Grout Expectations
An Examination of Portland’s “Groutest Gift”
Never spent any time in Portland, Oregon, but think you have an idea of what it’s like? You’re probably wrong, at least partly.
A haven for attention-seeking pseudo-eccentrics and twee bowtie-wearers, a foodie wonderland, an extraordinarily open-minded and “weird” place, a hopelessly overhyped pile of shit…
It is no more any of these than just about any other major American city in 2015.
Portland is in an exceptionally verdant and fertile part of the country. It is an easy place to get around. It is a place whose a recent cultural renaissance is well on the wane. It is a town with a horrible job market, and you probably shouldn’t move here. I’m only here because I had a remote gig and wanted to live somewhere with those first two things, a choice I’ve been paying for since I got downsized out of said gig several months ago.
Portland is all of these things, but it is not “weird”. The stickers didn’t work; the weird didn’t keep. You really have to look deep and hard to find anything genuinely eccentric about Portland in 2015 (it used to be just about everywhere you looked!). What you find instead are hints, little things that you might not even notice if you blink, that Portland has a storied history of weirdness: the plaque where the Kingsmen’s cataclysmic version of “Louie Louie” was recorded. The “Shanghai tunnel” tours, wherein you see how and where Asian merchant ships kidnapped drunken sailors for slave labor. The Smegma CDs and LPs peppered throughout every halfway-decent record store. The grout graffiti.
Grout graffiti?
Honestly, this might be something that only I’m excited about. In two decidedly different men’s rooms across the city from each other — one in the Educational Technology Center on the Reed College campus, the other at the World Famous Kenton Club — people have taken it upon themselves to scrawl dozens, perhaps hundreds, of grout-themed puns in between the wall tiles. I don’t know their vintage, and I don’t know if these two bathrooms share a patron who set the ball rolling. All I know is that these puns are funnier than anything I’ve heard from Portland’s purportedly burgeoning standup comedy scene, and they always make it joyously harder to control my stream.
I’m not sure why grout graffiti seems so specifically Portland to me, nor am I sure why I think it’s so funny, but that’s another thing. It’s true that I’ve never noticed it anywhere else in the country, but I have to imagine that it’s out there.
Maybe it has something to do with Portland’s climate? “Grout” sounds like a Portland word, a Pacific Northwest word. It’s almost as if, were it not that stuff between the tiles, it would be something growing alongside all the moss that covers everything here. Were grout a force of nature, you wouldn’t find it all over everything in NYC or Philadelphia.
Like I said, I don’t know who did this or when they did it. I don’t know if it’s the work of a ton of disparate people, or that of a tight-knit crew. Whatever the answer to these questions, all that matters to me is that grout graffiti makes me feel good about being in Portland, setbacks be damned.
Recommend this essay so others can enjoy it.
A grout find by Dustin while scouring men’s bathrooms in Portland. If anyone knows of the origin of grout graffiti please contact us.
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