Portland is a small city. It used to be tiny.
You can walk from one end of the so called “city center” to the other in under twenty minutes, and you can do it without getting mugged or seeing a single violent crime committed. Except for a couple thirty floor jobs, the buildings are short and squat, so you never lose daylight (unless you’re walking through the city at night, but you know what I mean).
Over the past fifteen years, Portland has gone from being a sort of modern ghost town to being a thriving, artsy-fartsy, pretension-filled Up and Comer. Our art museum was just renovated, and we’ve had, like, famous people take the stage at our theater (surely you remember “Marine #7” from episode 63 of “Two Dads and a Talking Sausage” – he played a potted plant on the set of the Portland Senior Brigade’s abridged production of Hamlet – it was a gala event, attended by only the wealthiest and most powerful people of the city, such as the manager for Smidley’s Gardening Supplies and his exotic lover, Jennifer).
As native Portlanders have watched their city get overrun by retiring southern Californians and traffic weary Seattleites, they’ve grown pissier and pissier about people they perceive to be Outsiders.
A Portland native, by the by, is one of the indigenous peoples of the Portland area. The indigenous peoples of Portland, in case you were wondering, are defined as being “Anybody who moved here before you.”
There was a law passed, or something, that requires any Portland native take on an air of superiority over his recently acquired Californian transplants, and to always express a sense of entitlement to the area that we stole fair and square from the Native Americans who were here first (“Hey, guys – have some blankets…”).
One problem that Portlanders face in applying this deserved snobbery is that it’s actually really hard to tell the difference between a Californian and a Portlander just by appearances. If you have a finely tuned sense of “ugly” then you can typically spot a Portlander from a mile away, but most Portlanders, probably due to repeated exposure to the stimulus in question, have lost a keen understanding of “ugly” the way a pig is immune to the smell of its own feces.
Portlanders have, therefore, fallen back on some other important signs that someone might be from Someplace Else, and perhaps hasn’t been here for the requisite three weeks that allows someone to claim native status.
One of the most telling signs of a foreigner around here is use of an umbrella. It rains in Portland the way it hots in Death Valley. It just doesn’t let up.
Now, I don’t really care much about fitting in, and I think that getting rained on because social pressures encourage me to enjoy it is a pretty stupid thing. When it pours, I use an umbrella.
People have commented before on this. I’m asked if I’m from out of town, or, get this, why I don’t like the rain. I don’t understand what it is that makes people ask me why I don’t like the rain. It’s very simple. I don’t like the rain because it’s wet. Hello-o-o-o…
The reason I’m writing about this is that I was asked again today if I’m from out of town (note that I’m sugar coating this – I wasn’t so much asked if I was from out of town as much as someone accused me of being a non-native - this is one of the highest forms of insult that a Portlander can unleash, aside from marrying your sister).
I explained that I wasn’t from out of town, and that I didn’t particularly like the rain because, like I mentioned a few sentences back, the stuff has a tendency to get things wet.
The response? Something about “liquid sunshine” and how Portlanders enjoy the rain.
I just don’t understand this. It makes me want to scream.
It’s like saying, “Hey – me ‘n the boys were wondering – you’re from Rwanda – so you must enjoy violent political insurgency, right?”
The answer would most likely be an emphatic “No.”
What I’m trying to say is, if you’re one of these Portland natives who doesn’t understand why someone would want to use an umbrella, and if you feel disgusted by the sight of someone using one, and if you feel the need to submit unsolicited comments on the matter, then, and I’m sorry for the strong language, you’re a pudding-head.
Yes. I mean it.
Pudding-head.
You.