Trees go to Zion

===LETTER FROM PORTLAND===

So, last night (Friday the 13th!) I went to this thing called the Scorpio Ball. I'm still not totally sure I understand what it is, but here's what I think it is.

Every year, when the sun is in Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22), a bunch of young Portlanders get together for a spooky costume dance party in a tent, involving good music and lots of drugs. I went as a kind of Zorro-Batman character. My friend went as a fox. My other friend went as an owl. We pretty much fit in with everybody else.

I don't do drugs--and I didn't make an exception last night--but basically everybody else was on something: molly, MDMA, ecstasy, adderol, coke, plus the whole place smelled like a car that somebody had hotboxed. There was lots of dancing and it was all very crazy. We got there at ten, and we didn't leave until almost four am.

The story I wanted to tell, though, is about when we were just leaving. Two friends and I were getting ready to drive home. We were standing by the front door, waiting for somebody to get their coat, or something.

There was this girl there, whom we had never met. She was dressed like a hipster earth goddess, kind of. She was wearing loose brown robes and feathers in her hair. She looked like she was maybe of Lebanese descent, or Syrian.

So this girl locks eyes with me and just starts freestyling. Just bam, right there. She's going crazy with the letter O, mainly. She's clearly on ecstasy, and all her rhymes end with O. For instance:

"We gotta go-go
from this place below-oh
up through the snow-oh
can't go slow-no

You get the picture.

So, when the universe starts freestyling at me, I'm all about that. It's a gift, right? So to help this girl, I start laying down some beats, beatboxing. What I'm doing is pretty simple, just a bass drum and some cymbals, but before long, we're really going.

Don't you know-know
I'm from Pocatello
I drink mellow-yellow
I'm reading Saul Bellow

We end up freestyling (and me beatboxing) for like five minutes. Finally, the girl is spent. She gives me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek, and then she gets out her iPhone. I'm thinking maybe she wants to exchange contact info.

Instead, she boots up this hi-res picture of a marijuana leaf that is kind of damp, with these water droplets on it. She sniffs the screen on her iPhone. Then she looks at me and shows me the picture. She invites me to sniff it. Then she looks at me real seriously and says,

"Trees go to Zion."

I must have had, like, a confused look on my face or something, and it's a good thing too, because then she decides to explain herself a little. She's like,

"Zion is zero. Three is a tree. Trees are green and threes are green. Trees go to Zion."

Ah. I get it now. She gives me another wet cheek kiss and we split.

--JR