Weirdo in a Weird Land

With the closing of the Portland branch of my credit union, I had to venture into suburbia to make a deposit of large, unmarked, non-sequential bills.

A city is a small and compact thing. While to some it feels crowded, it is merely a jungle. In your travels you learn to discern landmarks, visual cues, that guide you. Suburbia is a vast and sprawling land. Signs indicate that you have left one locale and are entering another, but the landscape never changes. In my travels across these United States I have seen this same town over and over again. The same shops, the same parking lots, the same houses. Where am I? The sign says Beaverton but it is virtually indecipherable from neighboring Hillsboro or far away Brooklyn Park.

The suburbs are not meant for people. This is a land of mobile steel, rubber, and specially formulated dent resistant polymers. Drive up this and drive through that. With a watchful eye you can sometimes spot one of these behemoths launching a fleshy little satellite that will dash, braving exposure to the elements, to retrieve some unknown necessity that a proprietor has thoughtlessly made inaccessible by any other means.

There, at the bus stop, stands a lone figure. He is a tall, awkward figure with his dyed black hair, wire rimmed glasses, and dark trench coat. You can see him pressed in upon himself, hands in pockets, elbows tucked in, feet together, head bowed down, the pressure of some demonic nightmare trying to squeeze this blight into oblivion.

A fleshy guidance system for one of these roaming lords of suburbia has it's ear pressed to some sort of communications device as it absent mindedly cuts off my path of travel. I roll down the window and shout, "You dirty animal! You filthy pig fucker! You shot Kennedy!" Perhaps coffee is the wrong drug for this place. Everyone else looks like they've been speed balling for years, constantly switching gears between intense, undirected bursts and frantic mother's milk relaxation.

Dear lord, get me out of this hell. Deliver me from this nightmare before I decide to follow through on the impulse to ram the next vehicle with a "W 04" sticker in the window. Carry me back over that ridge and down into the valley of the weird. Take me back to the stench of BC bud, french fry bio-diesel, and patchouli. Lead me to a land where one can actually see people, where I don't have to look at the numbers to tell the difference between houses, where I can walk into a store and smile at the owner who smiles back at me.

While I now sit safe in the valley, it is only a matter of time before I'll have to run that gauntlet of pig fuckers again. They have the city surrounded and have claimed it as their own. But we'll fight them, to the death if necessary. Every last freaky one of us.