Life's final appeal: Don't delay, simplify

Since turning 70 last February, day by day I’m living slightly askew.

For instance, this afternoon I received in the mail — yes the REAL mail, the one with stamps — yet another appeal to join my alma mater’s alumni association. I have resisted all such appeals for nearly 50 years.

This particular pitch urged me to become a “life member” for a mere $595. Its headline read, “Your membership lasts a lifetime. Don’t delay!”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or sigh.

At first I thought that it was just me reading morbid meaning into the words. Then I realized that the copywriter was having some fun with me, or at least trying to. The university’s computers no doubt had marked me as being in some existential “don’t delay” period of my life.

And so, I didn’t delay and immediately pitched the appeal into the recycling.

Life really is too short.

No question the eighth decade has a certain “don’t delay” aspect. You could start with all those unread books on my shelves.  It is now undeniable: There is no way on Earth I will read them. At least not “on Earth.”

And I’m absolutely certain that City Hall isn’t going to underground our utilities in my lifetime. (If the Europeans can bury their wires, why can’t we?) Once, in my late middle age, I boasted that I would see to it that the City of Portland would underground our utility wires before the fates undergrounded me. It was sort of a joke, but no longer.

The overhead wires, like the unread books, will outlive me.

Then there’s my cellphone, a relatively recent invention in my suddenly long lifetime. I have never mastered it. It has menus within menus within menus. It has menus FOR menus. The deceptively small contraption is a veritable thicket of lists with arrows pointing every which way.

A dark confession: I’ve been known to curse aloud at the damnable thing when I’ve been trapped in its maddening electronic labyrinth. That’s bad enough, but recently I had occasion to discover, to my horror, that, labyrinth or no labyrinth, the devilish “little black brick” was working all along. It was carrying my anguished profanities to an innocent friend on the other end of the line.

“Rick,” she asked aghast, “is that you?”

Shamefaced, I confessed it was. I begged her forgiveness and, to her credit, she laughed it off. I hope she meant it.

I now have one of those “senior-friendly” cell phones which is only moderately so. It still has one or two menus tucked inside other menus. But he nice thing about this “simple” phone in addition to its big keypad and extra loud volume, is that I can “block” the menus.

There’s really no need to be led down the maze of “feature” roads, at least at my age. I don’t need an alarm clock in my phone. I already have an alarm clock — and a radio and a calculator and a calendar and a compass. Putting them all in one device has not made my life simpler.

High blood pressure doing what it can do, “smart phones” threatened to simplify my life by simply ending it.

Then again, if that happened, my alma mater’s alumni association, at long last, could quit warning me that I shouldn’t delay about joining.

Death is beyond delays and delaying.

Undergrounding is good for the psyche

What do the three photos on the right have in common besides being from my recent trip to Berlin, Denmark, the Netherlands?

The answer: No overhead utilities.

You may not have noticed because you are blind to wires, poles and transformers on our own littered streets and highways. You automatically screen them out of your vision using some internalized mental Photoshop.

Since we no longer "see" such clutter, what’s the big deal?

I contend that whether we know it or not, when our view is free of such intrusions, we recognize that freedom subconsciously. We are more in tune with our environment, as we are when we view the European photos.

Admittedly it’s an unfair comparison, but take stock of your psyche looking at the European photos and then tune into your feelings when you look at the streetscape below of Capitol Highway in Hillsdale.

You don’t have to go to Europe to have the wire-free experience. When the City of Portland wants to bury utility wires, it does. Just visit the Pearl District or downtown.

We need a program here for undergrounding utilities in the places outside of downtown where wires, transformers and poles are most obvious.

I nominate Hillsdale, a Metro-designated Town Center, a pedestrian district and a Portland-anointed Main Street District, to go to the top of the list. The cost would be somewhere north of $2 million. The money should come from city-imposed utility franchise fees.

The utilities that litter our urban landscapes should pay to clean up the mess.

More blight arrives in the Hillsdale Town Center

Today, walking down to Hillsdale’s commercial center, I noticed that workers were piggy-backing technological bric-a-brac on one of our utility poles again.

We have wires, barrel-sized transformers, defunct wireless cones and now — what?

Cell phone antennae of course. After I took this photo, workers attached a large equipment box the size of a three-drawer filing cabinet to the pole.

Lovely.

Of course, each of the several cell phone companies has to have its very own antenna.

Call it antenna envy.

Our Hillsdale commercial center is what Metro, the Portland-area regional government, has designated a “Town Center.”

Hence “the Hillsdale Town Center.”

The idea is to make the Town Centers pedestrian-friendly so that people walk to shops, schools and buses and leave their polluting cars at home.

Several of us believe that making our Town Center pedestrian-friendly involves making it attractive to walk around in. Actual sidewalks would be nice too.

We have street trees, although I noticed today that the one next to the new antenna-ized utility pole looks seriously stressed.

And some of us have actually had the audacity to propose undergrounding the utilities. No more poles, wires, transformers and, yes, cell phone antennae. The powers that be manage to bury all this stuff downtown, in South Waterfront and in the Lloyd and Pearl districts.

Why not here?

Could it have something to do with politics?

I’ve worked on and off for 15 years on the undergrounding issue. I used to joke that my goal was to see utilities in the Town Center undergrounded before I’m undergrounded.

It’s a joke no longer.

The “City that Works” needs to start working on undergrounding. A decade ago some of us, representing varied interests, including the utilities, suggested that fees should be placed on new technologies like cell phones (they were new back then). If they used the public right-of-way, they ponied up to mitigate the blight. The revenues would pay for undergrounding in Town Centers like Hillsdale.

Vera Katz was mayor at the time we made our report with its funding proposal. She assured us our suggesting would not gather dust on a shelf.

But that is exactly where it is today. While the dust gathers, the antennae and overhead wire blight spread throughout the City. And my own personal undergrounding becomes more real with each passing year.

On a brighter note. Clearly Hillsdale's pigeons are pleased with things the way they are.

Hillsdale streetscape — 2020?

Knowing my obsession about Hillsdale’s blight of utility poles, wires and overhead transformers, my friend and fellow Hillsdalite Arnie Panitch sent me these photos from India.

I think he wants me to keep our little visual clutter problem in perspective.

Or maybe he just wants me to chill.

Actually, I might use these gothic street scenes to make the point that if we don’t reverse the streetscape clutter here, this may be what we have to look forward to.

Thanks for show-and-tell, Arnie.

Proposed cable contract mum on undergounding

Qwest, the big regional phone company, wants to compete with Comcast for your cable TV dollar in Portland. Whether a little competition results in better service and lower prices remains to be seen.

One thing is certain, a competitor will add to the visual clutter above our streets, unless the Mount Hood Cable Regulatory Commission stirs itself and inserts some pro-undergrounding teeth in the proposed franchise agreement.

The commission is set to vote on the agreement Sept. 17. (You can comment here.) As is, the draft agreement is silent on the whole undergrounding issue. The word "undergrounding" appears nowhere in the text.

Hillsdale neighborhood leader Wes Risher and I testified at a regulatory commission hearing tonight in favor of a set-aside franchise fee. The money raised would start paying for undergrounding in Town Centers (like Hillsdale) and Main Streets — places that are supposed to be pleasant to walk in. Yes, places more entertaining than what your cable pumps into your home.

Imagine Hillsdale without this clutter....

City-sanctioned Graffiti

So Commissioner Randy Leonard is on a graffiti eradication toot. Hurray for him!

Strangely, I’ve had a few of my students come to the defense of graffiti. Eradication is censorship etc. After all, this is art, free expression. Besides, those blank spaces are just going to waste.

Private property? Not if can be used to communicate "art" to the public.

Ok, I ask, how about your forehead? Blank space. In full public view. What say I spray-paint over your brow “Bonehead”? All in the spirit of free expression, of course.

End of argument.

Now then, I’d like Commissioner Leonard to consider two other forms of graffiti, both sanctioned by our city officials, including Commissioner Leonard.

The first are overhead wires on well-traveled by-ways. They are certainly as blighting and intrusive as graffiti. Obviously city officials agree, which is why they insist that the Pearl District, South Waterfront and the Lloyd District have underground utilities as part of their municipal tax deferred financing.

Officials should require the same burying of wires and transformers whenever new commercial construction is built on well-traveled transit lines.

You know, places like the new Watershed complex in Hillsdale.

The second city-sanctioned graffiti are the “sponsored” stop announcements on the Portland streetcars. Yes, auditory graffiti. Intrusive, offensive, embarrassing, deceitful and absurd.

Intrusive because they can’t be avoided.

Offensive because in order to use public transit, well, we can’t avoid them.

Embarrassing because out-of-town visitors and tourists, drawn to the trolleys, must find the voice-activated commercials tacky. Unworthy of the City of Roses.

Absurd and deceitful because the actual messages claim that public, taxpayer-built and maintained intersections are “sponsored by” this or that business or institution.

Come on.

I rode the trolley today and concluded that, frankly, some of these “sponsors” should be ashamed of themselves. I’m thinking in particular of the Portland Art Museum, the “Portland State Vikings” (who, pray tell, are they? The student body? The administration? The football team?) and the Portland State Bookstore.

There’s no way these institutions “sponsor” the stop intersections, and they know it.

So Commissioner Leonard, AKA duct-tap Randy, should look up at the wires and listen up to the trolley plugs. There is plenty of graffiti that he and his colleagues could clean up with a simple roll-call vote.