Goodbye Portland

It was around the middle of March when we decided to leave.

My lease ended June 1st, which gave us about two and a half months to tie up loose ends and get the hell out of dodge.  There wasn’t a lot of thought behind it.  My gut said go, and I listened.

Because really, imagine lying on your deathbed, skin on your face wrinkled like an old man’s nutsack on a cold day, clinging to the mystery of what your life could have looked like. Unable to step fully into death because you never fully stepped into life.

Talk about a nightmare.

All we really knew was that we loved each other. That we wanted to open a bed and breakfast.  Somewhere, somehow, some way.  And the reason we were doing it?  Simple. What we were doing felt right.  That’s it. That’s the whole blueprint.

But before we could leave, we had to say goodbye to Portland, the city of roses where beauty and decay share a smoke on the curb.  That damp, unraveling quilt of punks, burnouts, baristas, anarchists, misfits, and the chronically misunderstood. A city where misgendering and microdosing cross paths beneath moody skies and ever-watching crows. Half-feral and half-lazy as shit, stitched together with moss and fentanyl, soaked in stale Rainier, threaded with deranged sidewalk sermons and the sharp sting of piss-soaked walls.

Slouched in the Willamette Valley’s crotch she either rots or ferments, depending on who your talking to.   The sidewalks are covered in leaves and human turd, urban landmines marking the city’s slow collision between radical compassion and systemic failure.    A surreal, dreamlike place that taught me more than a few lessons and offered a mirror I wasn’t always ready to look into.  Something I dig deeper in: An Ode to Portland.

It’s the kind of city where, on your birthday, you can eat and drink your way through the day for free, if you know where to look and where leaving anything in your car overnight means waking to find a shattered window.

A city so brazen in “fuck it” energy, in 2022 some guys opened the “Shroom House” an illegal but legal psilocybin dispensary on Burnside.  No secret menu, no hushed exchanges, just psychedelic mushrooms in the display case as if it was a bakery. Despite it being illegal, it still managed to last just a few days before the authorities stepped in, but for that brief moment, it felt like the most Portland thing ever: part rebellion, part hallucination, all-in on chaos and hope.

That’s the place we were leaving.

There were just a handful of things left to do before we hit the road...

Learn how to bake sourdough for the Bell & Breakfast

typical stretch and fold

typical stretch and fold

best secret method to stretch the dough you WONT see on youtube

Say goodbye to Matt’s job at the Multnohmah Athletic Club

Matt’s trainer Picture, thanks to Patrick Fisher

Maestro Perparim Ferunaj taught Tai Chi so well I was able to end up teaching my own class, he is pictured down below in the red

Reconvert Ravie  

From a one person adventure mobile

to a love shack on wheels

Take some photos

Invite Djelal Kadir, a fellow Tai Chi comrade, over for dinner

laugh at downsizing from two apartments to a Rav 4

Next up: “The Test Drive (Of Love and Ravie)” – our first road trip together, 4,000 miles across the belly of America.