As I enjoy a meal of organic lima bean soup that I swapped for a tarot card reading,I ponder on all that I love about Portland. The show Portlandia has drawn attention to our cloudy little corner of the Pacific Northwest. While we may enjoy this rare spotlight, many residents wonder if it will repel or magnetize an onslaught of jobless hipsters who are attracted to the very culture it mocks. Most of the community here is either scraping by underemployed, or are on strait up ‘funemployment’. Newbie’s scramble for over 3 months to find a meager paycheck, but many stick it through for the sake of living in a culture that they could very well have created in the community they hailed from. If you are one of these people itching to migrate to Bridgetown for our surreal offerings, here are the things you can do right where you are to enjoy the lifestyle without the 8 months of rain and the applications for food stamps.
1. Overcome the culture of conspicuous consumption
Portlanders rarely buy new things except for undergarments and food. Some dumpster divers don’t even do the latter. We like to make things and fix them. If we don’t have the time or capacity to do so, we usually have talented unemployed friends do it for us for trade.
We shop at Goodwill a lot, which supports our ladies in their sexy grandma fashion and our weekly costume theme parties. We prefer to get home goods at the Rebuilding Center and go to Scrap Recyclers for arts and crafts supplies. Part of this is environmentally driven, since new things equal future landfill junk. Part of it is economical, and we’re all pretty broke. It’s not necessary to drive nice cars, or any car really, to get a hot date, because bikers are sexy. There is less social pressure to be rich, and more social pressure to be conscious of how you’re actually impacting the world.
Methodology 101
Naked Lady Parties (or Nude Dude Corrals)
Invite your mutually gendered friends and acquaintances to come over to your house with bags of their unwanted clothes. Clear one room, set up a full-length mirror, and lower the curtains. Offer snacks and drinks until most have arrived, and then have everyone drop their bags into one giant pile of apparel and dig dig dig for your finds! Guests strip down as they try on new fashions and stow away their new trashed treasures in the same bag they just unloaded. As you return the leftovers to a donation site, you can delight that your new favorite bodice top is the same one that helped your best friend hook up with her hot boyfriend.
2. Support your Local . . . Everything
With the way the economy is suffering, do you really want your dollars going to a megalith like Wal-Mart? The few extra dimes that you spend at local places will get turned back into the local economy much more quickly, thus raising the overall economic health of your community. If the mom and pop’s have all shut down, then you can avoid chain restaurants and buy your groceries at the farmer’s market.
Methodology 101
Start a local non-profit radio station. Use the internet radio feeds to start up and flyer the hell out of your town. Invite schools to participate. Advertise local businesses. Play music from local bands. Share local political concerns in an intelligent discussion instead of watching idiot pundits on major news networks tell you what to fear. Enjoy how easy this is in our current technological universe.
3. Prioritize Art in your Life
The biggest river in this city is not the Columbia or the Willamette, it’s the creative flow of art that floods the hearts and minds of every inhabitant. We’re not so much into going to museums as we are into having arts and crafts nights to do decoupage or learn welding. Creating art fills up your soul. It’s mentally and emotionally healthy. It’s what is lacking in the TV-centric lifestyle.
Methodology 101
Throw a costume party. Have a pile of stuffed animals that people can cut apart and re-sew back together to make monsters. Offer a talent show portion of any event. Invite closet musicians and other friends to sing songs that they love to cover or wrote themselves. Dork out.
Have gatherings where your friends teach each other how to craft, sculpt, weld, dress, design, stitch, knit, draw, paint, dance, and then put a bird on it.
Turn off the TV and make something. Don’t worry if it’s crap. You can burn it and use the remnants of charcoal to draw a portrait of your TV.
4. Survive the Awkward to get to the Amazing
I dated a guy who knits. He’s not gay. He just likes knitting. I think he’s way hotter because he’s not afraid to be a man who knits. When I visit my old hometown in suburban San Diego, I find it hilarious that everyone is in costume, but they just don’t know it.
Portlanders revel in their unique tastes. Yet, it’s not the zoo bomb bikers with thick- gauged plugs in their earlobes who stand out the most. It’s the people who just play around with figuring out what best suits their authentic selves, and wearing it well. They are allowed to play because no one flinches or jeers when they unicycle past playing a bagpipe.
Granted, Portland has some issues with being a city of cliques who don’t merge enough. It’s also way too Caucasian to be called diverse. But, one thing is clear, we like our fringe freaks just fine.
Methodology 101
Next time you meet someone who seems strange and makes you feel awkward, take a breath and find common ground. Ask them a question that you may be able to relate to. Avoid small talk and stating the obvious.
Try something new that makes you feel anxious. Step outside your own identity boundaries to see if it feels good to push your limits of self. Use an eyeliner to decorate your cheekbones. Even if you’re a boy.
Improvise. Risk it.
5. Eco-logical becomes eco-nomical
Upon arrival from Berlin, my Omi would unload a collection of creamers, jams, and plastic forks she collected from her airplane meals. She wasn’t an environmentalist; she had simply survived poverty. The two go hand in hand. People who wear sweaters in the house in the winter and turn off the faucet between wetting the toothbrush and spitting are saving money. It’s simple and extremely un-entitled in mentality. So if it’s yellow, let it mellow, and if it’s brown, flush it down.
Don’t just buy into anything that sells you with the words green, organic, natural, or cage-free. Consider whether the amount of waste resulting from buying a new ‘environmental’ product is comparable to the good it may do. Be progressive enough to find out for yourself. Research where your food comes from. You don’t have to go to the farm, just look online for people who have done so already.
If you want to beautify your area, then advocate for community gardens, re-greening plans, bicycle commuter paths, and protecting the land that you still have left. Portland is a town of protesters, and we love signing petitions and going to local meetings to speak our thoughts on keeping things visually and physically green, and public lands publicly owned.
Methodology 101
Educate yourself with movies like Food, Inc. and books like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Maybe even experiment in whole food diets to see how your health improves.
Grow a garden of your own. Install a rain barrel (purchased from your local industrial zone that uses big plastic bins) and save water. Compost.
Get on your bike or go on a hike and get out in it! Share the road with pedestrians and bikers when you drive.
6. Community Community Community
Nearly every party I go to involves a potluck and a snuggle pile. It’s what I love. The potluck often has a mix of treats from bacon to vegan, because Portlanders eat like red neck hippies. The snuggle pile is a safe place to get some human touch without any creepers, because my crew frown on unsolicited grabby vibes. Now, you may not desire potlucks or cuddle puddles, but create the types of gatherings you do like
even if it sounds weird to your guests at first.
The best bonding happens when you give each other the room to experiment. Personal growth is a popular goal in these parts. It can definitely get self-gratifying,
but that’s better than self-depreciating. So yeah, we make vision boards around solstice and process polyamorous relationships more than most. If that’s not your angle, then simply direct yourself into the path that is. Then call your friends over to join you.
Methodology 101
Meet your neighbors by doing a beautification project together. Get ideas for this from Village Building Convergence at http://vbc.cityrepair.org/
Contribute or start up a local ignite gathering. http://ignite.oreilly.com/
Collaborate! Do the things you love in cahoots with other people who’s input will enhance or refine your own project, and you theirs. Trade a ‘mine’ for ‘ours’ here and there.
Portlanders are totally guilty of most of the jokes poked at us on the show Portlandia, but behind each of them is a cry out to the rest of the US to play with using our awesome freedoms a little more creatively. By no means have we made utopia here. But, well, we try. Overall, we’re pretty lazy about it too, so step up and get inspired to create the world you want in your own city. Maybe for you that is the dream of the 90’s. It is alive in Portland. But you can bring it to a town near you.