While making arrangements to meet various people in Portland, I realized that I do not in fact know enough about my own neighborhood to make plans.
Yes, I know where my friends live – but everything else has changed so much I hardly know what to think. Chez What? is gone, I hear, along with assorted other landmarks I could reliably count on. There are coffeeshops and bars and restaurants and record stores where once there were merely boarded storefronts.
The worst by far is the fact that The Jockey Club was torn down to make way for, I don’t know, an expansion of the community college or something along those lines.
I wasn’t a regular at that bar (or any drinking establishment as I was a pure and innocent youth – do you believe me?) but it was the nearest place to meet people or take visitors.
One of my fondest memories from Portland involved sitting in a corner as my friends played Truth or Dare, which ended with the bartender doing a striptease on our table and Byron kissing a taxidermied moose.
Of course, I didn’t play.
That would be telling.