*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole. Thank heavens.* -The Editors

Being a younger sibling, I have no idea what it’s like to forge a completely new path under the close watch of those who’ll come after me. I got to see lots of mapping mistakes get made before it was my turn at various forks in roads. Thankfully, my choices were pared down to make things more manageable. I didn’t fall victim to the paralyzing pathlessness of infinite choice.

Which is why I tend to get confused when I get the feeling that I’ve been acting the role of older sibling without knowing it. Like I’ve been making drastic life-decisions without consulting my elders. But that my decisions are being closely monitored by those right behind me in line. Future innovators. Creatives spawned. My betters-to-come.

At some point and tent party during SxSW, I’m not entirely sure when or where, I happened upon the lead singer of a particularly popular band which is often referred to as being from Austin, who now lives in Portland. It was a later hour in the evening, and I was exhausted-drunk. You know the kind: it’s the seventh hour of the alcohol rapids and the previously raging whitewater is starting to calm. The sugar involved has long burned off and you’re just left with the slight, droopy-eyed hallucinations and numbed feelings of odd and unenthusiastic supremacy (I bet I could fly if I had better eyesight, that or one really tall leg). So I’m mumble-stumbling about when I run into Portland guy, who is oddly enough, hanging out by his lonesome. Probably waiting for some drunken loon to wander up and bother him about odd animal companions.

For the majority of the night before that moment, I was on a kick about wolverines, and whether or not they’d make good house pets. I’m not sure why I cared about this particular topic, but as previously stated, I was exhausted and slightly delusional. Most of my conversations that night went something like this:

ME (walking up to a group of strangers already deep in conversation): Excuse me, but if you were to wake up one morning to find that you had a pet wolverine, how would that make you feel?

SOME DUDE IN GROUP: A what?

ME: Wolverine.

SOME OTHER DUDE: You mean a grown man in tights with knives for fingernails?

SOME CHICK: That’s Freddy Krueger.

ME: No, a wolverine. It’s a, uh… mammal. Kinda like a, uh…

YET ANOTHER DUDE: like a cat?

ME: A cat? What the… no, like a telephone.

SAME OTHER DUDE: No need to be a dick, man. Just trying to help out. Seemed like you were struggling for a description. Shit.

ME: Yeah, but if I wanted to ask you about a cat, I would’ve asked you about a cat. And why would I do that, anyway? A wolverine’s more like a… well, it’s sorta like-

CHICK: Like a small bear.

ME: A bear?

CHICK: Yeah, like a bear.

ME: More like a telephone than a bear. Have any of you actually been to a zoo?

CHICK: HEY. You asked US the question, asshole. Remember? Stop acting like we should give a shit.

SAME OTHER DUDE: So it is like a telephone, then?

But before I launched into my wolverine pitch, a button in my brain got pressed and I was instantly more curious about Portland. I mean, what the fuck? Why’d this guy move to Portland? So I asked him that. Just like that, actually. “What the fuck? Why’d you leave Austin for Portland?” But before he had a chance to answer, his Blackberry started crying for attention. Goddamn telecommunications industry, fucking up my impromptu q&a session with this musician guy.

At first, he just glanced down at the black plastic message beast, and then started to sleeve it back into his pants like oh, my Japanese stock portfolio’s ticking up? Nice. But then he noticed something about my face. It could have been my droopy eyes, it could have been my half-shaved beard and half-tucked pants. Maybe a snot bubble was breathing out my nose, or a Sparks pull-tab was stuck between my teeth. I haven’t a clue. But he did a shoulder-shrugging double-take on the B-berry and pointed to it with an apologetic smile, “sorry, but I really should grab this…”

It didn’t appear to be vibrating and/or ringing anymore, but that’s cool. I’ve used that line a hundred times to get out of weird spots with hallucinating-drunk strangers and their badgering badger stories. In all honestly, he seemed like a genuinely nice and accomodating fellow. Like someone you'd meet at a local art opening, but wasn't actually related to the artist in any way. That kind of guy.

Off he and his messages went, into the growing crowd over by the port-o-potties.

I never really got an answer to my question, though. Why Portland? Seriously. What the fuck does Portland have that we don’t? Eh? Shoe designers and cement?

So I had to go check it out for myself. Had to see what was up with the backroom, hipster-ish hype surrounding the place.

I took a weekend hiatus to Oregon. To Portland. To Goonie country.

My ladyfriend and I stayed at a trendy-ish motel that was decked-out in a disturbing new modern standard: the disposable minimalist IKEA aesthetic (cheap, yet attractive for the first three months of use, at which point it gets all chipped and scratched and shitty looking – as our room was!). Fortunately for my usually-uneventful REM slumber session, there was a private booty music party, much like several of those magazine parties that are here for SxSW, being held in a huge tent over the courtyard beneath our room. It lasted until four in the morning (that’s 6am Austin time, by the way). It was loud. The bass was deep and soothing to the Spring-Breaker-soul. No, I did not crash it (though I considered it several times). I opted to allow Biz Markie to lullaby my tired ass to sleep.

I must say, the tent party was a pretty sweet introduction to the place. I was under a minor impression that Portland was a wee bit sleepish, somewhat grey in late-night personality. And that impression was incorrect.

Sleeve tattoos and neck specks (smallish tattoos on the neck, usually a spider web, Mickey Mouse, or an un-readable cursive name) are just as popular there as they are here. As are chest tats for drummers/bassists in v-necks. Bikes, bikes, bikes. Everyone’s on bikes. Bikes are chained up all over the downtown area. Just about any open post or chainlink fence is coated in cycles like the front racks of a suburban middle school. It’s quite beautiful, really.

Street cars, The Max (their lightrail/streetrail), and bunches of buses move everyone to and fro in the downtown-ish region. The Willamette River runs roughly N-S through the center of the city, dividing it much the same way that the Colorado divides Austin roughly W-E, with running paths and parks and beautiful green spaces all over the place. Everyone we met was friendly as shit, including the homeless (of which we ran into many), and there is a vibe (for lack of a better word) there which reminds me a-lot of how Austin felt back in the early nineties. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, because it’s not necessarily swell for those who cry/pine for the Austins which existed decades before that.

But you get my drift.

And if you don’t, that’s okay. You will be saying the same shit in ten years about how things “feel” in Austin today.

However, I can’t say that I fully understand the draw. Their development has the same taste and feel as ours, which is much in the same vein as the IKEA aesthetic of our time. Their design is high, but just as I worry about our little slice of heaven here, I don’t see it being built to last. If Austin’s my parent city, then I can see Portland as the cool Aunt who allows you to smoke and drink before you’re of age, but you can tell that in ten years she’ll be living on credit in a high-rise with a Golden Retriever, a Volvo hybrid, and two kids in Montessori School. She may be cool today, but she’s in well-treaded transition toward the dreaded national average.

But what’s really disturbing, really-really-really disturbing, is that if between our cities there exists some sort of sibling relationship... something tells me Austin’s the older sister of the two.