DB: The Stepchild

I love coming home. I don’t want to sound cliché, but Exit 133 is a pretty fun drive especially if you speed. Why am I in such a hurry to get back into town?

Once again I found myself in Portland this past weekend. In my continued exploration of this idolized city to the south, I have uncovered many inspirations and surprising oddities. Be it the immaculate hipster-hand decorated walls of the Ace Hotel, or the fully walkable shop-sip-sup neighborhoods, my time plodding the PDX bricks seems a blur of all that I am often accused of. All the radicals, rejects, races, reasons, rastas, rowdies, and Reedies (Reed College kids) seem to gather unto themselves an ethereal quality of cool here. From the simple social gestures in line at Stumptown to the complex array of yarn hanging from the ceiling of the Holocene, the standard of aesthetic quality is high in Portland. Even as we toured the “up and coming” hoods such as Mississippi Ave, there was an air of triumph or arrival … almost a laurel rest that is different from the determined resolution or equally echoed apathy I feel on the streets of Tacoma.

The sun shown upon us on Saturday as we participated in every hipsters favorite sport and dug through neatly arranged bins of 12’‘ plastic disks. Having discovered a strange french something something, we made our way back to the Ace to analyze it on the conveniently provided phonograph in our room. Sitting there enjoying foreign music, sipping room service Costa Rican Stumptown french press under the gaze of the giant hand painted cat on the wall above the chic vintage couch covered in just the right shade of brown surplus military grade cotton; I came to the realization that all of this was very, very cool. It was in this moment that I felt a surprising and very genuine longing for home. I cannot explain this very well, suffice to say that Michelle summed it up nicely by saying, “We have a pretty good thing going in Tacoma.”

All that to say, Portland is amazing, inspiring and very put together, I have not however found any sort of loyalty or pull to remain. My friend and owner of Fulcrum Gallery, Oliver Doriss says, “Well, you have to leave to come back.”

Portland reminded me of the people that make Tacoma cool to me. We are here because we love change, we love being a part of the come up .. .we aren’t the kids who flock to what has already been established by others. That’s why I couldn’t stay in Portland. We current Tacomans are here because we are the establishers. In ten years, when the Ace Hotel buys the Elks and hires Sean Alexander to hand paint the rooms walls with whales and raindrops … then perhaps I will rest. Or restlessly move to another place that needs the hard nosed gappy smile of a believer, the secret hopers that impatiently watch a place transform.

Call it a vibe or whatever, but it hit me super hard on Saturday night in the hotel bar/restaurant called Clyde Commons. The place was packed, we got a table upstairs and I had come down to order at the bar which involved a lot of standing around and waiting to be noticed. A gay couple introduced themselves and asked if I was staying at the hotel. They hailed from Seattle and raved about how “chill” people in Portland were. When I told them I was from Tacoma they immediately starting telling me what a ghetto Tacoma is. This is typical of most every conversation I have with young people from Seattle. I found myself immediately defending Tacoma, putting them in their place and telling them how much they thought they knew. This strange loyalty surprised me … local pride, HA! But it wasn’t just ego about my hometown, I chose Tacoma. I’m not from here. Michelle said, “We know way more about Seattle than they ever will about Tacoma.”

I like exporting myself to these haughty fancy cities and their entitlement to cool. I am an outlier, a stepchild from the weird family on the block, and from this position we will someday lead in ways that our big brothers and sisters of the northwest cannot.