What I did last weekend

Last week we went to Portland to see BB King.
We ate dinner at Huber's. Portland's oldest restaurant.
My wife had a steak and I had the house special. This was a hot turkey dinner with ham.
It was good. But more like what one would have for lunch, not for a night out on the town. Wife's steak was very good. It had a port wine reduction sauce which was quite tasty.
We ordered their famous flaming coffee. This means a person comes to your table and sets a perfectly good cup of coffee on fire. There is a lot of arm waving and artistic bottle pouring. There is a jar for tips involved. They are kind of expensive.
I think whatever it is that they put in your coffee makes you more comfortable with spending money.
The guy does tend to get into one's personal space.
That personal space was completely violated by festival seating standing at the concert.
It was at the old Starry Night which is now the Roseland after a scandal which involved someone being dumped in the river. Click for story
Curtis Salgado was the opening band. He was ok. Telling a story about his momma singing in the kitchen while he was growing up in Eugene seemed pretty amusing in context of Chicago Blues. You sure do learn the blues going from white middleclass Eugene to White Middleclass Portland. Those introspective girls dressed in black sure do break a man's heart. And when my Pappy lost his job as a janitor at OSU it meant really hard times for the family. And that is when I started carrying a roach clip in my dreadlocks. Angst is not the same as the Blues...
BB King mentioned a straight razor and singing in Church and the Woman who was foolin' roun' with another man. Now that is the sort of moral questioning that makes for good music.
BB Kind brought an eight piece band.
They were quite amazing. They were so smooth.
We had some stupid white kids near us. I could just hear the commentary the next day, "We saw BB King, drank some Jack, smoked a bowl, it was like wow! Oh yeah!" But I suppose we all want to be authentic.
Later we attempted to ride MAX. It is sort of a joke. A really big train set!
My wife understands the city, she hailed a cab.
We stayed at an old hotel on the east side of the river. It had a sky-view bar. We went up there for something to eat at 12 midnight.
There were only four people in the bar. It had a beautiful view of the city.
The bartender was a fan of Neil Sedaka, we had a nice chat and a chicken sandwich.
Sunday we went to Powell's and looked at books. I wanted to buy Gene Logsden's book, Holy Shit, which is what I almost said when I saw the $14 price tag. But then I thought that perhaps skipping church, attending a blues concert, drinking flaming spanish coffee, had used up my indulgences for the week and that saying a bad word would put me right over the brink into sin and dissolution.
So I said, "oh fiddle!"
It was a nice trip, I have no more cash, I feel old.