A #butterfly of some sort or another. #wayoutwest

PDX-centricity

While visiting Portland over the winter holidays, my brother and I made a pilgrimage to the tiny village of St. John’s on the northernmost tip of what is still, surprisingly, Portland proper. I say surprisingly because to get there, you must wend a path through what are, to SW/SE Portland residents, the already far flung expanses of upper industrial NW beyond which surely, I thought, the city simply ends. And then...you keep going. Doing so takes you past the dense catchment of current and repurposed factories and warehouses on and around NW 23rd and up the bipolar stretch of Hwy 30 that runs along the train tracks. The city persists, it turns out, amid the lush, looming hillside of Forest Park and a sparse population of very active industrial buildings and port facilities. It all takes time, covers substantial distance, and I remain incredulous: by the time you get to St. Johns, it feels like you should be anywhere other than Portland. St. Johns Bridge, courtesy of ZnE's Dad

Callus Coffee, a pre-review

Don't tell the bros of Callus Coffee , Seattle's newest coffee pop-up shop, that 2017 may be a little too late to get in on the trend of infilling America's urban cores with third-wave coffee bars bearing unfortunate, esoteric names. 2017 is a year of political upheaval, a year when the wheels of #resistance are turning, resolutely focused on forestalling #Trumpocalypse by galvanizing the American left in a united front the likes of which we haven't seen in generations. It's time to retrench, for us all to focus on our essential values and ensure that our democratic institutions have the fortitude to provide for a viable future. This requires constructive anger. Apathy is not acceptable -- if you aren't angry, you aren't alive. It's difficult to maintain one's righteous fury when sampling the single-origin pour over offerings and mulling the purchase of artisanal coffee mugs at a new coffee bar in a former industrial district, all the while dicki

The Hipster Tableau, an @Instagram Joint

I love social media, but I also hate social media. It's revolutionizing how organizations and individuals communicate with each other and disseminate information, but it's also destroying language and ruining attention spans. It's giving voice to the oppressed and disenfranchised, but it's also creating jobs for the least talented and most privileged among us. And while it's empowering small businesses and entrepreneurs, it's also making us all beholden to the whims of the handful of massive tech firms that run the platforms and are actively seeking out more and more innovative ways to mine our personal data for profit. I'm a grown up, so I understand that nothing is or is meant to be perfect, that slick marketing presents idealized depictions of products and services that are inherently imperfect if not intrinsically evil, but I can't help but have my expectations ruined all the same, again and again. This all brings me to some observations on a gen

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