beautiful, funny, sad & true

The other day, after writing the entry about flirtation and pedantry, I thought of a couple of examples of the type of sarcastic, pedantic, or downright nasty things I used to say to people.

ONE:
This occurred when I was nineteen, and I worked in the record department at a retail store.  Extremely glamorous (my tongue is very much in my cheek) and also low-paying.  One day, the manager and I were sitting around talking, like we used to do whenever business was slow, and a woman from another department ambled over to talk with us.  “Oh man, I hope today is better than yesterday; yesterday just drug.”

“Dragged,” I said, absently.

“What?” she asked.

“Dragged.  ‘Drug’ is something you take to achieve an altered state of consciousness.  ‘Dragged’ is what yesterday did.”

She gave me a look.  “What are you, some kind of encyclopedia?”

“Dictionary.”

She gave an exasperated sigh, then turned and walked away.  The manager put her hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter.

TWO:
This happened when I was about twenty-three, and I worked at a video store.  One of my fellow employees constantly talked about how she was on a diet, and about how she was doing this-and-that to lose weight, but she would constantly snack on candy throughout the day.  I don’t mean an occasional once-a-week kind of thing, either.  She’d buy a couple different bars in the morning and afternoon, and have an ice cream sandwich for lunch.  It was insane.

One day, she said, “I can’t figure out why I’m not losing any weight.  I mean, I eat like a bird.”

“What, you eat twice your own weight every day?”  Cause that’s what birds do.  “Or do you mean you put it down and peck at it like this?”  I made that pecking motion with my head toward her candy bar, which was sitting on the counter, half-eaten.

She got mad and walked away, and the other two employees cracked up laughing.  These days, I would never make that joke.  Maybe it’s because of all the women I know who have eating disorders.  Maybe it’s because I’m wiser about psychological matters now, and about the myriad ways that shame weasels itself into our lives, and into the decisions we make every minute of every day.  Or maybe I just think that it’s mean to make fun of people about their sensitive subjects.

All that being said, I have to confess that I do still think the ‘twice your own weight every day’ thing was funny.  But when I look at videos or pictures of myself at the time, though, I see what a jackass I used to be, and I have to cringe.

I must have been twenty-eight or thirty before I really started to change, and to grow emotionally, and to become the person I am now, but that’ll have to be a story for another day.

Was today frickin’ Christmas and nobody told me?  I got so many random gifts, it was absolutely unreal.

At work, my friend LC sent me an e-mail that said, “Are you here?” and then showed up with a bag full of CD cases.  There must have been twenty-five or thirty cases, and in each case was three CD’s!  I mean. . .oh my GOD that’s a lot of CD’s.  And best of all?  They’re all 80’s metal.  (Except for maybe a handful, like the New York Dolls and At The Drive In.  But otherwise. . .)  Seriously.  I was shaking, I was so excited to start listening to them.  After listening to the inauguration speech and a little bit of the commentary, I got through two Dio’s, a Mötley Crüe, and At The Drive In.

So then I called my mom while I was on my lunch break, and she happened to be over at her friend’s house.  This friend is my adopted aunt, by the way, who recently tracked us down on the net after we’d all been out of contact for almost thirty years.  Turns out that she lives about two blocks from my mom, so she wrote to my mom a few weeks ago and they’ve been reconnecting and spending incredible amounts of time together, which is mind-boggling and also makes perfect sense at the same time.  Naturally, my mom passed the phone to her, so I got to talk to her too.  In fact, here’s a picture of us together, which was taken when I was about a year old.

It was. . .I mean, I was practically speechless by then.

But there’s more.  My friend VL-W sent me a message which said, “Come in and see me when you can.  I have something for you.”  We were super busy, so it took me about an hour and a half, but when I was finally able to make it in there, I found that she had a super-cool black bowler hat waiting for me, which was the same one she let me borrow the other night at the IrishBand show.  She said that I could borrow it until I got one, but then wrote back right afterwards to say, “You know what?  I always think I look like a dyke in that hat, and you totally rock it.  It’s yours.”  Again. . .oh my GOD.

So I got home and there were two copies of the new Susie Blue CD waiting on my doorstep for me.  I’m in her band, and on this CD, which looks great and sounds great.  The other copy is for GuitaristDavid, my neighbor and friend, who also played on the CD.

Oh yeah.  The Susie Blue CD’s were resting on top of a box from my mom, which I didn’t even know that she’d mailed!  It  was full of new towels and kitchen stuff that she just randomly got just because she’s nice that way.

So. . .between the 75 new 80’s metal CD’s, the Susie Blue CD that I’m on, the hat, the box of housewares, the fact that Barack Obama is president now, AND I have an IrishBand show-slash-Obama-celebration tonight which is gonna frickin’ RULE. . . could today be any better?

I suppose that if I didn’t have to work (and work overtime at that) it would’ve been better.  But then again, if I hadn’t gone to work, I wouldn’t have the 75 CD’s or the hat.  So there you go.  Pretty damn good day, if I do say so myself, and it ain’t even close to being over yet.

When I was younger, I used to have this unstoppable urge to correct peoples’ grammar.  Thankfully, that impulse seems to have dissipated as I’ve gotten older, but I found out yesterday that it’s not entirely gone.

I walked over to FamousCoffeeCompany for a bit of the old you-know-what, and I was wearing my dark brown corduroy jacket.  The barista commented on it, saying that she loved it and that it was very teacher-esque.  My first thought was, “I think you mean ‘profesorial,’ ” and if this encounter had happened when I was twenty, I’m quite sure that’s what would have come flying out of my mouth.  With age comes dementia wisdom, however, so I said, “Thank you.”  Smile.  “Yeah, it even has patches on the elbows.” I raised an arm in front of me to show her.

“Nice,” she said, smiling back.  “Well, it looks great.”

I’m learning.  Slowly but surely, I’m learning.  Flirtation is much better than pedantry.  Or should that have been ‘pedanticism’?

Yesterday was extremely stressful at work, so much so that my friends and I decided that we weren’t gonna let it get to us, and that we were determined to have a good day. LC sent me a message that said, “You want to walk over and get some doughnuts for everybody?” I jumped at the chance, naturally. “Great idea! Let’s do it.”

We walked the handful of blocks to PunkRockDoughnutShop, to find one person in the back, working by herself, with Metallica’s Master of Puppets CD blaring throughout the whole place. We ordered two dozen doughnuts, in random combination, and it took her a while to get them together. When we went to pay, she told us that they only accept cash. We didn’t have enough between us, so we asked if there was an ATM nearby. She said there was one across the street, but that it was out of order. LC said, in an empathetic way, “Oh, man, you’d have to put them all back.” She got mad and started to do that, but I said, “No, no, we’ll be right back.” We walked out the door, trying to figure out where to go, and then I remembered that there’s an ATM across the street at the Sandy Hut.

Cash in hand, we returned to PunkRockDoughnutShop. In our short absence, two of the woman’s co-workers had materialized. She walked to the back and announced to everyone, “I need to breathe; that’s what my therapist told me.” We kinda looked at each other, and then placed our order with one of the other employees, and the woman reappeared, saying, “I’ll take care of it. Remember those two guys I told you about? These are the guys.”

“I told you we’d be right back,” I said, smiling. “I was surprised to see you putting them away.”

She said, “Oh, I didn’t hear that. All I heard was, ‘I guess you’ll have to put them all back.’ ”

The guy behind the counter laughed and quoted Led Zeppelin. “Communication breakdown; it’s always the same.” Perfect thing to say.

So she refilled the box and we gave her twenty bucks, and told her to keep the change, for all her trouble. It all worked out for the best; I love it when that happens. LC and I happily walked back to work and e-mailed our friends. “Doughnuts are in the break room, but keep it on the down low. You’re welcome.”

Throughout the morning, we were talking about music and feeling nostalgic, so on lunch break, we walked over to EverydayRecordStore, and found a bunch of 80’s metal records and CD’s, including Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark at the Moon and Ratt’s Out of the Cellar. Those were two of my favorites when I was about fourteen. I had a huge smile on my face listening to those again after such a long time.

Now I’m on the hunt for more of my favorites from that time, some of which are extremely hard to find, so I recruited a couple of my more tech-savvy friends to join me in the cause. And why not recruit you too? I’m looking for Lick It Up by Kiss and All Systems Go by Vinnie Vincent Invasion. There are others, of course, but those are the main ones I’m dying to hear again. Please and thank you!

Now I’m going to the basement to dig out Creatures of the Night.

As I promised, here are my favorite pictures from this past year, in no particular order.

The landscape between Utah and Idaho is vast, and seems quintessentially American somehow.

This picture was taken outside the studio when we were mixing Andrea’s CD.  There had been a freak snowstorm overnight, and we all woke up to this beautiful scene. Amazingly, the snow was all gone by the afternoon.  We finished mixing the songs, and then I drove back to Portland and went on a great first date.  That was a good day.

Andrea had just read and been inspired by the book Blue Like Jazz, and she wanted to take a little hike around the campus of the college here in town in which the book is set. Though it has changed in the decades since the book was written, this was and still is a beautiful place to hike and explore.

This is one of my favorite locations to take pictures.  It’s an abandoned cannery town along the Columbia river. Sorry about the small size.

When Breanna and Justin and I were on tour in Reno, Justin was getting his CD mixed in Portland, and the guy would send Justin mixes via e-mail, for him either to approve or to request some small changes. After our show, he and Bre were listening to the final mixes, so I left and walked around for an hour, and took about a million pictures of the city at night.  Came back and listened for a while, and when they went to bed, our host and I stayed up talking for another hour and a half afterwards. That was my favorite day (and night) of the tour.

ViolinistKarlee, me, Breanna and Justin on our tour, after our show in Redding.  This picture just puts a smile on my face every time I see it.  Karlee is such a lil thug.

This is my car, all loaded up with instruments to go to the studio and record my parts for Andrea’s CD.  I’m always amazed at just how much stuff this car can carry, despite its diminutive size.

ChefDave, in an instantly classic pose.  I love the way the light is gleaming off the knife.  Incidentally, you owe to it yourself to eat at the Sego Lily Cafe in Bountiful, Utah, by the way, next time you’re there.  Dave’s food is phenomenal.

There are lots of abandoned military bunkers outside Port Townsend, Washington, and I could easily spend a weekend just taking pictures of them. I love the way the light interacts and contrasts from room to room.

Ah, beautiful Astoria, Oregon, seen from the highest point in town.  That’s another place that provides an almost endless supply of photographic opportunities.

This picture I didn’t take, but it’s such a classic that it warranted inclusion on the best pictures of the year.  It’s the Cinemagic theater here in Portland, when they were in transition from the movie Hancock to the Dark Knight, and this was the sign change, in progress.

I love looking back over the year in this way. Even though this was a particularly difficult, painful, and challenging year, there were certainly plenty of good times too.

Here’s to a better 2009, though.