solastalgia

i had a conversation recently with a coworker my own age about portland in the eighties & nineties and how amazing it was to check out up coming bands at satyricon. i think we were talking about the KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD stickers. he thought portland was more genuinely weird back then. i've never really understood the keep portland weird thing as it seems to me if you have try to keep it weird it probably isn't really weird and selling bumper stickers about it really isn't weird either. maybe i just don't like how vague the term is. my coworker seemed to interpret it as when portland was much more working class and much less developed. i told him about walking home from laurelhurst theater one night and noticing all these new shops & restaurants, etc. i sometimes feel like it's very negative to criticize such places for existing, as if everything new is bad & everything old is good, for i believe that the nostalgia people have for the past tends to gloss over or even completely deny that not everything was so wonderful back then. our memories can be too convenient for the narratives we want to construct, both for ourselves & others. i thought most of the shops & restaurants looked much more interesting than the drab places they replaced, but i also felt some sense of anxiety & distance from them too. i realized that i feel kind of alienated from so many of the new places because they represent a certain kind of opportunity that i'm either indifferent to or simply can't participate in very much, if at all, which is offering new & interesting ways to spend money. at a certain distance, it's nice that such options exist, and i'm definitely not poor, but i don't really like shopping in the first place and i don't have much extra money to spend anyway. unfortunately, my wages have increased very slowly while everything around me seems to be increasing much more rapidly, which i think is the source of my anxiety about being able to live here long term. i should have realized this before i moved back as i did some research in a book called "Cities Ranked & Rated" which showed that portland was the most affordable decent sized & decent quality city to live in on the west coast. i think everyone else, thanks in part to portlandia, is discovering this as well. that's nothing new necessarily but we may have reached a tipping point where there is enough of interest for the affluent to move here, unlike in the past when it was a much more blue collar town. my coworker said he doesn't like the city portland is becoming and liked what it used to be much more. the funny thing about cities is that they seem so solid but are continuously being rebuilt. it's like a ride you get on thinking it's going to be one thing but might change radically once you are on, or it might not. and because it's so large & populated, it seems like there are very limited options if you don't like how it's changing, especially for the working class. i feel like you're really living at the mercy of whatever trajectory this vast artificial island is evolving toward. for me, this is an argument for intentional community, or at least, living in a village, though those also have their limitations & issues. all of this reminds me of my workplace, a business that has been around for over forty years now and which has a surprising number of people who have worked there for twenty years or more. some of them are very bitter & upset about how the business has changed over years, but what i am often struck by is the sense of outrage that it keeps changing at all, as if they expected both the city & the place where they work to remain exactly as they were when they first encountered them. to me it's amazing that there are still people out there who have had the same job at the same place for over twenty years as i cannot even imagine all the places that have come & gone over the years. i guess it's easy for me to wax philosophical about it as i am treading water with the changes so far, both at work & at large, or so i think. but it's quite different, i suspect, when you start going under more & more frequently, and even more so when you realize that you are getting old and may never tread water in this place you have lived & worked in, and that, even though you never left, somehow everything is gone.