Wonderful city, if you like being depressed
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3/21/2022
Lived here 24 years, was in Southern Oregon before that. I've missed small town Oregon starting the exact day we moved to Seattle. There is a difficult to measure miasma in this place, hard to name it but you can feel it weighing on you. Call it depressing, oppressive, abysmal, dark, hopeless, suffocating, I don't know but it's palpable. Maybe it's all the forest clear cuts in every direction, especially when you drive through the peninsula to the coast, maybe its that all the beautiful, sort-of-wild places within a 50 mile radius are choked with crowds and gleaming, expensive SUV's jockeying aggressively for parking at the trailhead, maybe its that all the land in every direction is either privately owned and off limits, or some kind of park or state forest that's absolutely jammed with people on the weekends, maybe it's the traffic, maybe it's the "Seattle Freeze." Then also could be the depressing weather, maybe it's the frenetic pace of things, the sighing of slumped, desperate people in survival mode because the cost of living keeps rising as housing costs climb steadily up, up, and away from the reach of 90% of home buyers.
Tom | Issaquah, WA