One Portland thing I'll never get used to is bicyclists riding aggressively and breaking laws as a part a kind of deranged "civil disobedience".

It's sort of the overall pattern I observe in people who've moved here in the past 20 years: they seem to think they're joining a religion: like moving to Portland will automatically fill them with purpose.

Within a few months they find, to their crushing disappointment, that it's just a city. It hasn't provided them with meaning, hasn't told them who they are and what they're meant to do. They're the same person they were when they decided to move here.

Some of them don't cope with it well, and start acting out; acting out publicly in weird, aggressive ways apparently meant to be a display of virtue, but it's impossible for someone not living in their heads to discern exactly what virtue they're displaying.