Strange Days

It's been a little weird this week. I started out with a crippling headache on Sunday night that picked up steam on Monday and really got going on Tuesday with the right hemisphere of my skull randomly exploding at five second intervals. I went and got acupuncture for the first time at Pine Street Community Acupuncture. It's one of those sliding scale group places and I was led into this enormous room with a high ceiling and a skylight and there were little fountains everywhere making noise and Tibetan monks chanting through the speakers and she stabbed me with needles in my hands and my feet and then left me there. At first it was relaxing. I napped briefly. The headache was departing. I tried not to think which led to me imagining that I was scooping my brain out like a melon ball, over and over and over again. Then I got worried. It felt like I had been there forever. She didn't come back into the room and it was entirely empty and the sun came and went through the skylight and the fountains kept playing and I couldn't move. The needles have little springs in their ends and they were waving off my hands like alien antennas. I couldn't scratch my nose. She had forgotten I was there. But not really, eventually she came back and gave me some herb tablets and I took them and went back to work. It worked. The headache was gone.

Then it came back as I was heading over to Tony Vu's. He made meatloaf with chevre and pine nuts and we ate that with asparagus and olive bread and sorbet and drank pabst and then we went to the Owen Pallett show at the Aladdin. So good. He plays the violin and loops over himself. He didn't play this song:



But I wish he would have. The headache left about halfway through the show and it was like the lifting of a black veil. He told a really charming story about blowing it the last time he was in Portland opening for Bloc Party at the Crystal Ballroom. Gus Van Sant and Hedi Slimane were there and people talked loudly throughout his entire set and he eventually walked off the stage to zero applause. We all said AW, and cheered loudly enough to make up for his last Portland failure.

So Owen Pallett cured my headache on tuesday and I met Jocelyn at Slow Bar on wednesday for Portland's best hamburger (so they say) and we ended up at the Dirty Mittens show at Holocene. But not before sharing a watermelon flavored Four Loko in the alleyway. Like teenagers. I had never tried this drink before and it's a fruit-flavored caffeinated alcoholic beverage. Right? How can it go wrong? Our New York friends love it and Kale tried to get me to befriend it on facebook. That's not happening. I don't need to be friends with an undesirable like that. Four Loko turned out to be less than a good idea. But the Dirty Mittens show was great. I think the thing I find most charming about them is the amount of fun that it looks like they're having up there.