Weirdness isn't some taxidermied jackalope sitting on a shelf—it's a live animal scrounging in dumpsters to find something it can transform. The "Keep Portland Weird" slogan has become nothing but a bumper sticker on a Subaru, a slick marketing ploy to sell $6 donuts to tourists.

We're not interested in "keeping" a thing. We're here to transform weird from an inert, passive noun into a potent, passionate verb—a semi-hallucinatory force that makes the world's teeth chatter with fear.

What irony that four American cities, plus some quaint little isle in the UK, all claim to "Keep ____ Weird." As if authentic strangeness could be packaged like artisanal hot sauce. Austin claimed it first, but who cares about precedent when the fabric of our collective reality is being bleached and pressed by the mad machinery of cultural homogenization.

*Weird - c. 1400, "having power to control fate," from wierd (n.), from Old English wyrd "fate, chance, fortune; destiny; the Fates," literally "that which comes," from Proto-Germanic *wurthiz, from PIE *wert- "to turn, to wind."

Let's reclaim weird's roots—not just accepting what comes, but actively turning, winding, and shaping our future.

Look around! We are separated from our potential for genuine innovation by institutional constraints, and commercialized strangeness has calcified into a brand with a shiny, commodified motto.

Corporate interests sanitize and package "weird" experiences. The machinery of capitalism hijacks our creativity, brands it, and sells it back to us at $17.95 plus shipping. What once was beautifully bizarre is now a backdrop for influencers.

Gentrification is rampaging like a bull through our neighborhoods. The artists, the freaks, the beautiful mutants are being exiled while corporations buy up their lots and turn them into more high-priced apartments.