Alimony Flats

This has been my first non-working Saturday in Portland. During my stays here last year, I spent my Saturdays and Sundays in the office, feverishly working against a deadline to get a report out on time. But today, I was able to sleep in guilt free, brew a pot of coffee and watch CNN in my boxer shorts.

I'm staying for the next 30 days in a furnished apartment (my company calls in a "corporate condo," but it's not a condominium and there's nothing corporate about it). It's located in the heart of Portland's Pearl District, a mixed area of expensive condos and apartments for low-income people just north of W Burnside and west of NW Broadway, or as Chuck Palahniuk calls it, "Alimony Flats." The picture above was taken from my living-room window this morning.

The Pearl District has the largest concentration of art galleries in the city as well as restaurants, nightclubs and small shops. However, the only food store in the District is Whole Foods, located six blocks to the south and two blocks to the west of my apartment. I walked there in the rain Wednesday night after wandering all over the Pearl looking for a food store, but all I saw were brew-pubs, galleries, boutiques, salons and sushi. I finally went back to the apartment, found the Whole Foods address on the net, and headed back out in the rain to get my groceries.

That rain continued all day Thursday and Friday, but this morning it turned into a wet snow that didn't stick to the ground. Walking around in the Oregonian weather in my Georgian jacket and sweater, I realized that I didn't look like the other people here in Portland, specifically, they weren't wearing Georgian clothing but instead were walking around wearing ski jackets and mountain gear. They also didn't look as cold and wet as I felt.

So I hiked four blocks to the west and and two to the north to the REI store, and bought myself a better coat for this weather - a Mountain Hardwear Conduit Softshell, as well as a Blur-brand hooded pullover sweatshirt and a pair of "Mount Denali" gloves. Patagonia has a store right behind my apartment building and North Face has a store a couple blocks from here, and I'm told that Columbia Sprotswear has an outlet store in nearby Sellwood, but I selected REI for its greater variety of brands. After I changed into my new, regionally appropriate wardrobe, I walked back to Whole Foods for lunch and then headed over to Powell's Bookstore and bought two books on Northwestern geology, a copy of the Blue Cliff Record, and Chuck Palahniuk's "Fugitivies & Refugees," subtitled "A Walk Through Portland," in which he calls the Pearl District "Alimony Flats."

Alimony must be a thriving business here in Portland, because there's new construction going on everywhere you look in the Pearl. Cranes are everywhere, like this one visible over the roof of my apartment:

Or a Palahniuk puts it, everyone looking to make a new life migrates west, across America to the Pacific Ocean. Once there, the cheapest city where they can live is Portland, so the city is filling up fast with the most cracked of the crackpots, the misfits among misfits.

Apparently now including a 50-something Zen Buddhist from Atlanta, Georgia.