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. 

28 replies on “Portland as Fuck”

  4. Ian i wish all those chicken wings and ice cream and weed resulted in a more humorous column. Alas i will now have to go troll for Mecklem’s comments so i can laugh.

  5. I’m pretty sure I’mrightyerwrong and Mecklem are the same person. I hope so. I think it would be really weird if there was some underground negative comment culture where people were actually fans of other people’s negative comments.

  6. Whoever edited this put the “/” in “soul’s/heart’s dick” – I wrote soul’s heart’s dick. As in the dick of the heart that belongs to your soul. That should put a silence to any more of this criticism.

  10. The main problem with those ‘weird-ass flavored’ ice cream joints, though? THE LINE AROUND THE FUCKING BLOCK! Seriously though. People in this city will wait half hour, or more, for some overpriced ice cream, some overpriced brunch, or some mediocre donuts. I don’t give a damn if the ice cream has balsamic vinegar in it…. waiting in line THAT LONG is plain stupid.

  11. But the awesome thing is you don’t have to go to the place with the long line for the amazing ice cream (or iffy donuts). Go to Ruby Jewel downtown! Go to other places I’m too lazy to remember their names! Portland is pretty damn delicious right now, particularly because lazy folks like me can still eat awesome ice cream and we don’t have to stand in line. Plus it’s delightfully warm right now!

  12. waiting in line is stupid, I agree. However, hanging out with friends outside and taking a step every minute or so while having a great conversation that culminates in some ice cream? that’s pretty cool.

  21. Portland: we all look the same, act the same, think the same. A white homogenous glob trying everyday to fool itself into thinking its something it’s not. We’re not weird, we are ultra conservative, fetishizing a past that never really existed, wearing hipster costumes because we are to lazy and dull to develope our own personalities, constantly vigilant for outside validation, because deep down we know the truth, being Portland as fuck sucks.

  23. I think the mercury should hire Todd Mecklem as a sort of point/counterpoint (Todd being the counterpoint) to this column. It would save us all a lot of time. I would also like to add that Portland, OR will always be the best city in the states. But what do I know? Never lived anywhere else. Never felt the need to. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?

  25. Already did. Sold my cracker box in Arbor Lodge to some moron for 285K and moved to KC which is way cheaper and has a lot more going on, and no breeders with anger problems trying to ram me with their carts at Whole Foods because they can’t deal with their entitlement issues. “but what do I know?” Nothing. You know nothing because your to lazy and to investigate anything outside of your monoculture.

  26. You guys might want to lighten up about “Portlandia” and how it affects the image of Portland. As far as I know, nobody takes the show seriously or thinks it has anything to do with the real city of Portland. It’s just a silly sketch comedy. Now if you want to see someone take a television show way too seriously, come out here to Minneapolis where comedy “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was set back in the 1970’s. For her part, Mary Tyler Moore was in Minneapolis for one day to film the opening sequence and then got on an airplane back to California to film the show. If you remember the show, it was well written, quite harmless, and almost a little too sugar-sweet. Well, a lot of people in Minneapolis took the show a little too seriously. They believed it honestly reflected Minneapolis. Indeed, they even put a life-size statue of “Mary Richards” tossing her hat into the air as seen in the opening credits.The statue is still there. People drive past the “Mary” house. Of course, when the movie “Fargo” came out there was outrage that the people of Minneapolis seemed to come across as dumb hicks. “We don’t talk like that! You betcha!” It all seems to come down to this – believe your own image of who you are and where you live. Don’t let outside points of view – especially fictional ones – throw you off center. You’ll just come across as provincial and small minded. Lighten up. It’s just a goofy television show.

  28. It actually is. Cause everybody doesn’t cobble together a weak set of mimicked affectations and call it a personality. And they do real drugs here creampuff

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