There are some things I love about Portland. I love the coffee houses. I love the craft beer. I love the art. I love all the hippies and weirdos. Yesterday, I got a little taste of the natural side of Portland…loved it.
But, you know what?
These Portland rains don’t show up anywhere on that lovely list.
I tend to take pride in being a nature lover, but my reluctance to even step outside today is revealing me a bit of a fraud.
After all, what’s more natural than rain?
I finally did make it out to the coffee house where I snapped the photo above and where I sit writing this fine piece of predominantly pointless prose.
I don’t normally allow myself to be hermitized by rain. It does fall in Costa Rica quite frequently.
Maybe it’s because I’m here with virtually no money, relying on the good graces of couch surfing hosts to keep me dry at night…and coffee houses like this one to do the daily trick.
Damn it, I got things I want to do, places I want to go, stuff I want to see, and the rain, well, it just interferes.
If you let it.
We allow a lot of things to interfere, now don’t we?
The natural phenomenon that’s rain doesn’t pay a hipster’s heed to our plans. It just falls squarely upon them…without the slightest tinge of remorse.
We live in a harsh and cruel world like that. In fact, nothing really pays heed to our plans, if you think about it…
Maybe that’s why Steinbeck once wrote that…
The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.
Well, he actually stole that line from the poem To a Mouse, by Robert Burns of Scotland.
Whether it’s the weather, time, circumstances, happenstances, people, problems, or our own peculiarities…
it seems the making of a plan is part in parcel of the perpetuation of a failure.
I’m here on a mission. My mission is to hatch my plan of moving, repatriating, to this fine city of Portland, Oregon.
This place of hippies and hipsters, voodoo doughnut dolls and wads of weirdness lurking around every corner.
And the rain…lots of rain.
I’ve already had at least one Portlander give me that cockeyed, are you freaking nuts look, as soon as I mentioned that I wanted to move from there to here.
That’s OK. I’ve learned to plan to prepare for failure. And I’ve had a ton of practice.
I know nothing about this move will be easy.
And this rain has me waffling from absurd confidence to flashes of abject fear, as I consider how to do relatively simple things like find a place to live and a way to pay for it.
I keep having these visions of ending up a lowly part of the homeless subculture that openly exists here.
Portland might be the most liberal city in the U.S.
But it still has a harsh climate, as I’m sure any of those guys would attest.
And it’ll chew this Costa Rica Guy up and spit him out faster than you can say…
revolutionary misfit.
I guess, in that sense, they could be considered a renewable resource…
like Portland rains.
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