I moved to Portland from San Francisco in early 2000. I'd been through a difficult divorce, and the cost of living in the Bay Area was starting to exceed what I could earn. So when a neighbor returned from a trip to Portland and couldn't stop raving about it, I had to take a trip to the city and see for myself.
I moved to Portland a month later.
Over the next seven and a half years, I became involved with Oregon's Green Party (yes, really), pondered the meaning of 9/11, and left the Greens; made a lot of great friends, including Michael Totten, Jason Holliston, Patrick Lasswell, and Sean LaFreniere; bought and sold a lot of books at Powell's; lived at the exquisite Commodore Apartments, which I highly recommend to anyone moving to Portland; had many dinners and many, many pints of beer at the Blue Moon; took courses at Portland State University in pursuit of that elusive bachelor's degree which seems, like Zeno's tortoise, to be always just out of reach; and volunteered for Basic Rights Oregon, and for Goli Ameri's unsuccessful campaign to unseat Representative David Wu in Oregon's First District.
I also lost my father and my mother during that time.
I began political blogging at Dreams Into Lightning in April 2004, and created sites dedicated to my family history and my father's World War II memoirs. I also created tribute sites for the poetry and prose of my sister Stephanie McLintock, who died in 1992 at the age of 28. Together with Stephanie's old friend, Georgianne Fastaia, I created a consolidated tribute site at Stephanie Online.
I did some creative writing of my own, including the short stories The Rose of Paradise, The Zero Ring, and The Death Wish. More recently, I began work on The Queen's Courtesan, which is still a "work in progress"; and the Gilkesh language, which is listed in Langmaker.
My seven and a half years in Portland ended this week; I have moved back to San Francisco, where I can spend more time with Georgianne, with my son (now almost eleven years old), and with some old friends who still live in the Bay Area.
UPDATE: Many thanks to Jack Bogdanski of Jack Bog's Blog for the link! I only got to meet "Bojack" once, but he and his blog are an essential part of the Portland experience. Do go pay him a visit.
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