Earlier this week, there was a video on Reddit from Portland. The Oregon city also known by its airport designation, PDX. I’m not linking it here.

The videographer seems to have been a diner seated next to a restaurant window – but has jumped up and backwards to record a man on the outside of the window. I can just imagine how unnerving it was to have someone so close, gesturing from outside.

We see this angry man waving his bare arm at the thin glass before angrily punching it. His arm comes all the way through into the restaurant and the glass is immediately splashed with red as he withdraws his arm. He looks down at his arm, then seems to stagger as if he’s drunk, tilting back towards the window.

“He got his artery” someone comments in text, apparently naming which one. “Yeah, bleeding out,” affirms another.

Online can be its own world but I guess we’ve been wrung dry of “Oh, no,” these days. Reddit’s always felt more curious or flippant than openly cruel to me- but I stay in Popular’s shallows and don’t venture into darker subs.

Further down the post’s comments is a link to another image, this one of the empty, backlit night sidewalk, mounded with blood. “Someone I knew was there and saw this. They took him away but I heard he didn’t make it,” says my memory of this comment. Nothing comes up for PDX News that I could find. I stop my search.

A man looked at people inside and railed at – who knows what. The taunting ghost of an old enemy? The forces that drove him to drugs and this state of have-not? He’d been scrunched with rage, raising his fist as the person recorded him. If that injury didn’t take him it’d be a miracle, because there was too much blood in the followup shot.

This happened in the PDX’s shiny, affluent Pearl District. In 2008, I thought I’d permanently moved to this misty city one person dubbed, “Seattle’s plain little sister.” Despite the artful bikes, streetcar, hanging flower baskets, art and stop-motion artists, the omnious, lurking mood unsettled me, and I knew I’d never feel at home there.

The events you’re thinking of in PDX tool place long after I floored my gas and ran south down the 5 (ok, Interstate 5 for the rest of you) and back to LA.

I wish that man had decided to have a different day.