I CRIED while I was watching Portlandia the other day. I was sitting in a plane, hurtling through the clouds at 600 MPH with no regard for the pride of birds, crying my gorgeous brown eyes out over an IFC sketch comedy show. Well—not really over a sketch comedy show, I was crying because of the opening credits. Say what you will about the show itself (super hella everybody already has), but that credit sequence punched me right in my soul's/heart's dick and I started crying.

For as silly and absurd as the sketches on Portlandia tend to be, the opening is remarkably sincere (AND I ALSO HATE ME FOR SAYING THAT). It captures something—the moments and landmarks and faces that the show spends the next 22 minutes ridiculing. It reflects Portland the way I know it, when I'm walking over the Burnside Bridge on an incomparable summer night and feeling 10,000 different kinds of grateful that I get to be here, now. It's a Portland that I already miss.

Again, I'm fully aware of how relentlessly I need to be baseball batted in the face for getting this wistful, but if you don't take a minute to stop Yelping some bullshit about rice noodles to actually appreciate what we have, then what's the fucking point? Maybe this is just me being in my late-20s and feeling a general nostalgia, or maybe this really is a beautiful time to live in this city.

You can say the words, "Hey, let's go to that super good local ice cream place and fuck around with some weird-ass ice cream flavors," and then you can say, "Actually, let's go to that OTHER super good local ice cream place and fuck around with some weird-ass ice cream flavors," and THEN you can end up going to both because neither of them are Cold Stone—and there's nothing wrong with Cold Stone, either. I fucking love Cold Stone. When my mom took me to Cold Stone when I was growing up, I didn't need a ride home, 'cause I'd just Crip Walk the whole way—but now that I've had 50 Licks I want to spit right in Cold Stone Creamery founder (this might not be true) "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's face.

I live within walking distance of three chicken wing joints (Basa Basa, Fire on the Mountain, Pok Pok) that make me so furious at Buffalo Wild Wings for even existing that I'm surprised its atoms haven't shattered and dispersed from the sheer heat of my disdain. Rejoice! This is the present state of your current city. It's fucking dope here. And it might not always be.

Our music scene might not always be this dynamic, diverse, and prolific. We might not always have a comedy scene. The beer might not flow this freely, the weed... well, the weed will probably always be pretty good, but the beer! You never fucking know, brotherdudes and ladybirds and genderfuckers, things can change—rent goes up, tragedy strikes, people move, people die, shit burns down, condos happen—and there will soon be a time when fluoride (or whatever the fuck that month's fluoride is) isn't our biggest problem. So, for yourself and your memories, take note, appreciate and cry during the opening credits of Portlandia