It was a bittersweet goodbye to the City of Roses, that damp, unraveling quilt of punks, prophets, burnouts, baristas, anarchists, misfits, and the chronically misunderstood.  A city where misgendering and microdosing cross paths beneath sagging telephone wires and the watchful eyes of crows.  It felt half-feral and half-forgiven, stitched together with moss and fentanyl, soaked and soggy with rain and stale beer, threaded with sidewalk sermons and the sharp stench of piss soaked walls.  Portland: moody, feral, oddly tender and slouched in the cradle of the Willamette Valley. Rotting or fermenting, depending on who your talking to.  A surreal, dreamlike place that taught me more than a few lessons and offered a mirror I wasn’t always ready to look into. A chapter I dig deeper into elsewhere: An Ode to Portland.

It’s a city where, on your birthday, you could eat and drink your way from breakfast through dinner on nothing but free offers from local joints and small scale newspaper publishers like the Willamette Week and Portland Mercury still exist in print for free, housed in their holder on various street corners.  And where leaving anything in your car overnight means waking to find a shattered window.

The coffee scene? Deep. The food carts? Endless. The dive bars? Dimly lit, carpeted and with $2 Peebers and a tarot reader lurking near the jukebox.  The sidewalks?  Not just covered in leaves, but also human turd, urban landmines marking the city’s slow collision between radical compassion and systemic failure.