I hadn’t been to Portland for five years. The last time I was there, life was very different: I had just started this job, I was carrying my laptop because of fantasy football draft requirements, and I had just started using the Kindle app on my phone to read books. Now, the Kindle app (or device) is pretty much the only way I read books, and I was doing it on either my iPad or my Moto X. I did end up spending most of the time carrying two phones, thanks to the requirements of the job (gah) and I learned I don’t want to do that anymore, so I got that going for me which is nice.
But Portland. Five years ago I said it was like “what if my high school was its own town” and I see no reason to change that. This year, it feels like San Francisco, only with nothing to prove and successful treatment for Asperger’s. It’s like Silicon Valley if it could only realize there were other people. Without fail, everyone was nice. Like seriously nice. The only real problem with the week is that it was hot as balls in a part of the world that I am assured is reliably cold, rainy and fogged in. Jacket and socks were a no-go. Otherwise…
It points up the real problem: we could totally move to Portland. I’d find another job, the wife could probably telecommute, we could totally afford a house – but as soon as you move out of the Bay Area, you’ve moved away for good unless you hit the lotto or somehow arrange to move back into a house trailer of some sort. It’s the problem with having a house that’s suddenly worth a million dollars: sure, you could sell, but then you have to turn around and buy something else in a market so hyper-inflated it thought your house was worth a million dollars.
But there’s all the beer. There’s all the coffee. There’s Distillery Row and an allergy-sensitive bakery around every other corner and a light rail-streetcar system that goes places you want to be and a soccer stadium smack dab in the middle of town and a soccer team that’s THE big attraction and an NBA franchise if you need that, so you have a local sport year around. There are trees everywhere, plenty of shade, the beginning of fall color already.
Now.
I know that a lot of this is down to the novelty of a different place, coupled with the joy of not being at this job. And that’s as may be. And it’s entirely reasonable that people in Portland would drive me nuts after a while. And you know what? That’s exactly what I said when I decamped from DC to the Bay Area. And it worked out just fine. At least until this job turned shitty at the same time as the technodouche boom washed up the flotsam of a hundred thousand hipster CS50 washouts.
We’re not going anywhere. Not for a good long while. But wouldn’t it be something if we could?