You Cannot Ever Go Back Home

Being on vacation and visiting family back in the Portland area this week, I have come to the conclusion that I could never move back to my home town again. While I miss the conifers and the beautiful greenery, and of course my family and friends, I unfortunately cannot tolerate the fruits, nuts, and flakes that populate this town that have now reached critical mass and basically have ruined many of the best parts of this beautiful state.

Just reading the local newspaper, The Oregonian, was enough to get my blood pressure severely elevated. Portland may now be more liberal than San Francisco is, and they are proud of it! One would think that they would realize that it is their liberal policies that have about bankrupted the state and caused the comparatively outrageous unemployment rate here, not to mention the fact that they have caused grossly unnecessary traffic nightmares through very poor city planning and a flat out refusal to expand major arterials.

Then to top it off, I spent four hours in a freak Portland area snow-storm that should have only taken 20 minutes to reach my destination. Horrendous traffic I can tolerate, however, it grows unbearable when the other motorists bring a new meaning to foolish and rude. For those of them that believe in karma, they must have caught it coming back around because most of the ones in the ditches were the rude idiots in their BMW's, Subaru's, and Prius's.

By the way, I find it amusing how many bumper stickers on cars such as these state their support in "Freeing Tibet" or supporting Palestine. One wonders, and I strongly suspect, that these are the same folks that want us to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan after successfully liberating millions and millions of people living under an evil dictator and a freedom-hating totalitarian regime respectively.

Yeah, the home area of my boyhood has gotten too big, too crowded, too liberal, and too expensive. I guess I will just have to remember it as it was in my memories and watch the Blazers on TV when they broadcast the games nationally so I can still see at least something great from Portland that hasn't changed!