Another Portland

This was always a city of dreamers,
a concept in the collective consciousness
of escape and closeness,
of uniqueness and collectivity,
of responding to the canon and divorcing oneself from it.

But we must accept that Portland was never the utopia we dreamed it to be,
that the dream of the 90s, of cheap rent and unrestricted art and communes and love, universal and freely given, between people and communities,
never existed, not even in the hyperreal.

Old Old Portland,
and New Old Portland,
and Old New Portland,
and New New Portland,
were never what we truly desired, were years of blood and struggle behind the dreams of what they were—even if Portland was always weird.

But this isn’t to say that Portland cannot be a utopia.

But this isn’t to say that the future does not exist first in the imagination, then in the will, then in reality.

It can and it does.

But to reify it, to bring it into reality, we must first discard our false concepts.

We must see this city and its past for what it is and nothing else.

We must kill our idols.
We must kill our darlings.

To imprint on creation our dreams for the place where two rivers meet, the city of roses and bridges, of blue and green, of rain and coffee—we must kill them.
And then dream again.
And again.
And again.

And then bring them into effect at the smallest levels. In ourselves. In our friends. In our neighbors.
And repeat this process again.
And again.
And again.

Until
all that is solid melts into air,
all that is sacred is profaned,
and we are left to face with our sober senses
the true nature of what this world can be,
and the relations to our kind,
for

Another Portland is possible.