LOS ANGELES can be particularly loathsome. It can be (and so often is) a wonderful place to live, but if you’re looking for it to play “loathsome,” LA will quickly reveal a side so contemptible and superficial and hopeless and caked in filth that you begin to detest the people who don’t find it as detestable as you do.
On those days you want to hate Los Angeles, it’s doubly easy to do so when you’ve come from Portland, Oregon. Portland—at least the one that exists in our hearts and on IFC—is a negative image of the glitz and grit and “OH MY GOD, WHAT’S YOUR NEXT PROJECT?” of LA. Portland is all rivers, trees, and comfortable gloom. Portland is artisanal sandwiches and lesbians who own small publishing companies with a storefront that sells zines and good coffee.
Portland will make you feel more homesick than you’ve ever felt in your life. I was in such a mood when I took in a basketball game at the Staples Center between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Portland Trail Blazers and… ah, my foes, and oh, my friends… it was fucking rad as fuck and exactly what I needed.
When I tell you I hate the Lakers, it makes me angry that I’ve used the word “hate” to describe so many insignificant things (walnuts, wind chimes, people who pronounce “Ian” as “Eye-an”). I H-A-T-E the Lakers, and their fans are garbage eaters who shit pestilence. The current generation of Laker fans are like the spoiled children of dictators, so weary of their life of privilege that they resort to the perverse (insisting Kobe Bryant is still a good basketball player) to break up the monotony of their tedium, even as their kingdom crumbles around them.
As I strolled through their arena, resplendent in Trail Blazers paraphernalia, I felt the harsh gaze of Laker fans. I was empowered by that gaze. There were other Blazers fans, too—a bunch, in fact. I felt more connected to those people than I’ve ever felt to any other group I’ve belonged to: Jews, comedians, really handsome fat guys. We were gathered together, to worship at the Church of Portland. The sermon did not disappoint.
I’ve been a Blazers fan all of my life, and had they limped into LA with a team full of bad basketball players, I still would have cheered them on—but in 2015, that isn’t even almost what’s up. This team is wonderful and beautiful, and I know they’re from Oakland and Texas and France and the caveman diorama at the American Museum of Natural History, but they feel like home.
It was mostly a close game, but toward the end Damian Lillard grew tired of the cloud-of-gnats persistence of the Lakers and unleashed pure heck on them. It was all rim runs and three pointers and then that dunk… that fucking dunk. THE DUNK WAS ANGRY THAT DAY, MY FRIENDS. Lillard, someone who doesn’t know I exist, manifested a moment of pure catharsis on my behalf. All my frustration with living in LA and missing friends and family and my girlfriend and the city itself were taken out on the Lakers, and as I heard a diaspora of glee throughout the arena, for a moment, I felt like I was home.
Oh, do you live in Los Angeles now?
I thought Ian was pronounced, ‘yuan’.
I check the comments every few columns just to make sure Todd Mecklem has a sad life. He does. See you in a month, fuckboy.
I appreciate that both ‘diorama’ and ‘diaspora’ made an appearance in this article. That is all.
Todd- I read somewhere that Mr. Karmel grew up locally. Beaverton, in fact.
Beaverton isn’t local. Only us REAL Portlanders™* know that.
Anyway, USC fans are garbage. Dodgers fans are garbage. Rams fans were such garbage that the NFL completely pulled out of the second largest city in the country. It’s only fitting that their garbage owner brings them back.
*Circa 2008
yeah because if are homesick for beaverton but say you are homesick for portland you are totally different from people who say “OH MY GOD, WHAT’S YOUR NEXT PROJECT?”.