Well, the month has nearly passed without a word, so I'm going to tell a short story here to bring a little bit of Portland to all you folks out East (except Josh and Brad).
Last night was the largest regular swing dance in Portland, so after work I wandered downtown trying to waste two hours until the dance started. As it's own random story, between the end of work and dinner, I bought two sets of tenor banjo strings and tried on a fedora (?) that had a $250 price tag that scared me into putting down the hat and quickly walking out of the store. But I thought I was getting hungry, and I've been wanting to find a new place to eat downtown since everything is a very expensive, trendy place or must otherwise have frightening cartoon murals to make up for an economical price tag. Example: I ate at an Indian restaurant the week before last, and I lost twenty dollars to a very small, metal bowl of a half-dozen pieces of lamb in a curry sauce and a plate of rice, and a chai tea. It was ridiculous. The other place I eat at regularly downtown (usually before my Sunday night dance) is called The Pita Pit, which has cartoon murals of all the animals you would be eating in their pita wraps - a T-bone steak with eyes, arms and legs, standing beside a leg of lamb, a chunk of ham, a moronic looking chicken and somehow a more deficient turkey on the other bookend of the meaty crew. On the other side is a car driven by a pita with a very big smile, probably because it is filled full of cartoon meat from the other side of the wall. I wouldn't go in that place if it wasn't cheap and pretty darn good (they make a great gyro pita with a cucumber sauce).
Just two blocks from The Pita Pit, I was intrigued by the name outside the very small restaurant: "Rice Junkies" Also, I have for some time wondered exactly what bento is, or what it has to do with, so I wanted to satisify my curiosity. I entered the store and realized almost immediately that I had made a mistake, but I have a social foible that make me more embarrassed to leave a store after entering it than staying and dealing with my bad choice. And this is before I noticed the cartoon murals on the walls of this tiny place. There was seating enough for maybe sixteen people - the fact that it seemed empty while being tiny should have been just one more signal flare of trouble ahead. I ordered a chicken bento with teriyaki sauce on white rice and a small foutain drink. Six bucks. Not too bad, not great, though. So I filled my drink and sat down, and really only drank in the frescos around me. On the largest bare wall direcly in front of me was a confusing assortment of images. I decided to the left was a black bean of some sort, complete with arms, legs, and eyes (as is customary in downtown Portland) holding one side of a trampoline, the other anchored by a grain of white rice (black arms, legs, and eyes) rescuing another piece of white rice from falling direcly from some unknown travesty. Beside the heroism was two smiling tomato heads atop blue and purple, respectively, body-building physiques squeezing the innards out of a vegetable wrap of some sort, for what purpose I do not know. Atop the wall over the window into the normal world, a hamburger was being murdered by similar rice and bean peopel with green lances with the obvious written below the scene: "Death to Fast Food", or something like that. Below the powerful written word was a Roman amphitheater, the lady tomato seated on a throne, the stands filled with rice and beans, and in the middle, Mr Tomatohead holding a bowl of rice like Atlas. If these confusing, violent, archaic images weren't enough, I looked behind me. Yes, there were rice and beans riding cartoon chickens (less cartoonie than Pita Pit, which feels like the barnyard part of the Garfield TV show), jousting or trying to kill an egg that happened to be standing in the middle, frightened for obvious reasons. I mean the strangeness of all the images, not the thought of it all being over because that sounded quite nice. And then dinner finally came- three pieces of chicken that would have been better had they been rubber chicken atop a bowl of rice with teriyaki sauce. I didn't even finish eating it. At least I had a drink, right? No, it was fifty cents for a refill, which I saw only after I walked back up to get a refill. Twelve ouces of soda cost a store owner about ten cents. If the cup cost another dime, the owner just made $1.30 without doing anything, really, and they want another fifty cents? Needless to say, I left Rice Junkies rather disgruntled about my bento experience. Luckily I had five hours of good dancing to make up for it. I'd tell you all about that, but it's not as funny and probably not even half as interesting, so I won't bore you any more than I already have. Three years gone and my best story is a crappy dinner in cartoonland. Hopefully I'll have something better to write about soon. We'll see. Catch you guys soon... maybe in May?