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I’m old enough to remember when the national media loved Portland, or at least found us adorable, worthy of fawning pieces about food carts and a zeitgeisty-but-mid sketch comedy series. I’m also old enough to remember when the national media started hating us, because that was just a few years ago. But the hits keep coming.
The latest person to inform a national audience that things in Portland may be getting out of hand is David Sedaris, the humorist known for frequent contributions to NPR’s This American Life and books like Holidays On Ice, a delightful collection of holiday-themed essays. The first of those essays, about holding down a crappy retail job while nursing delusions of grandeur that one’s big break is just around the corner, will always hold a piece of my heart. The humorist was last in town Nov. 17 for an evening at the Schnitz of readings, recollections, and a book signing for his latest tome, Happy-Go-Lucky. Shortly thereafter, the writer published an essay in the decidedly left-leaning New Yorker about getting bitten by a dog on the streets of downtown Portland.
While the essay posted on Dec. 8, it’s gotten traction on social media in more recent days, though, presumably because it touches a nerve with Portlanders, who are a little bit sensitive about our city lately, what with all the war-zone talk from the reality TV star who now runs the country. Also, the dog who bit him apparently belonged to some people who were smoking fentanyl on the streets of downtown Portland.
Public drug use is another fraught topic here, of course; Sedaris mentions Oregon’s decriminalization and recriminalization of drug possession in 2020 and 2024 respectively, but fails to note that public drug use is not legal here and also wasn’t when decriminalization was the law of the land. (In fairness, nobody else with an opinion on Portland These Days seems to know this, either.)
After he’s bitten, Sedaris confronts the group of people who seem to be responsible for the errant dog. He threatens to call the cops but apparently does not, and the people responsible for the dog seem unbothered. Per his description, they’re too busy smoking fentanyl. He also refuses to be seen at an ER, apparently out of spite: “The thought that their day would proceed uninterrupted while mine would be spent in what I imagined would be a very sad and busy hospital was more than I could bear. And so I returned to my hotel room deciding I would rather die.” Sedaris does not detail the severity of his injury, though he does mention a visit to a local pharmacy.
In recent years, Sedaris has on occasion come across as tedious and cranky rather than funny and perceptive. In a 2020 segment for CBS This Morning, he proposed a “citizen’s dismissal”—basically, a concept akin to the citizen’s arrest, wherein anyone could fire anyone who gave them bad service. It was meant as a joke, but came across as both out-of-touch and badly timed, dropping as it did at a moment when service workers were burdened with a far heavier heap of shit than usual.
As for his most recent trial, the last section of Sedaris’ essay bemoans the fact that nobody seems to see what an injustice he’s suffered. It’s hard to say whether he’s actually outraged or poking fun at his own indignation. It’s unclear if he thinks the problem is drug users or dogs, and whether the fault lies with Portland or society as a whole. (Several other dog bite incidents that involved people he knew are described. He doesn’t say where they happened or whether the dogs’ owners were on drugs, though in my observation, crappy, entitled dog owners exist at all social strata.) It’s also hard to know what he thinks should have happened to the dog who bit him or its owners, especially given his refusal to do anything about it.
A bit of additional factual context and a PSA: Oregon state law requires that authorities (in Portland, this would be Multnomah County Animal Services) investigate all animal bites, and that animals known to have bitten somebody be quarantined for 10 days. Owners of aggressive animals can be fined up to $500 and the animals themselves can be euthanized if authorities decide it’s warranted. Whether you sic authorities on an aggressive animal is up to you, but if you’re bitten by a dog, for the love of whatever you believe is holy, get the wound checked out. People can and do contract and die of rabies, and while a staph infection is a more likely result of a dog bite, you don’t want either one.
You can read Sedaris’ essay here.
