beautiful, funny, sad & true

The other day I was parking near J’s place, and there was a red four-wheel-drive Jeep parked in front of a black four-door BMW, with just barely enough space for a Honda in between them.  It was tight, but I thought I could do it.  As it turned out, I wouldn’t normally have been able to make it, but for the fact that my car is so ridiculously low, and the Jeep is so ridiculously high.

The bumper of my car slid right underneath the Jeep’s bumper, and I glided into the spot without a scratch.  I had to capture the moment:

On Sunday afternoon, I participated in Project X, a sort of time capsule event created by a theater group called Hand2Mouth.  I found out about it when I went to see a play last weekend, and I’ve been looking forward to it ever since.

The event was divided up into multiple stations.  There was a main station called ‘ground control’, which was where the lion’s share of the event took place.  For brevity’s sake, I will describe it as a place where you listen to other peoples’ stories in headphones, create your own stories, create a timeline of your own life and of events in the broader scope of human history, and choose how you would like to be remembered by future generations.  There were ample opportunities to speak, write, draw, or add whatever you felt like adding to the project.  There were also opportunities to converse with other random people, and to record those conversations via satellite for posterity.

It was an amazing experience, but it’s also a fairly daunting one.  The event asks a lot of its participants, and you have to be prepared to interact in a pretty demanding way.  I wasn’t prepared for that, quite frankly.  I made it through three of the five stations, in an hour and a half.  The two remaining stations were ones that took a bit of time, so I waited numerous times to get in, but each time I found myself turned away because the stations were occupied.  At a certain point, I decided to give up.  I had been told by my friend to allow about three hours to participate, but since I’d been so busy in the previous few days, I was starting to shut down and become anxious, so I decided to give the last two stations a miss, unfortunately.  This exhibit/performance/time capsule/event will also be conducted in Seattle next weekend, at the Bumbershoot festival, and I think that will be a tremendous experience.  I have a feeling that if I had done it up there, I’d have been much more likely to participate in all of the events, but since it was here in town, I felt my real life responsibilities creeping back in.  What’s more, I felt myself falling instantly in love with one of the women in the group, so I suddenly lost the ability to speak or think in my usual eloquent way.

If you live in the Northwest and are considering seeing the show, I definitely recommend it.  Be prepared to be there for quite a while, and know in advance that some of the stations are better equipped than others to handle more than one or two people at a time.  Perhaps this will change by the time it has its run in Seattle.

I’m very glad to have been a part of this time capsule, and my metaphorical hat goes off to Hand2Mouth for creating such an amazing event.  I hope I’m around in the future to see what becomes of it.

Saturday was not Mike’s actual birthday, but that was the day he wanted to celebrate it, so what’re you gonna do? You have to follow the birthday boy’s wishes. He started by having a little soiree over at his place, with about ten other people. (Incidentally, the hit of the party was Allanah’s homemade guacamole, and her chocolate ‘Irish’ cake.) From there, he, Allanah, Orion and I went to Tony Starlight’s to see the band 3 Leg Torso.

BassistMichael is a friend of mine, who actually played in Steph’s band for a short time last year. It was great to see him again, and especially to see him play in his natural habitat. He’s really an amazing musician.

It was a totally great evening, and after driving everybody home, I think I got home around 2:30 in the morning. But the weekend wasn’t over yet. . .not by a long shot.

I woke up yesterday to find that my phone had been shut off. Yesterday I took the day off from work to play a noontime gig with Breanna and the band down in Pioneer Courthouse Square.

I decided to take the MAX commuter train downtown, because Pioneer Square is one of its stops, and parking downtown can be tricky and expensive. So I drove to the stop and carried the cello and accordion on board the train. Two stops later, we all had to exit the train and cram onto a waiting bus, because the bridge over which the train travels is closed this month for repairs. It wasn’t fun trying to get two large instruments onto an already crowded bus, let me tell you. Not to mention the screaming kids and obnoxious people. When we arrived across the river, we all exited the bus and got back on a MAX train to follow its regular route. The exhausting trip took forty-five minutes, and it normally takes fifteen.

So then we played our gig, which was great. It was well-attended, and we sold a whole bunch of CD’s.

Came home afterwards via the exhausting and circuitous train-bus-train route. By this time, it was about ninety degrees outside. I finally got home, drenched in sweat. I had an e-mail waiting for me from J saying that PhoneCompany’s service was down for a while yesterday, so it wasn’t my phone after all. What a relief!

I took a nap and then went to meet J for sushi. She came over afterwards, and we watched an episode of Planet Earth; it was the episode about how the climate is changing drastically and rapidly, and how we are losing species (sometimes in as little as ten or fifteen years) and completely destroying the natural environment. It was very informative and influential, and it was good to be reminded about many of those things, which we tend to forget about in our daily lives.

Incidentally. . .for the record. . .I try to do my part by living near enough to where I work that I don’t need to drive, and where I can easily ride my bike, walk, or take public transportation to the places that I need to go. There have been many years where I didn’t own a car. I’ve always owned economical cars, including the one I have now. I don’t eat very much meat. I choose to live in a small apartment in the city, as opposed to a sprawling suburb. I don’t intend to have children. I try not to use disposable things when I have permanent options. These are all choices that I feel make a big difference in both the quality of life, and minimize the effects of my existence on this planet, but I still have a long way to go, and there are plenty of things that I can still do to make a difference for this little and unique planet.

So. After that, I got a call from JBJ saying that Jaime and Becky (whose CD I played on) were playing an impromptu show, so I texted Becky to say that I was going to be there, and it would be very easy for me to bring my cello with me. She thought that sounded great, so I ended up going down to join them at eight o’clock. The show was awesome, and the two other performers, Galveston and Justin Power, were amazing as well. I recommend that you check all of them out

I have another daytime gig with Breanna today, actually, so I’m going downtown again in an hour to load our equipment onto the Portland Spirit cruise ship. This is going to be a really fun gig; I’ve played it once before, last summer. It’s a lot of work, and it’s an all-day affair, but it’s just. . .totally great. I’m really honored to have such good opportunities to play with such good people.

Tonight the plan is for more J time, and then I need to do laundry and pack for the annual trip to Cannon Beach with Mom, Stepdad, and Brother and his family tomorrow morning. I’ll be staying for the weekend, until Sunday afternoon, when I’m driving back and then going to see a play at night.

SoOoOoO, it’s all a bit of a blur, but at least now you know why things have been a little quieter than usual around here lately. I’ll have my computer with me at the beach, so I should be able to check in from there too.

But now, it’s time to take a shower and get downtown to the boat.

OneYearAgo

Okay, so if you’re the kind of person who is bothered by the F-word, or the S-word, or by the mention of Satan, you’ll probably want to stop reading very soon.  Then again, I suppose you did read the title already, so there you go.

Back when l still lived in Yakima, I was in a hard rock band that will remain nameless. On July 4, 1992 (no, of course I didn’t remember that date; I had to look it up on my guitarist friend’s MySpace page, because he actually has a picture from that show), we played a house party, and a heavy metal band (who will also remain nameless) opened for us. They had only been playing together for a short time, so they only had about six songs in their repertoire. That means they played their six songs, then we played for an hour or so, and then they played their six songs again, for the people who arrived late.

Those of us who were there for both sets got a real treat, because they played everything exactly the same, including the between-song banter. My favorite introduction, which I remember so well because I heard it twice, went like this:

“This next song is for all of you who, if you really knew anything about Satan, you’d shit your fucking pants. This song is called. . .’Six-Six-Five and One Fucking Half.’ “

That was the band’s cue to launch into the song’s slow, grinding riff. We had to put our hands over our mouths to stifle our laughter, especially the second time around.

My favorite thing about that band, though, was the fact that the drummer was the only one who had a sense of rhythm. If you counted off, ‘One, two, three, four’, the bass player and two guitarists would all come in at different times around the next ‘one.’ The only way they could manage to play together was visually, if the three guys were staring at the drummer. For example, if he would hit a certain cymbal, the rest of the band knew that it was time to play the main riff. When he hit another cymbal, it was time to do the second riff. It was completely bizarre, and funny, and it took quite a while to realize that that’s what they were doing.

I wonder what those guys are doing now. The only one whose name I can recall is the singer. Something tells me that he’s the only member of that group who’s still involved with music.

And what happened to the group I was in, you may ask? Well, you’ll be glad to know that my guitarist friend is very busy these days, living in Seattle, and is booked clear into the New Year. The singer, I have no idea. I’ve looked him up from time to time, but so far it’s been to no avail. He was always a bit of a technophobe, and a suspicious one at that, so I imagine that he’s kept himself off of the usual online places. The drummer actually lives here in Portland and is married, but when he lived in Yakima, he had a kid with a horrible woman who bled him dry and completely devoured his soul.  I say that about very few people, by the way, but this woman was a leech, and a despicable human being.  Drummer sold his drums, gave her his car (which she and her drug-addicted boyfriend later wrecked), paid for her to live in an apartment, and even paid for her other daughter’s expenses as well. It just went on and on.

And me? Well, I’m doing all of the stuff I’m doing now, with no looking back, except to recount stories such as these, with a shudder and a huge sigh of relief.

OneYearAgo