Justice is just a bedtime story

It's embarrassing, mostly. Fifteen years ago if you told me I'd be living in an apartment above what to my pretty punk-seasoned ear is a legit punk band (think Mommy's Little Monster-era Social D) playing below on a sluicy Friday night in a pretty cool city, I'd swing a crooked shit-eating. Now-me? I just went digging around for the earplugs my girlfriend keeps here. (I can't find them so I'm drinking beer which I told myself I wasn't going to drink until I got this one Very Important but Unlikely Job Application nailed down and warbling thru the internetz.) [NB lately my 'z' substitute endings have been a little, o, well, unchecked, but I just have to have them, to the chagrin of, mostly, me.] Not purple mohawk me. Not bleaching-mohawk-in-back-of-friend's-mom's-car-on-the-way-to-show-me. Not even X-ed up hardcore kid me, or--damn, probably not--even philosophy major me. And here's the point (because, well, thank christ it's a little deeper than me facing the complicated yet very real presence of my age directly positively correlating to my hair thickness and negatively correlating to my plant-watering consistency): I want to blame my uptightness on Portland. Something about the herd here being so--is this the word?--ideal is off-putting. (I think the word is b/t/w Portlandian, but that seems a bit self-referential.)

By way of personal delusion/justification: Race: Arizonan (Hassayampan). So, this means, if I may generalize about my people, that, more than anything, this: You don't ever tell me what the fuck to do. See the "Had Enough? Vote Libertarian" signs in every punkrock house in Tucson for more (be)dazzling examples of this. (But, srsly--punkrock houses?...) On some level, it's in every real Arizonan. Whether you're a pistol-under-the-front-seat teabagging conspiracy theorist or a tattooed professor/poet type, Arizona means Don't tread on me more than it means anything else. But if you are a punk kid--or an intellectual kid, or a creative kid--in a place like AZ, on some level your whole identity is oppositional. When you walk in to a coffee shop (and we're talking about the '90s, here, to be sure), you know everyone else there is on the goodguy team. The Tucson coffeeshop called Safe House had its name for a reason. It doesn't matter if you want to curbcrush the wank in Birkenstocks with socks and flowy pants who lets his moustache whiskers grow into his mouth so he can suck on them, you're, while in the coffeeshop in Arizona, on the same team, and you'd stick up for this whisker-sucker if some gooch came in to the place and started shit. (Tho you'd do it begrudgingly and then maybe kick the shit out of the W-S after you kicked the shit out of the G for causing you the trouble.) So, now you have this Arizonan, or punk, self defined by its opposition to normative herd behavior. [NB My friend Kate (Arizonan) and I, when moving up to PDX together in a late-night drive-talk agreed that this definition-by-opposition is the most troubling philosophical component of moving to our adoptive town.] Then you move to a place where the herd acts as you want it to act. Kinda-sorta. Everyone has: degrees, Subarus, Pavement albums, bikes, feelings. Sure, iPhones, too. They read--and we're talking Actual Reading. A 23yr old dropout is reading Russian novels in her free time. This 32yr old douchey guy is learning Portuguese (maybe to finally get laid, but still...). Urban gardens. Smiling at strangers you wouldn't fuck. It's weird, it turns out. OK, so, you're now dealing with a mass culture that is in many of the best ways yours while simultaneously dealing with the throbbing, almost Darwinian, impulse to rebel against the masses which in your new environment is actually the kinda-good-guys. Next thing I know I'm rendered quasi-motionless by conflict. Who am I? Why can't I say yes to the good thing? Well, it turns out--and I now realize I may be, in my not returning or feeling any sort of fedality to my original topic, boldly forging into the tangental and pontificatory--that this city of ideal-herd is the very thing (shock of all being) to turn me, for the first time in my pretty little life, into an Aristotelian. (Writing it both brings me joy/causes me to wince/apologize to Dr. Tim Luther, my political philosophy mentor. He'd suffocate himself on carrots if he ever read this.) It strikes me as a Kafkan type of funny that spending my whole life in a dominantly-conservative place made me feel like, "Man, if we can get these herd folks to see what's happening, we'll totally change their mind," to "Fuck, buddy--these people are fucking dumb and spineless, but at least they listen to me, because I'm smarter than them and know how to manipulate them into getting them to want what I want in a way that would be fun or exciting if it weren't so easy." And, for realz [NB there's the 'z' again...], that feels sick. I don't understand what is happening to me.

So, in a separate but related bit of information that I hope you will connect the dots to so I don't have to, I assigned for my classes this week the DFW essay "The View from Ms. Thompson's" for discussion. (Still, the punk band is so loud....) One of my classes got on the topic of revolution (maybe I instigated by chiding them for knowing nothing of the Occupy Oakland police brutality), and that quickly turning into one of my (maybe?) *star* students quoting, at length, from Capital about the inevitability of violent revolution. They went into whether or not a militia type 2nd Ammendment-type insurrection might come up at some near point in time. This student talked about how 30 years ago we woudn't be having this conversation at a community college in the rural west. He also asked the class how many of them had guns. (+/- 65% said they did.) At one point I had to out myself in a personal, and corrective, way letting them know that A.) I spent every weekend (essentially) of my childhood at gun shows because my dad was a gun dealer, and B.) that I was a member of the junior olympic shooting team during same, in order to both keep certain stupid pupils quiet and establish a continued and pervasive dominance over any and all conversations that could even potentially come up in conversation. They went everywhere--from the EU and China not even letting a violent uprising happen in USA b/c/o global economic ties to how community colleges/off-brand state schools in the middle of nowhere will be the hotbeds of the post-9/11 militia because they're rural, (generally now, more) educated, but still own guns and know how to use them (as opposed to legs...). And, you know, I mostly hate everyone in this class, normally, but this day I felt connected to them like I haven't felt connected to a group since I left Arizona. Again, these are people that I generally distain.

Meanwhile, I'm looking out my (awesome, big) apartment window, on the best intersection in town, with the raddest jobs a dude'll ever want in Portland, and pissing about the bleedout of this stupid punk band and wanting to throw beer bottles at them. (Kinda.) There's people my age here that are down at the show. There's people my age that are vegan (still!). And there's people my age that are (surely) not quite as tired as me (but 1/2 as close, I hope--at best) that would be cool with this bullshit. So what does that say about me/this world/me? I'm not camping d/t at Occupy Portland (--for sure!). While I work 85-90hrs/wk, I make plenty of money. I have a big apartment, I'm writing on an expensive computer and drinking expensive beer and I just dropped a lot of money into the continual fix-up of my dream car. I'm in love with the most lovely woman in the world (and she loves me), I have two kids that would make absolutely anyone in the world who wanted kids feel second-tier, and I have an ex-wife who is probably one of my better friends. I'm under 30 and teach at a great college. Shit--I'm even handsome. I'm a Complete Fucking Bastard. Why on earth am I writing about this Social D rip-off-band? Fuck, after a few beers, I'm almost my 15-years-earlier self that loves it, even if I want to go to sleep now. OK: take aways: 1) I'm a lucky bastard--for sure, at least on some level; 2) being an Aristotelian is just like Portland itself: awesome/sucks; 3) being part Mexican/being poor/being the first Mains to go to college is all much less relevant than being from Arizona. Other take aways: it's rainy & cold and my love's 4.5k/mi away is daunting. I don't have a guitar in Portland, or my turntable, or my speakers, or lots of shit, and I'd like to have those things; 4) beer in this town is getting unrealistically expensive, while I'm getting good at local wines, which causes local wines to be almost as cost-effective as beer while making me less fat; 5) if you read this far, you missed your calling of being a professional masturbator.