I rented Steve Vai's Live at the Astoria DVD last week, and the result was that I had Steve Vai songs going through my head for the course of a weekend of bad music, primarily in the car driving to and from Portland. Not that I'm a huge Steve Vai fan, but his "Passion and Warfare" CD is an un-friggin-believable "guitar" album. So although the DVD might have better been named "The Wank of the Overrated Musicians", it did save me this weekend. At least in my own head.

How much can I gush about Portland? Actually, how much can I gush about anywhere that isn't San Francisco? I just hope it really isn't "how much can I gush about anywhere where I'm not?" Oregon, again, is just a cooler place than California, with our Austrian governors and Republican Democratic mayors.

Anyway, I could have done without the roadtrip. I just went for the halibut. Hell of it. Helluvit. In retrospect, that doesn't seem like a good enough reason to go. Or it could have been Melissa's smoking which kept me constantly nauseous. I'm starting to think smokers are verifiably evil, but that's neither true nor nice (I personally know several angels who smoke, and the smoke just gives their halos a nice copper hue). Or maybe it was just Melissa, who I neither particularly like or dislike, but if given a choice whether to be engaged in a conversation with her or eat a pineapple, I'd choose the pineapple. She's a great conversationalist, very interesting, very intelligent, very articulate, it's just that our personalities do not support any connection of meaningfulness for whatever we might talk about to make them worth it or matter.

Portland was rainy, but nevertheless beautiful and beery.