Portland is my New York City

I apologize for my irregularity; I know it has been a few weeks. It is now the end of May but Portland is stingy with the sun, doling out a little and then bringing on the clouds and the rain. I am okay with it for now. 2024 is overlayed onto past years like a very thin cloth: I am single again, riding buses around town or to some service job. Unlike then I have seen and experienced another life. I find myself daydreaming about places I have traveled, arid places with harsh trees and forbidding rock formations; I will get back there but first I need to do what I am doing in this city. One thing is socializing or being more social. My intention is find some sort of dance school and take tango lessons. The other goal is to begin playing music live. I practice music an hour a day and have gotten quite good at it in my sort of limited but interesting way.

The direction this country is going in concerns me. It concerns me but doesn’t worry me because I have found the means to live very inexpensively. Right now, only to illustrate things, I pay $1000 a month for my apartment. That works as long as I have job making $20 per hour but when I am on social security….the only way it could continue is if I have a job. I can collect social security in five and a half years. I don’t have much in the way of a pension. Odds are, I will be working in some form or fashion the rest of my life unless I get an acute cases of the Clevers. But, that work could be the sort that involves traveling from gig to gig in a camper. Will a small piece of rural land play into it? Unknown. I have seen the detriment of solitude when applied in generous amounts. Does having a social life require being in a large city like Portland? Not necessarily. I could find some small, arty sort of town. Of course, in such a place jobs are scarcer and rent more expensive. Maybe I could rent a spot to house the eventual camper, some sort of RV park.

Until May of 2025 at the very least, I have my apartment in Portland (Oregon).

I have come to see this as my New York City experience. Mind you, NYC was a lot more dangerous in the 1970s/1980s, but Portland has a grimy sort of edge to it with all the mentally ill people and drug issues. Nearly every bus trip there is some lost soul suffering some variety of mental issue. A few days ago there was a gentlemen suffering from what seemed to be paranoid schizophrenia. Living here has made me (even) more aware of our national shame, of how we leave these people who should be looked after to their own devices. A few weeks ago, this elderly man was shreiking as he attempted to shake a dumpster. Who is looking after him? And it’s not just for these lost souls, it is for public safety. Portland has tried to be too touchy feely, too live and let live, but I think I see the beginnings of Portland beginning to wake up. I am witnessing Progressives beginning to understand there are problems and it is time to be the grown up, the hard ass, and make some changes.

The presidental election is in five months. No matter who wins there will be chaos and violence. Not to be negative, just reminding everyone to make sure they have food stocked up, the means to purify water (you can use household bleach just please Google the proper instructions). Biden is too old, he is clearly suffering dementia or something. Trump is a creature unlike any we have seen in the 236 years of the presidency. It is a terrible cliche to compare the MAGA movement to Nazis, a cliche but in an extremely general way an acceptable comparison. I will explain in the next paragraph, if that sort of thing bores you, feel free to skip to the paragraph after that.

The economy in Germany was in tatters after World War One. Germans are a very tough people, a very proud people not unlike people in the United States. The 1920s saw them struggling, and still grieving over all the dead and maimed and everything else that comes with a war and a pandemic….and along came a group. 

My people, you are suffering. Our once great nation has become terrible, you cannot afford bread and that is the fault of the current leadership. Well, we can make Germany great again. Understand, a large part of the problem are all these people—you know who I am talking about—poisoning the blood of this country. We will fix that, and we will fix all the other problems in our homeland.

Trump is not another Republican and his followers are not the Republicans of the past. Trump is not Hitler, he is more like Goebbels, the master of prophaghanda. But, again, you can’t compare Americans in the 2020s to Germans in the 1920s, the way we live is completely different if not just for the dissemination of information with the Internet and social media and so on. But, if you look the general details, comparisons can be made.

That’s enough about politics, I think we’re all simultaneously trying to avoid it and wringing our hands over it. Right now I am focused  on playing live music but I am writing some. I spend nearly two hours on buses working days so I’ve started writing a story in a notebook. MLK Boulevard is a mosaic of potholes so my handwriting is terrible, but I have to beginnings of a good story. I also have a couple of novels to fine tune and a long story and…

I also need to relax and do nothing at some point. We all do. People in this country work too much and when they aren’t working they feel guilty about it. This is a sickness and I am infected, as well. Today, like my other “days off,” I have this long list of things that have to be done. I think a key to appreciating life and whatever time we have is sometimes just locking that list in a drawer...