When I was in college, I used to have long hair. Not quite shoulder-length, but maybe 6 inches. It hung over my eyes in a way I thought jaunty. I used to worry very much about my hair and to a certain degree my clothes. My girlfriend and I would spend hours shopping for conditioner and polo shirts.

For someone in his late teens I owned a lot of Things, and I was really proud of my Things, because they were all Brand-Name Things. I had a big aquarium and a pet lizard and all the books I'd ever bought and a comic book collection and a CD collection and a cactus garden and a big Macintosh computer. I never rode my bike or did any other kind of exercise. I never drank alcohol because I thought it would make me lose control. My biggest concerns were What other people thought of me and Staying in control. My life wasn't particularly out of control, having as I had a really pleasant childhood, but I guess I was just wound really tight.

I think back now on that guy and I wonder, who the hell was he? I wouldn't like that guy if I met him now.

The summer before my Senior year of college, my girlfriend dumped me and I discovered getting drunk and working with my hands digging in the dirt, and I had to move all that crap out of the dorms and into a studio apartment. I have spent the rest of my life getting rid of all that stuff. I still worried a lot about my hair, though, even though it was evident my hair had long since given up on me. Ten years after that summer, my ex-wife left me and I was again living in a studio apartment, but this time with totally different hair product. This time around, I had short spiky hair and it was dyed white because I thought it was harder to see that I was balding. I was still obsessed with What people think of me but what I wanted people to think about me was more complex. I wanted them to think I was a kind of a daredevil, a Fun Party Guy and also a Ladies Man.

Who the hell was that guy?

Just before I met Jenny, I shaved all the hair off my body except for my eyebrows, as an experiment. It was liberating. I realized that I was secretly a hippie, and that people's opinion of me rose when it was apparent I didn't give a damn about their opinions of me. Or, more specifically, their opinions about my hair.

Is this:

Once a week I will wear a tie

So for those of you just joining in, this is my second week as Senior Web Architect (hey look at the guy with the job title) at Ports, a major international clothier. Ports produces the single most successful clothing brand for the Chinese market (Port International) which is why you’ve probably never heard of it. There are a great many things (like Xu Jinglei) that are phenomenally popular with literally a billion people but about which everyone outside China is blissfully unaware. We also have a tres chichi red-carpet brand called Ports 1961.

The problem with working with people who jet off to New York for Mercedes Fashion Week is that I dress like someone who hops boxcars to Aberdeen for the Loggers’ Carnival. There is a certain bar for stylish workwear at this office and I am way, way below it.

Compounding my problem is that I completely failed to anticipate the Xiamen climate. When we decided to move Xiamen last year, I looked a globe and saw that Xiamen is at the same latitude as Cuba and figured, “hey, now I can sell all my sweaters.” Suffice to say, this was a Bad Decision. Right now it’s about 12C (54°F) here in Xiamen, where the buildings have neither insulation or central heat and I own exactly one sweater. Which isn’t even very warm. So I can’t do what unstylish people in cool climates do, which is put on a nice sweater (because everyone looks better in a nice sweater?).

Thus the new dress code. I figure if once a week I wear a tie (even if, like today, I’m wearing it with brown jeans and my retro digital watch), people might remember me as “the guy who wears a tie.” (Despite their stylishness, my coworkers indeed seldom wear ties). This way I can spend the other four days wearing hoodies and Chuck Taylors. It’s like Casual Day, but in reverse.

• Huey Lewis & the News — Sports Tour — 1982 or 1983
• Beach Boys — (tour unknown) — 1983 or 1984
• Frankie Goes to Hollywood — “Frankie Say War! Hide Yourself” — 1984
• UB40 — Little Baggariddim — ca. 1985
• R.E.M. — “Postcard from Athens, GA” — 1986
• R.E.M. — Pageantry — 1986
• Young Fresh Fellows — (tour unknown) — 1986
• R.E.M. — Chronic Town — 1986
• Sex Pistols — “Never Mind the Bollocks” — 1986
• Murphy’s Law — (tour unknown) — 1987
• The Smiths — “The Queen is Dead” — 1987
• R.E.M. — “What Noisy Cats Are We” — 1987
• R.E.M. — “Allied” (Document Tour) — 1987
• R.E.M. — “Bicycle” (Reckoning Tour) — 1987
• Sonic Youth — “Sonic Life” — 1987
• Replacements — Let It Be — 1987
• Sonic Youth — Sister — 1988
• Descendents — All — 1988
• Minutemen — “The Roar of the Masses Could be Farts” — 1988
• Hüsker Dü — New Day Rising — 1988
• R.E.M. — “Pop Song 89” (Green Tour) — 1989
• Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians — One Long Pair of Eyes — 1989
• The Cult — Sonic Temple Tour (Canadian) — 1989
• R.E.M. — “Get Up” (Green Tour) — 1989
• R.E.M. — “You Are the Everything (white)” (Green Tour) — 1988 or 1989
• R.E.M. — “You Are the Everything (black)” (Green Tour) — 1989
• R.E.M. — “We Are Having a Wonderful Time” (Reconstruction Tour) — 1991 or 1992
• Millions — “Admit Nothing, Blame Everyone, Be Bitter” (glows in the dark!) — 1992
• R.E.M. — Monster Tour — 1995
• Shonen Knife — “Happy Dead Teddy Bear” — 1997
• Stereolab — (green & pink) — 2001
• Kraftwerk — Radio Activity — 2003
• Stereolab — (defiant fist) — 2004
• Dead Kennedys — FY 1983 Tour — 2004

So immediately I recognize three trends:

1. My musical tastes sure improved after I hit puberty (ca. 1984)
2. I bought almost all my concert t-shirts when I was in high school (1986 - 1989
3. damn I bought a lot of Sonic Youth t-shirts.

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.