MikeyOpp.com

Good afternoon and welcome to the Pacific Northwest. Congratulations on your decision to leave America and come visit the exciting fantasy world that is Portland, Oregon. Say it with me, Or-eh-gun. No matter what your reason for leaving the United States, Portland welcomes you with open arms. We’re a city dedicated to a lack of dedication. Are you old enough to drink, but too young to establish your identity with a career? Then c’mon in, a city of non-career oriented slackers and artists awaits you, just be sure to use the club when you park your car, because Portland leads the nation in auto theft.

Lately, it seems like everyone and their mother is moving to Portland, and why not, it’s a nice city, with a moderate crime rate, and some of the most tolerant people in the world. But be warned, if you are considering visiting, or moving to Portland, there are some things that you should know first. Since I’m about to celebrate my year and a half anniversary of moving to Portland, cold turkey, I have decided to create a “Mike Oppenheim Guide to Portland” for prospective future residents to use when navigating the unfamiliar, upside down world that is Portland. So put on a raincoat, some rain pants, some rain and water proof shoes, but leave that umbrella behind and take a tour of PDX.

I work in a small restaurant in Portland, and we serve about fifty people on the average eight-hour day that we’re open, yet I swear that almost every day, one of our customers says, “I just moved to Portland.” And this is because Portland is one of the fastest growing cities in the country. As my friend Omar put it, recently, “Watching people move to Portland is like a spectator sport!” And I couldn’t agree more. This is because, as the local bumper sticker reminds us, most of the residents here are trying their hardest to “keep Portland weird.” And it won’t take you long to see how weird Portland is.

The first thing to strike me as odd when I moved to Portland is how much sharing goes on in this city. People show up to parties with food and beer, and at bars, people buy each other rounds without first asking for the cash to pay for the booze up front. Bikes and cars even attempt to ‘share the roads’ here in Portland, in an attempt to create a multi dimensional transportation system. People here even share genders. By this, I mean that since I moved to Portland, I’ve met countless trans-gendered people, who claim to be one sex, while sharing the apparatus of the other. Due to the remarkably ambiguous sex of many people in this city, when bartending, I’ve learned to stop using pronouns with customers, and to call everyone ‘you’, ‘y’all’, and ‘folks.’ It’s just easier that way.

The most common absurdity that you will witness if you are watching the sport that is ‘people moving to Portland’ is a newcomer’s reluctance to admit that it is always going to be raining in Portland for about eight of the twelve months of the year. Let me elaborate; here in Portland, there are four seasons, and they are fall, fall, fall, and summer. If you don’t like fall, don’t move here, and visit us in the summer. If you like a steady drizzle that keeps the air fresh and the vegetation bright and green, then Portland is the place for you. And don’t worry about bringing out any winter gear, it snows about once every three years here, and when it does, the entire city shuts down a la NYC on 9/11 out of fear of the unknown phenomenon that other humans would identify as snow.

Do you like beer? If you do, Oregon is the microbrewery capital of the U.S.A., and I believe that Portland has more than twenty microbreweries in the city alone! And if you like whisky, like I do, then Portland has a great little invention called the ‘beer back’. This means that when you order a basic shot of any liquor, the bartender will offer you a six to eight ounce ‘beer back’ with your shot, which is a free mini chaser of beer. What a concept! And when you go out to eat, leave the calculator at home, because there’s no sales tax here, which means adding up bills and shopping carts is easy as pie.

Of course with the good comes the bad, and Portland is far from perfect. Oregon is one of the most socialist states in the union, and some of our state laws and agencies would make Hitler proud. Take for example the much loathed and feared Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC). This agency, which I’ve vented and ranted about in several previous columns, has put the fear of god into everyone in this state that serves alcohol. This is because the agency has created a statewide monopoly on liquor sales, which has in turn driven up the cost of liquor by more than 20% of the regular prices, found in nearby states, like California. The OLCC also has the right to sentence any bartender to death if they serve a minor alcohol, or if a customer they have served gets a DUI, because apparently, no one here should be held accountable for their own actions.

And despite my best efforts to enjoy the lack of a sales tax in Oregon, I’m not stupid, and I realize that the state is more than making up for the lack of sales tax revenue by overtaxing every single citizen with what is one of the highest state income taxes in the union. Basically, when you buy groceries, you pay the actual price that the store wants to charge you, and then you go to work the next day, to earn your rent, and the government asks you to make up for the lack of sales tax by giving them one of your teeth, in addition to thirty percent of you gross income each year. So if you live and work in Oregon for twenty years, you’ll be toothless and poor, but when a candy bar says that it costs seventy-five cents, you can actually throw three quarters on the counter, and walk out the door. Of course you’ll have a hell of time trying to chew the candy bar without any teeth.

You can really tell how little this state trusts you to do anything on your own, by the fact that it’s against the law to pump your own gas here. And not only is it against the law to pump your own gas, you can’t physically even touch a gas dispenser in any way, shape, or form, lest you risk a $10,000 fine. The goal of this law is to create employment opportunities, because all gas stations have to hire attendants to pump gas. The problem is that most gas stations owners are cheap, so they hire one attendant to operate about twelve pumps. This means that if you are trying to fuel your car up on a Friday night between five and nine o’clock, you’re probably going to have to wait in a horrendous line to get your gas, like in the seventies during the OPEC crisis. And this proves, again, that socialism has a tendency of providing its citizens with long, frustrating lines to wait in.

And the drivers here suck! It seems as though no one here has ever heard of a blinker, and very few, if any cars will pass a car on the right at an intersection if the car ahead of them is waiting to make an unprotected left turn. And when cars turn right, they slow down to a complete stop before turning, and proceed to make dangerously wide turns that cut into the opposing traffic’s lane on the street they are turning into. Combine these piss poor driving habits with all the rainfall and overcast skies, and you’ve got a city dedicated to fender benders and long lines of traffic (this city is obsessed with lines!). I’m often shocked by the fact that in order to travel four miles across town, I often end up idling in my car for several light cycles without moving, and by the time I arrive at my destination, I could have crawled across the city like a baby and gotten there quicker!

Portland is obsessed with roses, and I can’t figure out why. We have rose gardens, a rose parade, and yet everywhere I look, instead of roses, all I see are lots of trees, buildings, bridges, and a river. I think the city should be less proud of roses, and more proud of its shady Victorian Era past. You see, back in the 1800’s someone built a labyrinth of tunnels underneath downtown Portland that spanned from many of the local pubs and their basements out to the Willamette River. These tunnels are commonly referred to as the Shanghai Tunnels. They are called the Shanghai Tunnels because ship captains used to dock their ships on the river, and then pay crooked middlemen to drag drunks from the pubs, through these tunnels, and out to the rivers where ship captains would purchase them as ship hands. To be captured like this was to be “shanghaied”, and that is why these tunnels are known as The Shanghai Tunnels. If you are wondering how normal people could suddenly disappear and be enslaved, you must realize that this happened in the days before the advent of Amber Alerts, fingerprints, and Identity Cards, so I imagine drunken-adult-napping was a fairly uncomplicated and safe enterprise for local crooks.

But don’t be frightened by these Shanghai Tunnels, they aren’t nearly as frightening as some of the locals you’ll meet here. If you want to be frightened, hop on up to the Alberta Arts District, in North East Portland, where you can find hundreds of local carnie-look-alikes. There’s the clown house, where a bunch of modern day ‘clowns’ live; people with tattoos all over their faces, who build and ride monstrous bicycles that reach heights of over fifteen feet, and need ladders to mount. These modern day carnies probably do something to earn a living, but I imagine that it’s not anything in which you have to deal with old-fashioned people, because when your entire face is covered by tattoos, some of which glow in the dark, well, you tend to look a little bit scary, even though I’m sure that these people are awfully nice. But I sure as hell wouldn’t hire one of them to baby-sit my kid, I mean I have two tattoos, and have nothing against them, but when I was young, had I been left alone with a person whose face looks like the villain from “Hell raiser” it would have made me piss my pants and given me nightmares that probably would have led to me seeing a shrink. But maybe tattooed faces are just my ‘irrational fear of the week;’ they just kind of creep me out, like baby chickens—ugh.

But Portland, for the most part, is a nice city with nice people, and it’s a space where you can be left alone to do your thing, so long as your thing isn’t pumping gas or paying a fair amount for liquor; Adam Smith’s invisible hand can’t do its thing if the government attaches strings to certain fingers, but life’s a trade off, and I’ll take a big government and tons of rain in return for a culture that works to live, but doesn’t live to work.

And if you want comedy, or even if you are just bored at night, be sure to watch the local news here in Portland, you’ll be delighted to see local news for about three minutes, followed by seventeen minutes of weather related reports, and then a 90 second blurb on world news, which usually omits any news of actual importance or significance. And if there’s time, they might allow some knucklehead to rant about the Oregon Ducks and their football team, or he’ll show you highlights of the latest Trailblazer player to get arrested for marijuana possession. And as for the lack of international news, this is because people in Portland, for better or for worse, seem more concerned with their local government than the national one. Most people here are dedicated to fine-tuning their own city, and to keeping their local laws in check. I wish these same people would ‘fine tune’ the OLCC into rubble, and then reinstate sales tax and lower my income tax, but then we wouldn’t be able to support all of this state’s many residents who are unemployed, not looking for work, and taking my money in return for their hard work at couch surfing, pan handling, and getting drunk. So come visit Portland, and if you do, you can have a beer back on me, cause, uh, I’m cheap, and they’re free!