Well, shit.
Normally this yearly wrap-up is a fun exploration of silly little things around Portland that are irritating me. Normally. Right now, though, it’s difficult to focus on the little stuff when 46 percent of the country just elected the alien in a farmer’s body from Men in Black to be the president. It was like finding out a huge swath of America secretly loves Comcast. Like finding out the Midwest eats only the peel and throws the banana away. Like finding out the talking phlegm ball from the Mucinex commercials just won The Bachelorette.
As bad as that felt, I disagree with people talking about 2016 like it was the worst year ever. Yes, some wonderful celebrities died, but every year at least a couple musical legends go to the big trending topic in the sky. We don’t elect a dumb president every year, but we have done it about every eight years, so it’s not that weird. And Lemonade came out in 2016. So it wasn’t all bad.
Besides, 2017 will almost certainly be worse.
As challenging as it is, I’m going to push ahead with my annual list of silly jokes about minor local irritants, because if there’s one thing I’ve heard over and over from artists in the last two months, it’s that the most important thing we can do in these tough times is make the same art we were going to anyway.
I’m tearing up just thinking about how brave I am to do this. Okay, here goes. Godspeed, me. Godspeed.
One of the people trying to ruin this excellent city was a burglar who robbed at least six food carts in November. Just one food cart robbery would be bad enough, but he went back five times, presumably because the money he stole came in much smaller portions than he expected.
The only thing that makes me feel better is knowing that if he wanted to count the money, there wasn’t any place to sit.
There were also several robberies at local farmers markets. I know how bad it must have felt for the farmers, because I always feel robbed at farmers markets too.