The other night Lisa and I went hunting for a Rock Band xbox bundle– not the Aerosmith edition, mind you– and ended up venturing into the seedy wonderland of SE 82nd avenue. A lot of Portlanders (us included) don’t get out this way very often. In fact, I’d say most people who don’t live or work nearby tend to flat-out avoid the area. You see, it ain’t the pastoral arty bluffy quirky “close-in” Portland that you might have heard about in your magazines and newspapers. It’s the big, long, ache of a boulevard that houses everything that the rest of town isn’t: strip malls, car dealerships, skid row motels, big-box monstrosities and fast food chains.

It’s the sprawl they don’t want you to know about– but it’s there. There’s no sweeping it under someone else’s boundaries, since it’s within city limits. And people seem to live there, eating its soggy tacos and food-stamp-friendly Papa Murphy’s pies. (Please nudge me next time I complain about our own neighborhood being shitty.)

It brought me back to my months in Tucson, which I’d usually describe as “one big strip mall with some houses stuffed in between.” That’s a shitty appraisal of the place, for sure, but this kind of run-down commercial strip was way, way prevalent there: every box gets its own asphalt parking lot, its own driveway and its own light-up sign towering above the strip.

And there were a lot of strips. It was one of the big reasons I disliked Tucson– an otherwise beautiful little city. Sure, there were neighborhoods in the old-school areas of downtown, and perfectly tolerable oceans of spanish-tiled ranch homes elsewhere. But that stuff is barely visible as you drive from one end of town to the other. What you see is an endless parade of Circle Ks, furniture showrooms and used car lots. I missed living in a lush, green neighborhood with people doing stuff out in the yard, people walking along on real, tangible midwestern sidewalks (not vaguely-less-gravelly paths along the road that turned to mud during the monsoons). I’ve got neighborhoods now, and green space. Lots of green space. I don’t miss the geographic isolation that a city of four-plus-lane grids deals a pedestrian and bicyclist. But it’s there, just on the outskirts of Portland proper, where the 1930s / 1940s development gave way to the suburban ideas of the 50s (I suppose).

In the end we found our video game in stock at the strangely deserted and somewhat run-down Best Buy. And driving the lion’s share of 82nd also gave birth to another fun pastime: spot-the-prostitute! We saw at least a couple obvious ones working the corners, and probably a couple more that weren’t so obvious. The crown jewel was a modest little house with neon hugging the window frames– and a sign in the yard prominently announcing “Private Shows”.