On the road again: Portland, day 3

Ramblings from a tired brain:

The hotel's Internet connectivity has slowed to a trickle, the bits flowing to my screen like drops of reddish water falling from a rusty spout in a sink in the kind of motels where they come to change the sheets after an hour. Either the Omni in Austin called here and told this hotel's AI to stop treating me nicely, or the available bandwidth crumbled under the weight of several hundred middle-aged male guests simultaneously downloading their favorite porn films so they can fall asleep happy. Eeew.

The world may be conspiring against me today.

Lunch was at a chain Tex-Mex place that should have been reliable but that instead was serving food from a chef whose wife absconded with his truck and his dog mere minutes before a meat salesman with a three-day-old beard showed up at his back door and offered him a great price on some gray looking chicken that happened to still have fur and cute ears. He bought the gray chicken, carved a few chunks, threw it under the salamander, and served it in my quesadilla. I'm still picking fur from my teeth.

Dinner was supposed to be the one big fun event of the day: a tasting menu at Sel Gris, which I have praised before. As we were heading out the door, the fine folks at Sel Gris called to tell us that they had just closed the restaurant for the evening. It seems their neighbors had decided to paint during the prime dinner hours, and the fumes from the paint were so powerful and so toxic that the diners and the staff were feeling sick. Their neighbors probably bought that paint from a sleazy guy who was selling it out of a box still covered in blood and fur.

I'm a helper, so I'm going to pass along this advice. If it's almost four in the morning, you've been up for about twenty hours, you haven't slept much in weeks, and suddenly the little bit of dirt under the nail of your right big toe takes on an unholy fascination, a force so compelling that you absolutely must get it out immediately, without hesitation, then do not--I repeat, do not--under any circumstances get a pair of new and extremely sharp scissors, stand naked on a tile floor with one foot on the ground and the other on the bathroom counter, start to use one blade of the scissors to clean out said dirt, catch sight of yourself in the mirror, realize in a flash of insight that perhaps this is it, the defining moment, the one at which you will later look back and realize it was indeed the instant at which you began the great downward slide into insanity, and in that split second of distraction punch a hole in the tender flesh under your toe. Just don't do that. It's a mistake.

Neither knowing nor, I must assume, caring about whether their speakers have toe injuries, the fine folks at Intel's Take Five video filmed three different segments of me yakking today. I don't have a clue what I said, but I guess I'll learn when they post the videos. Assuming I didn't reveal anything too incriminating, such as, say, my inability to clean my toes, then perhaps I'll post links to the videos when Take Five releases them.

For no good reason whatsoever, I feel the need for a romantic song I like, you know, the kind of song that has been true for at least a few minutes each time you've ever loved someone. Ah, here's one. Enjoy Patti Scialfa's "As Long As I (Can Be With You)." She's the bomb.

I'm out.