Portlandia, please stop. Three seasons was torturous enough to make it well known that Portland is, and will remain, weird. Two additional seasons is akin to beating the dead horse with Hellfire missiles.
Be my guest, if you have the will to reach down into the depths of Gresham to pull out some crack jokes or walk down Southeast 82nd Avenue on a Friday night. You might find that Portland, like anywhere else, can get incomprehensibly bizarre. As of right now, though, you are running out of material and encroaching upon my personal space.
We wallow in cliche as it is, and your vignettes that debase the eccentricities of the Northwest’s liberal inhabitants are just making it harder for me to get to work and school because of your road blockades. If you want to argle and bargle about yuppies who like to knit, the least you could do is not congest my neighborhood. Yarn in the yarn store, not in the street. And just for the record, kickball league is off limits. Go play hide-and-go-seek alone in a library, grow old and never find yourself.
Now, Portlanders have to deal with an insultingly slap-to-the-face comedy style that was played out in the days of Tim and Eric, and the subject matter is a city that proudly harbors diversity and uniqueness. California actors taking up space to make fun of what Portlanders take pride in seems counterintuitive to the Portland mien.
Satire holds a special place in the hearts of the seasonally depressed. However, throwing low blows at the youngest and debatably most liberally progressive city in the country is like drop-kicking an infant. It is high time you switched cities.
Go back to Los Angeles and show the world how weird it is to simply walk around the Staples Center. Or head to the Venice Strip, where people jump off ladders into glass. You could give that a whirl while laughing at your own weakly gleaned witticisms and unoriginal style.
Florida sounds like a great idea. I hear that people there like to build amusement parks, drive around in pontoon boats chasing alligators, shove their arms down the throats of catfish and relish anaconda infestations—pretty weird, huh? Because you don’t catch many drifts, I don’t think you’ve realized yet that the eccentricities of a single city do not warrant five seasons of ridicule.
I thought the days of bullying were over, but it seems as though Portland’s infamously passive-aggressive nature has seeped through your rain-sodden skulls. The people who enjoy you aren’t the ones who must suffer your existence. Not only are you contributing to the city’s gentrification by revealing certain niches to the pop-culture world, you are making it seem as though Portland is a place dominated by idiosyncratic airheads, which attracts more airheads, thus driving rent prices up.
As a city, and as a community, we need to find it in our roots to tear down this woebegone eyesore. Not only will we free up the single-lane traffic nightmare and put a plug in the leaking dam that is the mouths of those who repeat cliche phrases we should deem unmentionable, we will give the army of street-soliciting canvassers a mess of new recruits. Polls and petitions all around.