Portland. Saturday. The streets smelled of fried sugar and desperation, powdered donuts stacked against human wreckage. Just outside the neon circus of Voodoo, the farmer’s market pumped out the illusion of plenty: fresh fruit, artisan bread, overpriced kale for the enlightened bourgeois. And then this man, folded into the sidewalk like a casualty of the American Dream.

Hood pulled low, body hunched, the cardboard screamed louder than any megaphone: “Black Mold Victim. Please Help.” You couldn’t miss it, not unless you’d trained your eyes to slide right past the human condition. Which most people had.

The world kept moving, eco-friendly shoppers with tote bags full of honeycrisp apples, tourists snapping selfies with pink boxes of donuts, the great Portland freakshow parading on as if this man weren’t dissolving on the pavement. The recycling bin behind him mocked the scene: bottles, cans, neat little arrows promising renewal. But there was no recycling system for lives like this.

It felt like standing in the split-second between carnival laughter and the crash of a coffin lid. America was here on the curb, reduced to a Sharpie-scrawled plea for survival, while the city danced around it with sugar-glazed smiles.

This wasn’t poverty porn. This was the raw goddamn truth. Portland in black and white: spectacle and collapse, donuts and decay, kale and chaos. All of it pressed together on one street corner, daring you to look away.