A Californian in an Eastside bar once sold me a bag of what turned out to be very crappy brick weed. For that reason alone I tend to not believe a thing they say.

The rest of the world will do the same thing once they discover smart phones and tablets.

Internet dating is HUGE here. What you're seeing is people in bars who have either been stood up, or are waiting on their late date, trying to decide if they've been stood up.

Doesn't make sense, you can talk to other people without going out. Though you do have to kidnap them first.

^^ Your windowless van or mine, big boy?

I agree that many people in Portland are generally polite, but stand-offish. I have generally noticed that older people here are more friendly than the younger ones, so I think it's more a generational thing of people with no social skills more than a Portland thing. My oldest child is 12, addicted to her smartphone ("only OLD people TALK on the phone dad!") and, unfortunately, her and many of her peers seem to be way behind my generation on the curve of social skills. The people here under 30 are the first wave of smart phone zombies.

This is funny because the premise is that people in Portland somehow are a deviation from anywhere else in our inability to relate to other people, or in our addiction to technology at the cost of human to human interaction. First, because that's not true... and second because everybody (especially people in the bar-going age bracket) is from somewhere else to begin with (and there's a good chance they were still living in that somewhere very recently).

I promise you you'll see almost the same thing if you go to any bar in SF, Brooklyn, LA, etc nowadays.

Maybe you could talk about how white everybody at the bar is, or how Portland is the whitest city you've ever been to, or how DAE racial homogenization and you have friends in an african-american traveling comedy troupe and they told you personally they've never felt as black as they did when they came here. etc etc....

Fuck all Californians and everything that they say.

Clearly the author isn't terribly familiar/up-to-date with macro-scale societal trending.

Cell phones and the internet have led to creeping anti-social behavior for years now. In a privacy-free age, people can now be in the public sphere and have no desire for social interaction and/or perceive staring at their mobile device as a form of social interaction just because they're looking at an old high school friend's stupid fucking Facebook posting.

Quite sad actually.

THE FUCK IS A PORTLANDIAN

Actually I don't mind. I've found generally anyone who stares at their cell phone instead of my dreamy eyes is not worth my time anyway. Unless of course they're so distracted by their phone I can steal something from them.