“And yet I remain, and just, perhaps, for these very reasons. Here is a place that perfectly fulfills my political values but utterly fails to fulfill my cultural ones, and maybe that’s no accident. Portland doesn’t much remind me of the country that I know, but I came here, after all, to discover a new America. New York may be the city of my past, but Portland—green, self-limiting, communitarian—is, I believe, the city of our future. Or at least it needs to be, if we’re going to have a future. As any student of American history can tell you, you reach the new by releasing the old. And as any student of another place can tell you—I mean a certain strip of land between the Jordan and the sea—too much memory can kill you…

As for me, my sojourn in Portland has reminded me of something else I used to hear in Zionist youth movement. It is the most famous line in Hebrew poetry, composed by Yehudah Halevi in 12th-century Spain. “My heart is in the East, and I am at the end of the West.” An immigrant, I realize now, is exactly what I am. You flee the old country for the promise of a better life, and then you spend your time regretting what you left behind. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? You come for the political values, but then you lament the cultural ones. These Americans! The Russians in Brighton Beach stare out across the water as if they were gazing at the Black Sea, and I keep a MetroCard in my wallet. If I forget thee, O Manhattan. I understand why people used to go back to be buried in Calabria or County Cork. Put it this way: I want to live here, but I don’t want to die here.”

“Traffic officers along Interstate 84 in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge say a lead-footed driver was in such a hurry to make a court date on a meth possession charge that he racked up $2,000 worth of speeding tickets in an hour.

Police say the 34-year-old was zooming west Wednesday morning and got pulled over three times - first at 105 mph, then at 98 mph and finally at 92 mph.

Police say the last ticket appeared to have an effect. Down the road a bit, a trooper set up watch and clocked him at the limit, 65 mph.

Besides fines and penalties, police say his license could be suspended for up to 90 days if he’s found guilty on the citation alleging driving in excess of 100 mph.

Police confirm he was indeed scheduled for a court appearance later Wednesday in Oregon City, south of Portland.”

“A young Portland couple called it Valentine’s Day role playing. Police called it disorderly conduct, saying it created public alarm as well as taking up the time of at least nine patrol cars for 20 minutes Tuesday.

That’s how long police spent checking out an alarmed 911 caller’s report of a possible kidnapping. The caller reported seeing a car leaving a grocery parking lot with a naked woman tied up in the back with duct tape over her mouth.

Sgt. Pete Simpson says officers flooded the area and alerted Washington state law enforcement in case the car headed north on Interstate 5.

When police located the car shortly before 1 p.m., Simpson says a 31-year-old man gave officers the role-playing explanation. Police confirmed that account with the man’s 26-year-old girlfriend. Simpson says both were arrested for second-degree disorderly conduct and booked into jail.

Typically, Simpson says the district attorney’s office might drop such a case from a misdemeanor to a violation, like a traffic ticket.”

“It was dubbed the ‘flash mob’ bill when it got a hearing Monday at the Oregon Legislature — a proposal to make it a felony to summon people by Twitter or email to commit a crime at a designated place.

Now it’s more like flash-in-the-pan.

‘It’s dead,’ said Sen. Floyd Prozanski, the Eugene Democrat who, because he holds the gavel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, gets to decide such things. Yet 11 Republicans and one Democrat signed onto Senate Bill 1534, which would have created the crime of ‘aggravated solicitation.’”

You still can’t buy liquor in grocery stores, though.