There are no post-ironic dive bars where you can show off your foam trucker hats and drink PBR. You can only have a dog if it’s a cockapoo or Scottish Terrier and has a name like “Snowball” or “Alabama”. There are no breakfast joints where you have to wait 45 minutes in the street before you get an omelette containing weird crap like wild mushrooms and goat cheese. The streets are too narrow for your SUV but too wide for your Cooper Mini. The hills are hateful for fixed-gear bicycles. There is nowhere to salsa dance. There are no punk clubs. Every night is craft night, but only at the senior center. The street corners are completely unsuited for drum circles. The only place to get a mixed drink closes at 11 pm.

The residents are old but not cool old. They are themselves exactly, completely without postmodern self-awareness. They wear matching sweat suits with tourist slogans but never polyester and they do it entirely without irony. The people who aren’t old have families. But not alternative magnet-school type families who make their own peanut butter or tattoo/cateye-glasses-wearing moms with bumper stickers on their strollers and I have never seen a little girl in a soccer uniform. The single people here are all into their mini-vans and Friends reruns and Monday Night Football with old college buddies at the sports bar and Tae-Bo and dressing up their cats for Christmas which they love because they are very churchy. They may be single but they are profoundly uncool and project rays of overwhelming uncoolness miles in every direction. Only the West Hills stand between downtown/inner eastside Portland and a tsunami of horrifying Houston-style uncoolness.

Did you know that if you live in Multnomah Village your address is actually “Tigard?” And your area code is 360? And it takes an hour by bus to get to Nocturnal? And the west hills block all reception of Adult Swim? And you can’t load certain webpages, for example Flickr? In fact, there is no broadband Internet access whatsoever! All the coffee is Maxwell House! The vegetables in the grocery store contain EXTRA pesticides! The ultra-violet rays will dissolve clothes from American Apparel!

FOR GOD’S SAKE HIPSTERS YOU’D HATE IT HERE!

The last thing I want is people living on SE Ankeny or Division or St. Johns or NE Fremont noticing my neighborhood and moving here with their hoodies and tribal tatoos and $200 sneakers and Arcade Fire records, making it “hip” or “with it” or “rocking.” I want everyone in Portland to know that Multnomah Village is kind of boring and staid and has no nightlife and nowhere to hang out wearing white belts or dreadlocks reading Chuck Palahniuk and smoking clove cigarettes. It doesn’t rock at all, it’s actually [what’s the opposite of rocking?]. I love it.

Dear all,

This morning I had Sitka put to sleep. It was the hardest, saddest, and most awful decision I have ever made. His physical condition over the past month had taken a very sharp turn for the worse, despite which he remained the same cheerful and brave little dog he has always been. Sitka spent the last day of his life much as he spent all the days before it: playing, eating, and living with his smiley good attitude. Last night several of my neighbors stopped in to visit and to say goodbye. Jess, Lori, and I took him to the park before his vet appointment this morning and he played with all his usual vigor. He left this world the way I would hope to: surrounded by his favorite humans, wagging his tail. I will miss him.

I was in that kind of mood. The kind where I sit on the edge of the bed in my underoos and stare at the wall, too down to move. I exerted a great effort of will just to shower and dress. I am not like this often. And my schedule was totally thrown. I didn’t get my 6 am bike ride in, but it wasn’t so late in the morning that I could just clean up and hit the office.

So I slung Sitka into his scooter and headed to Couch park.

Sitka had a great time: fetch, chasing other dogs (well, trying to chase dogs), sniffing butts, the usual dog stuff. In a wheelchair, my dog is normal. Living with a disabled dog can be depressing as hell but this morning he was exactly the kind of dog I want. Then the most amazing thing happened.

On our way back to the apartment, I passed the Metro Learning Center. A woman stepped around the MLC from the back parking lot and said, “when we saw your dog I knew my daughter Ilana would want to meet him.”

Apprehensiveness briefly seized me. Sitka does not like children. He’s not bad with them, he just doesn’t know what to do with them. They make him skittish. But Ilana was Special with a capital S. She was Sitka special.

Ilana had, I would guess, cerebral palsy or MS. She used a wheeled walker to get around -- just like the walkers old people use, but mini-sized. I would guess she was about 7 years old, frail and curled. Just like Sitka. I tried to set her up: “Sitka is a little nervous with kids,” but she was unfazed, and she did the thing kids always want to do, which usually sets Sitka off. She reached right for his face. Sitka loved it. Ilana and her mom couldn’t get enough Sitka, and they tugged his ears (which he loves) and scratched under his chin (which he loves) and he wagged his tail so hard I thought he’d tip his scooter.

Ilana asked the obvious question: “what’s wrong with him?” to which I gave my stock reply, “he has a neurological condition that makes it hard to walk.” Which led to a discussion of the other usual topics: How long has he been in a wheelchair (about 3 weeks), will he get better (no), etc.

Ilana told me this story:
“When I first got my walker, I didn’t know how to use it. I couldn’t turn corners. I would walk in a straight line until I hit something like a wall or the edge of a door, and my mom would have to turn me.”

I said, “Sitka does exactly the same thing!”

I waited until we had said our goodbyes and I was walking back to the apartment to have the requisite Generation X post-ironic reaction. My disabled dog bonded with a disabled little girl. If I’d have seen it in a movie, I would have rolled my eyes. In the real world, it made me feel good, way-down-in-my-soul good.

on a cool dry weekend afternoon about a year ago
i took the dog to the school
near the house i used to share with my wife
to play frisbee.
lori was shopping for dishes with my mother.
sitka and i were mostly alone on the playground.
my fingers grew cold
reaching for the wet muddy frisbee
over and over and over.
i never quite understood those dishes
they were rectangular.
lori has them now.