Although the Portland Pataphysical Outpatient Clinic, Lounge, and Laundromat has only been physically located in Portland, Oregon for eight of the 33 ludicrous years of its imaginary existence, we have considered it our spiritual home even longer. In 1954, for instance, I was asked by Mrs. Criscola what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I responded with: “Cruel and living in Portland.”
This began a lifelong affair with figures of authority believing they could correct my anti-social behavior by having me sit for long periods of time without interaction with other people. I wonder how that worked out for the douchebags.
I like Portland because it perfectly encapsulates and illuminates the nation of miserable fucks (NOMF™). It is small enough that you can walk through the entire city in an afternoon and listen to the stupidest inane conversations engaged in by earnest young men and women who don’t even bother to wipe the shit rings around their necks that they earn from sticking their heads up one another’s bungholes.
The older people also have shit stains on their necks for the same reasons, particularly the bureaucrats and elected officials, but I prefer not to talk about them in a disparaging fashion because many of them are armed and pissed off at liberals for limiting their opportunities to shoot and kill things to have processed into sausageat Gartner's, and many of them mistakenly think I'm a liberal because I savage neocondi rice and beaners for being irredeemable idiots, unworthy even of contempt.
You can actually run into people in Portland you know in a non-Biblical sense on a regular basis and try to avoid them, usually without much success. We have 15-20 people die of boredom every year in sidewalk conversations. I always carry my camera on the off chance I can capture one of these exquisite moments for posterity, which is that place where most Portlanders keep their heads.
Portland always dreams of being something else, no matter how grim and depressing. Apparently, anything is better than being a backwater burg with no accomplishments in the past and no vision for the future. I realize that being the birthplace of Skid Row is not really much to crow about, but who really wants to be a city known for bicycling in a country that hates the French?
This month the city is touting how normal and cosmopolitan it is as the result of being home to three murder-suicides in a single week (Oregon as whole added a fourth partial as I wrote this with the murder part of the equation still hanging on in extremely critical condition after being shot in the back and dumped on a street), putting it right up there with Chicago, New York, Detroit, Atlanta, and Philadelphia as the kind of places to live if you really want to exercise you second amendment rights and add to the body count.
Eight dead in seven days because NOMF men need to own guns and kill things. That’s the Portland dream I can identify with. That works out to 409 dead family members a year, more than 100 of them children. And this is just one pitiful city in an overly-armed nation of miserable fucks.
Guns may not kill people, as the NRA likes to claim, but these eight all died from gunshot wounds. I’m guessing that without so many guns available to defend our second amendment rights to exercise the same stupid right, eight Portland miserable fucks wouldn’t be dead today. Of course, I suppose the killers could have accomplished the same results with claw hammers, but the fact is, assholes, that rarely happens. Try it sometime.
And what does Portland learn from having eight of its citizens dead from gunshot wounds? That it matches the national pattern for such totally foreseeable consequences of legal gun ownership in a country where humans are a minority to weaponry, which is itself a minority to ammunition.
As far as I can tell, the only law that was broken in any of these crimes is that a husband, former husband, or boyfriend used his second amendment rights to end a relationship with extreme prejudice, including the unfortunate offspring.
Isn’t that special? I love being a Portlander. I smell like victory.