San Diego And Gomorrah

Portland | Tyler Benson

Vice: an immoral or evil habit or practice

Vice Magazine: a print/online magazine founded in NY and built around anti-establishment themes. Currently cashing in on the Midwest’s 14-16 year old and/or intellectually equivalent to a 14-16 year old demographic who are also looking to be “counter culture” or looking to say something “counter culture” and/or ignorant on the magazine’s online comment section.

Vice City: a video game that I actually canceled an anniversary date with then girlfriend of 3 years in order to play until 4am. I killed people with a ninja sword.

my vice: Coffee. I take an iced, undiluted cold press coffee with sweet chai tea and a smidgen of cream.

I’m sure my vice sounds rather upper-middle class soccer mom compared to a lot of yours, as well it should be. I am an extrovert practicing introversion who just happened upon a type A personality disorder while showcasing a superiority complex. To me, 10am coffee is akin to a cocaine line off of a Shanghai Tunnel barkeep’s cleavage. Regardless of our vices, my love affair with Portland beings and ends with its bombastic practice of keeping a head about itself and never letting their personal demons control them outside of an appropriate public arena.

While filled with degree carrying baristas serving degree carrying waiters on their days off, with both classifications moonlighting in an avant garde band, nothing about Portland carries with it a visible douche bag stamp of attention attained by most cities overrun with youthful ideals. It is with my Rose City state of mind that I gathered my nary worn shorts and headed back towards two locations that contain 90% of my formative year’s friends and family. My stop was a sandy little town that you can still hear people quip as being named for a whale’s vagina if you hang out with an unfunny friend desperate for material and/or you are the unfunny friend. It was my 5 day stay in this city of the NFL’s Super Chargers that led me to cheer “Oh Snap!…San Diego is just like Portland but with a more established Pearl District scene.”

I drove my rental car, an electric blue Chevy Impala, along California’s historic Pacific Coast Highway with the jolly disposition of a Harlem revivalist wearing an exuberantly bright colored hoodie who drives my current ride “for ironies”; compared to his older brother who would have been driving my current ride about eight or ghetto years ago “for serious”. Perhaps it was this concept and scenery that turned around my normally captious stance of hating nearly every aspect of nearly every subject matter, but I must say that San Diego was extremely pleasant. The weather never dropped below 70 and the clouds were only a problem for 20 minutes per day. 20-30 year olds rode free on their beach cruisers to a beach front flooded with some of the most attractive people on the planet, each one of them in good spirits. While my San Diego trip included mainly Henry’s Tavern-esque bar selections I deemed acceptable, it was never a disappointing experience to be in an unpretentious area of a city with such surfer-esque sentiment.

I’m going to end this lollipop sucking here; my last night in San Diego made me wish that everything I saw I could play back for the parents and future children of this horrible bar’s patronage to which I would film these patron’s families sad, somber head hangs when they see what a lascivious orgy their current children and future parents are staples in.

It’s called the Wave House. It contains a 120,000 gallon wave machine which people ride wake boards on throughout the night. A bit shticky, but with its lack of hedonism aggressively rubbing against my thigh it was the sole vision keeping me from jabbing a pencil into my eye. $5 Bud Lights didn’t tip me off. The fact that shirts and pants were optional didn’t tip me off. The 2 gentlemen sporting ultra moused faux hawks wearing nearly the exact same $150 Ed Hardy sequined shirts didn’t even tip me off. What tipped me off that God had forsaken this 5000 sq. feet?…coming out of the bathroom to blaring techno music whose bass momentarily befuddled my temporal lobe with its audible finger poke jabbing. The once barren dance floor was now littered with heavily tribal-tattooed body builders doggystyle dry humping 4′ 7” blonde white girls in sarongs covering thong bikinis, people mimicking that glow stick thing that rave/lonely kids do and one portly Pollock with his shirt unbuttoned to reveal an assortment of gold chains amassed thicker than my own wrist. It was like a sci-fi convention, except replace sci-fi with attention whore and invite only fanatics whose fathers were mentally/physically abusive and mothers who affirmed hourly how manly a waxed chest looks.

I scampered away from the audible diarrhea and took leave at the bar. A fellow to my left with hair gelled into cones and heavy mascara couldn’t hold back his excitement for the pounding, repetitive bass line and commanded his hips to rocking and gyrating back and forth as if they were trying to fend off attacking wolves, ultimately bumping me into a girl that was holding her magenta Motorola Razr in between her very surgically manipulated set of double D’s. It was Saddam and Gomorrah meets a Univision beach party game show.

I fled to the opposite end of the bar towards the wave machine. An elevated stage just to the right held 8 girls and one MC with a microphone that made everything sound like a date rape, spewing out confessions he had eavesdropped on that very morning at these 8 girl’s Daddy Issues Anonymous meeting. Apparently, these girls were going to play “Bikini Twister” for drink tickets and the chance at being ogled the longest by horny military personnel on leave/listeners of Avenged Sevenfold. I tried to concentrate on the 12 year old wake boarding and setting the most adult example of the night; poise and diligence wrinkled in his brow as he rode a fake wave.

Do you know the tilting point for me in all of this?…Regardless of the meat head’s thrusting uncomfortably close, the failure in this entire city’s scope was not embracing what the hell coffee is all about. Needless to say, the ideas of cold brewed technology (grinds + water + 12 hours = cold press) baffled every single independent coffee shop that I stumbled upon…I believe there were v two. The other options I was left with were Pete’s Coffee, The Coffee Bean and Starbucks. Of course, being a good assimilated North Westerner I sighed and schlepped into a Starbucks.

I manipulated my regular vice to 2 espresso shots, chai and 2% milk with which I was warned “Are you sure?”. I should have left here. My drink was just what I expected, which is exactly what Starbucks delivers…uniformity. They are consistently good, never shockingly great or double take bad. I ask you, however; if I consider coffee my one vice, why would I want to partake in my dirty habit within the walls of a NYSE publicly traded asset? It would be like ordering a vodka-tonic at Applebee’s and expecting to take that first sip, swallow hard and shout, “WHAT THE SHIT!!!! This is basically a pint of vodka.”

No alarms, no surprises…that is San Diego for me. Beautiful city, young people, beaches and casual dress. The most important failure for the city? No theoretical vice. No umpf. No jena se qua to emit an emotion towards. There is no dive bar on your block, there is no privileged trust fund hipster finding pretension in his hairstyle, there is no music scene, there is no Renegade Magazine, there is no Portland Mercury, there is no Alberta Arts District, there is no communal identity…these are what a city needs in order to make it quirky enough to establish the adjectives you proudly herald your neighborhood with. It’s pride, it’s braggadocios, it’s contentment…for me it’s Portland, and if it’s not for you than your city sucks.