merry with our friends—the friends that we’re going to have. When we both have jobs. When we both have jobs.
Laurie Mecham has noticed, Toto, that we’re not in Kansas any more.
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