Update

It has been a season of grief.  The sudden loss of Peter Firchow, my friend of twenty-five years, in October was shattering.  Closer to home, there is my mother's cancer.  There have been things to say but no desire to write here.  "The busy griefs," as Auden calls them, want time.

Downtown Portland isn't a bad place to be if you are mourning: weathered, uncheery, crowded by forest to the north, with its rusting bridges and glum faces, this is seldom a city to twist you by the arm into feeling like you should be happier.  Except for recent development, it feels human, dialed to what is necessary and useful. I expect this is due in large part to my walking life, far from freeways. Nor has it all been torn down and rebuilt into a frictionless facsimile of every other recent glib American place; there is a memory here with the weight of the past, and it reminds me of Waukegan, Ill., in my 1960s childhood, where what was old had a claim on the present (largely because prosperity was a rumor, work hard, capital fickle, industrial decline afoot, the loot extracted and the action elsewhere). 

Livability is helped by there not being billboards on every corner, so I rarely see insipid ads outdoors. This is in contrast to Saint Paul where my days were oppressed by my view of the sleek, blinding teeth on the twenty-five foot high faces of KSTP-5's TV news team. Yes, all four in a row, like sinister diecasts, sugary same-jawed fuckers perched above the corner on Snelling Avenue.  I thought of them as smiling suppository salesmen pushing the new revolutionary Jumbo iPlug: you shove it up in the crevices of your ignorance and -- give it time!  give it time to work! -- within minutes you're aware of every shooting, car pileup, NFL trade and massing stormfront for miles.

I don't even know the names of the newscasters here.  And I will never know.  

It's a start.