My Life as Forrest Gump

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to write about my now-not-so-recent experience as a guest on Strange Love Live, but have been consistently failing to come up with something that does justice to it. I wanted to write something really funny, and mention panties at least 17 times, but I just couldn’t write about it at all.

I’m still not entirely sure why I couldn’t write. I mean, I think we’ll all agree that I generally don’t have trouble filling space with words. This, however, time I am.

Part of the problem is that it’s more of an experience than that. It’s not limited to my appearance on The Couch of Cami Kaos. The experience is something much bigger than that. It’s a world of events happening around me while I play ping pong.

In the past couple days, I’ve begun thinking that maybe the reason for my trouble is that I’m just really not the person to write about this. Right now, Dr. Normal is thinking about the audio settings for tonight’s show, the second focusing on Sex as a healthy and fun topic. Cami’s rounding up her friends for laughter, a wild after hours, and scheming on how to make her husband blush. They’re prepping the studio and changing everything from the last performance- and that performance was about the Idaho tech community.

The point is that while I’m sitting and trying to think about what’s happening, I’m already a distant memory, because they are on the move. It’s as if I’ve accidentally stumbled into a big room to dodge the rain, and happened to get caught in a picture standing next to someone famous.

I’m Forrest Gump.

There’s something very big happening here, and I’m witlessly stumbling onto its fringes.

Timberline Lodge and Blueprints

Jessica and I got married at Timberline Lodge on July 24th, 2005. We’d been there before and loved it both for the atmosphere and for the history. If you go there, and head downstairs, there’s a little room with a continually playing movie about how they built the lodge. It’s mostly comprised of interviews of people describing what it was like to work during that time, the feeling of being one of the lucky ones- either that had a job, or that had the opportunity to do something great in such a hard time.

The most poiniant thing about that movie is the continual sense that the people were just making it up as they went along.

The most poiniant thing about that movie is the continual sense that the people were just making it up as they went along. One man tells a story of how they built the furniture. There were rules they had to abide by, and one was that nothing was supposed to be built without a blueprint. So the carpenters would build a chair, making it up as they went along- “This looks good, that might work-” and then when the chair was done, they’d go back and make a blueprint of the chair they just built.

It was the same for nearly everything. Glass workers made these incredible hand-cut murals of Paul Bunyon and Babe in a tiny bar. They just made everything up on the fly. Iron workers would create these beautiful hand-wrought gates and railings to guide people along beautiful stairways into dining rooms. They were building on little more than a whim and an idea, and throughout the movie you get the sense that there was this time, this wild, grand, mysterious time, way back when, during which people could just think of stuff to do and, well, do it. They did it. And what did they build? Not just Timberline. They didn’t build a lodge, they built a feeling.

You leave the movie thinking things like “Wow, it would’ve been great to live back then, when you could just get away with stuff like that. When you could make it all up as you went along because there was no blueprint that someone else gave you to follow.”

Those, you think, were the good ol’ days.

Portland, Or., 2009: “The Good Ol’ Days”

The more I think of it, the more I realize why it’s difficult for me to write about talking with Cami and A.J. and Bill about Oregon Blogs. It’s because no-one is supposed to write about this for another 20-30 years at least. We’re in the middle of building something that none of us understand.

I just keep thinking about this fellow in the movie who said things like “We didn’t really have any idea what we were doing, or what they needed, we just knew we had to build some furniture, so we built what we knew how to build, the way we knew how to build it.” I think of that, and then I remember seeing Dr. Normal sitting at his mixing panel and saying “There’s a lot of people in here. Cami, bring down that fire extinguisher, just in case.”

Look. Do you see it? They’re on an overused 19 inch television in a tiny room. They’re stars in a documentary that people watch before going to eat dinner in the Timberline’s Cascade Dining Room. They’re talking about being in a basement, just making this stuff up, just doing things on the fly. Meanwhile,  they’re part of this larger movement-  call it PDX Tech or whatever you want, it amounts to the same thing.

They are building chairs. They are making history.

Stop and look around you. Feel the energy. There is so much going on. Over here, a guy starts a blog just because cool stuff is going on that no-one hears about. Over there, a group of people get together just because they want  to help cool events happen, small gatherings and unexpected ideas become movements that grow and gain traction in ways that the originators never even- couldn’t possibly have- conceived.  Ideas- good ideas, crazy ideas, new ideas- they sprout like flowers feeding bees, pollinating a landscape of possibilities that no-one dreamed of.

And where’s the blueprint? Where’s the plan? Where are the people saying “this is how you do this, and you must never do that?”

They don’t exist. Or if they do, they only do because people make something up, fail and finally succeed, and then write it down for others.

Portland, we are living in The Good Ol’ Days. We are the people that our grandchildren will watch and dream about, saying things like “Imagine what it was like, back at the turn of the century, when they did, oh, so very much, with so little. Imagine what it would be like to change the world.”

Coda

You, gentle reader, may not have the emotional attachment that I do to this experience. I admit that I am a bit swept up. I sat on Strange Love Live, I’m soon speaking at Ignite Portland, it’s a lot for me to handle. You may read this as the worst form of hyperbole. If you do, know that I understand.

But know also that I truely believe this. I believe it because I feel it. You may see it as little podcast by a simple couple who is more proud of being parents than of anything else. I see it as one more piece of a grand and beautiful building that going up around us. It’s growing faster than any of us imagine, it’s more than anyone yet even appreciates. Strange Love Live is a chair, Ignite Portland is an iron railing, Beer and Blog is a glass mural in a bar.

And Portland. Portland is a feeling.

Me? I’m Forrest Gump. I’m stumbling around on the fringes. I’m little more than one of those guys carrying a box across a field in a black and white photo hanging on the wall somewhere. You might glance at it, and wonder what the guy was doing, but the thought barely crosses your mind before someone calls your name on a reservation list and you turn away to go to eat dinner in The Cascade Dining Room at Timberline Lodge.

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