To a city unknown
On a work trip to Portland, Oregon, I was thinking about creativity, sobriety, and how places change.
1/24/2024
PORTLAND, Oregon — I’m writing from the 6th floor of the Hyatt Regency, and the words aren’t coming that easily. I’m up very early as I always am now. From the window the sky is gloomy, dark, and cold. The forecast is for a 90% chance of rain, and it’s that way for days.
I’m here for a company-wide retreat. The corporation I work for brings everyone together once a year in a different city, and for some reason they chose in Portland in January. I look north over the Oregon Convention Center out on a gray city that meant a lot to me at one time in my life.
About 15 years ago some of my best friends got here first, and I joined them. We had an idea of a scene full of artists living in one place because it was where we all wanted to be. The rent was cheap enough. You could get by without a car. And the city felt alive with creativity and possibility.
Yes, it was depressing in the winter, most places are, and a lot of people had SAD lamps, but the writing and the books and music and the good beer were supposed to be enough to get us through. That was the idea I bought into. I wasn’t here long enough to tap too deeply into all of that — Asia called me back again before a year passed — but I can remember my days here vividly, with fondness, even if that city I knew then is gone.
Places never stay the same, do they? I returned about five years ago, on a reporting assignment to write about the cannabis industry in Oregon, and I tried to go back to some of my favorite bars, including Hal’s on Morrison, which I loved because it was a true working-class joint, complete with alcoholic regulars and a no-bullshit atmosphere. The type of bar you still see in Nebraska. That time, I walked right inside and it was like I entered a portal to a future I didn’t want — carefully crafted ambiance, white tablecloths, and candles on little tables. Fake. Pretentious. Completely ruined.
When I think of the word gentrification it’s not often that I think of poor white people being pushed out by richer white people. In places like Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where I lived after I lived in Portland (after another stint in Korea), the gentrification was more obviously racial. You could see it just by looking at the people. A historically Black neighborhood was being occupied by white hipsters. Here it was white-on-white displacement. More subtle. Just as sad. The tech money pushed out the artists, and the city I knew had disappeared. I went back to Denver thinking I wouldn’t ever have another reason to come back to Portland.
But here I am, looking out at this city and thinking about those Traveling Days again.
Yesterday, in the way that moments like this develop on work trips, I was sitting at lunch in a convention center room, eating catered food from a plate that turned into a buffet-like mess of mixed meals. When the SEO Guru (not a term I love, but I’m not naming anyone here) at my table said he was hoping to get over to Powell’s Bookstore, and I was looking at a solid block of session content that didn’t apply to me at all, I said we should go together right now.
We went back to the hotel where I ditched my laptop and my badge in my room, then took an Uber over the Burnside Bridge. I was glad to have escaped the conference to at least get a look around.
For many years people have held up Portland as an example of how “liberal politics have destroyed a city,” and from that characterization you expect to see tent encampments and people shooting up and defecating on every sidewalk. Antifa lighting fires in the street. This was a quick trip, but I didn’t see that. There were a few street folks outside of the bookstore that asked for a couple of bucks when I stopped to take a photo of the iconic sign. The street scene seemed like many other cities in America. Not great, but not the Zombie Apocalypse either.
We went in and I split for the Small Press wall, where two of Adam Gnade’s books, This is the End of Something But It’s Not the End of You and The Internet Newspaper, were faced out and displayed prominently. Here, Adam is the king of the independent press world, and he deserves the prominence. The attention is partially thanks to the great Kevin Sampsell, who is a champion of Adam’s writing, and indie writers in general, but it’s also because Adam puts in the work, and he’s getting better all the time. He writes books that strive to show what it’s like to be alive during our times. He’s my favorite writer, and I’m proud to call him a friend.
I also found books by Trident Press authors Noah Cicero, Nick Gregario, Claire Hopple, and Mason Parker, as well as a copy of my novella The Silence is the Noise. I pulled all of their books and faced them out so smart people would buy them. That idea came from Nicole Morning when I texted our writer’s group pictures of the books. “Guerilla Trident Display!” Adam had responded.

After that, we didn’t have a lot of time, so I went to the children’s book section and got Jia an Eric Carle boxed set with titles we didn’t already have.
Back in an Uber across the Willamette River, I told the SEO Guru about the time I lived here and worked at a restaurant that floated on pylons on the river. I had just arrived and wanted to work, and it was an easy way to make money and stay busy.
When we passed what’s now called the Moda Center, I told him about the day I found out Bob Dylan was in town after I showed up at work. I told my manager I had something I wanted to do, and he said, “Sure, get out of here. We can cover for you.” I hopped back on my bike and took off.
That was back when the arena was called the Rose Garden, and Robert Zimmerman was singing about looking for Alicia Keys in his Tom Waits voice. He was playing songs from Modern Times, including “Spirit on the Water,” which has the sneering line:
You think I'm over the hill
You think I'm past my prime
Let me see what you got
I remembered all that freedom to do anything. Live anywhere. Spend my time going wherever I wanted. Traveling Days, indeed.
Back at the hotel, we went to our separate floors, and I didn’t talk to the SEO Guru again on the trip. I knew I’d see him on a Teams call in a few weeks.
That night it was the ‘80s party at Revolution Hall, an old school that had been converted into a concert venue with several bars. It was only a few blocks from my old apartment on Morrison, and I stood on the rooftop in the freezing drizzle and looked for some building that I might remember, some way to reconnect myself to my past and this city. But the only way I knew I was looking in the right direction was by checking the way the blue cone faced on my Google Maps location dot.
It almost felt like I was in a dream where people were telling me that I was in a place that I should remember but nothing looked familiar.
There was a cover band and face painting and a photo booth. I wore a Care Bears T-shirt that said, “Careful, I’m Grumpy” with Love-a-Lot Bear trying to console Grumpy Bear on it. People were dressed up like Hulk Hogan and Madonna and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. One group was dressed up as the actual Care Bears.
Not drinking at a work conference might be the toughest test of my sobriety. There’s a lot of exhausting networking and hanging out with co-workers you don’t know that well. People see this as time away from family to do what they want. No kids to take care of in the morning. No spouse to monitor your drinking. Booze on the company dime. Some don’t handle it that well.
That all makes it tempting to fall in with the fun crowd and see where the night ends up. I’ve never been very good at moderation, and I love the feeling of getting swept up in a crowd and drinks and even better if it’s a mix of people you would never find yourself around in your other life. It’s almost like you’re traveling to a new place with people you don’t really know, on a strange trip. Why not keep yourself open to the possibilities?
Why not? Because in actuality it’s not that kind of trip at all, and getting carried away mixing work and pleasure is a bad look. For clarity, I’m not some kind of careerist, overly ambitious shithead trying to keep my image and reputation spotless. I’m just trying not to mess up.
The pledge I made when I decided to become a dad was to always be there for Jia, either home or traveling, whether it’s on the phone or in the morning, or any time at all. I want her to know that I won’t be drunk or in any way unavailable at any time. It has to be a choice I make for her every minute. It has to be a choice to live in reality. To remember everything. To feel everything. I owe her at least that.
At the risk of sounding like a soft-minded company stooge, I did come away from the conference inspired in one specific way, and it came from an unlikely source.
Let me backup a little bit. I don’t have a core, guiding philosophy I follow, but I believe in the Stoic principle that we don’t control everything that happens in our lives, we control how we react to what happens in our lives. And even though a lot of what we were doing on this trip was absurd and self-congratulatory in a comical way, one presentation in particular resonated with me.
It was a talk themed around the idea that the culture of the company should be based on a “growth mindset.” I know, I know — what is this? A LinkedIn post? But hear me out. I’m sure this is a buzzy term in the business world that gets thrown around a lot, but the speaker’s message got at something I’ve been thinking about in my career as a writer and someone who considers himself a creative person. A part of the talk was about how we shouldn’t be afraid to fail, to fail quickly, and to move on. That we should try to build things that may not be perfect but are still good. That we should move fast and not over-think it.
That idea is what I need to remember when I want to hold on to something like a novel manuscript and not let anyone read it because I’m afraid of what people will say.
One more idea around this: When I got back home, I was reading the journalism newsletter that James Durston puts out, and he helped articulate what I was thinking and feeling about the creative process that was spurred by that talk. Durston wrote:
Do not wait. Do not plan for perfection. Those circumstances are idyllic and rare, perhaps impossible. There will always be an excuse, a distraction, another thing. Make the first mark, and make it badly. Envision the imperfect, loosely structured ugliness of the first attempt, and aim for its heart. Creation is a process not an end. The result isn’t up to you. Quality is for others to debate. You must simply make. Produce. Allow your being to show itself. Be true. Be busy. Success and failure do not exist. Only process. Only production. Make, produce and create like one day you will die.
Some other stuff happened on that trip that I probably shouldn’t write about because I work for a publicly traded company, and I need health insurance. Not that someone from the SEC is going to read this, but still.
I also want to write a novel called The Trade Show because these conferences are deeply weird experiences that at once leave me feeling drained and at the same time hopeful about people. Most of us wouldn’t meet or know each other in non-work lives. We’re thrust into these situations, and it’s somehow uplifting that we all help each other through these strange events by being kind and human. I’d like to put that in a novel, and I’ll save the stories I can’t tell here for that.
As I look out on this city that I loved once, I’m thinking about how when I was younger so much of my writing was connected to hope, to promise, to the future, to how I thought in my 20s that putting the words down was enough, would be enough, to get me where I wanted to go. So much of my motivation and my creativity came from that thinking.
And now, 20 years later, I’m in a hotel room, alone, putting these words down knowing that the writing I’ve done these two decades has gotten me here, and only here. Is it far enough?
No. I have the feeling I’ll go the rest of my life and never feel like I’ve gotten where I wanted to go. Is that a blessing for a writer? To never feel satisfied? To always feel like you’re striving to arrive? Who’s to say that getting a novel published by a major imprint would be the dream I really want? What if the reviews are bad? Or it doesn’t sell?
Would getting what I want, only to find it wasn’t what I wanted at all, be worse?
I’m having all these thoughts and I don’t even have the excuse of hotel-room anxiety from a hangover.
One thing that did happen recently that made me feel good about my career was getting interviewed by the travel writer
. Rolf's a legend in the travel-writing world, and last year he included an excerpt from this essay about reverse culture shock that I wrote for The Week in his book The Vagabond’s Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel. He sent me some questions about writing that I enjoyed answering.Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
How did you get started traveling?
I’ve always been a reader, and when I started reading novels about real people going to far away places, I wanted to live that way as well. Much like you, Rolf, my life as a traveler truly began when I first taught English in South Korea, where I ended up living for five years. That opened up the entire continent of Asia to me, and I saw as much of it as I could while I was there. My wife is from the Seoul area, so we still get back there fairly often, and I try to fit in a trip to another country when I can. We were on Phu Quoc, in Vietnam, for example, for a week last year as part of our trip to Korea.
You can read the rest here.