It’s been an incredible week in Portland, Oregon. As I sit in PDX, waiting for my Alaska Airlines flight back to New York, I can’t help but reflect on the past seven days and the memories I’ve made. Mornings, awash in the smell of pine trees, spent walking to coffee shops where I’d sip a cappuccino and read the Portland Mercury and Willamette Week. Afternoons whiled away perusing the shelves of stationery in novelty shops that make little economic sense. Evenings filled with great food and live music on Mississippi Avenue. The Pacific Northwest is the most relaxing region in the whole country. I love the cloud cover and the misting rain. Yes, it’s clear after this brief visit that I cannot live anywhere.
Were I to return a few months from now and establish myself as an Oregonian, I’d have to find a job and a place to live. I’d obsess about the Cascadia fault, the rupture of which is unlikely on any particular day but inevitable in the long run; the wildfire season; and the Trail Blazers, unable to break through in the playoffs year after year.
Sometimes the natural beauty of Maine or Vermont seems appealing to me, but I’d spend the summer worrying about ticks.
I could try to make it in entertainment, and live in Los Angeles—I am a fan of KROQ, and I like the kind of fast-casual restaurants where they give you one of those signs with a number to put on your table, so the server knows where to bring your food—but the freeway has too many lanes. I’d have to set aside several hours each day there to meditate away my fears about earthquakes, as well. And how could I soothe myself by taking deep breaths, given the smog?
Friends say that I’d enjoy Austin, but any place that sunny is an instant no. The UV index peaks at eleven in July and August!
A brief perusal of the official Web page for immigration to Canada reveals that I am not a strong candidate.
I’m fond of Barcelona, but my only marketable skill is editing and writing in English. What would I do there?
In 2018, Tulsa, Oklahoma, offered people ten thousand dollars to relocate there if they had remote jobs. In response, an acquaintance of mine said that he “wouldn’t move to Tulsa for all the money in the world.” I disagree. I’d move to any city for all the money in the world. Whatever the differences are between Tulsa and my ideal place of residence, I’m certain I could address them with unlimited financial resources. I could pay my favorite restaurateurs to open locations there, start up a couple alternative weeklies, and commission both a home and a transit system built exactly to my specifications. To return to the UV index, as an example: in Tulsa it averages around ten in June and July, but that wouldn’t be an issue after I constructed the ZellerDome™, a retractable roof that would remain closed over the entire city from 11 A.M. to 3 P.M.
Still, there would be downsides to living in Tulsa, even with all the money in the world. For one thing, how could I trust any of my new “friends”? It’d be nice to think that they were interested in me as a person, but they’d depend on me for everything they needed. No one would be able to eat or have shelter without my munificence. This also brings up philosophical questions about what it means to have “all” the money. Does this imply that I could never pay anyone for anything, because then they’d have some of the money? If so, does it follow that the money is worthless because I can’t use it? In that case, Tulsa is not worth considering.
I guess I’ll just stay in New York until the very end, when it will be time to go to southern New Jersey, because that’s where I found a pet cemetery that allows uncremated human bodies to be buried alongside their pets. I wonder if Portland has one of those.
