beautiful, funny, sad & true

So.  Yeah.  The trip to Port Townsend.  Finally.  Sorry it took a while to get around to this.  PT trips always end up being big stories.

Good times, as per usual.  Our IrishBand show was on Friday night, and we spent the entire rest of the weekend partying, and eating, and walking, and talking.  PT is small enough (and pretty enough) that you can just walk everywhere in the downtown area.   Singer and I arrived in town first, and we walked from place to place, and I had my camera ready for a few of them.

it seemed that everywhere we went we met someone Singer knew, who was brimming over with interesting stories.  We met his first grade teacher, and a couple of other friends, and his uncle (Ex-step-uncle?  Not biological, anyway. . .isn’t this interesting?), who wore an ascot and drunkenly talked our ears off in a comic way.  He was quite the character.

We met up with some of our friends from Portland (who also moved from PT), walked downtown to buy a huge bottle of beer each, and then walked to the pier to sit and relax for a while.  The sitting and relaxing (and, of course, the picture-taking) was already in progress, when an unhappy-looking guy walked up, took his shirt off, and stood at the end of the pier, staring down into the water.  We called out to him, “You okay, dude?”

He didn’t look at us, but instead hopped over the rail and dove into Puget Sound.  We called to him a few more times, and told him there was a ladder on the other side of the pier, but he didn’t respond to us in any way.  It was pretty freaky.  He sat there treading water for a long time. . .

. . .and then swam back over to the dock and climbed out, walked clear around where we were sitting, and never once acknowledged our presence.  Luckily everything turned out to be okay, but I think we were all fearing the worst, or at least preparing ourselves to dive in after him.  Situation averted, we finished our beers and walked back up to get food.  Before long, it was time for IrishBand to play our show, which was pretty awesome, and the venue was packed with people.  Finally rolled into Violinist’s parents’ house at around three in the morning.

The next morning Violinist’s parents fixed us a glorious breakfast of the heartiest French toast you can imagine, with a delicious array of toppings (I chose the homemade berry sauce) and veggie sausage on the side.  Suddenly it was time for the Rhody Festival parade, so we drove into town in time for that.  I had my camera, but all parades look the same, so I didn’t feel the need to capture this one for posterity.  It was fun, though, and we met up with another of Singer’s friends (a former recording studio owner, which was interesting), and went to lunch with him after the parade was over.

Y’know what?  I’m gonna change the plan for this entry, because really, the whole rest of Saturday was spent eating and drinking.  Singer had to go to his ten-year high school reunion, so Drummer and I got dropped off at a party with some people we barely knew.  One of them was very drunk already (this was around 3:00 in the afternoon), and he wanted to watch the soccer game.  He stood in front of the TV, yelling horrible things like, “I knew you were gonna miss that, you f**king queer!”  and “Jewbag!  What the f**k was that?!“  A couple of people tried to stop the flow of insults, but you can’t reason with people who are that drunk and belligerent, so I decided that I needed to make myself scarce for a while.  I walked out of the house and down the hill (I could still hear the strings of obscenities from three long blocks away) into town and over to the beach, where I sat quietly on the rocks for a long while, before walking the length of the beach to a small rocky point to collect some mussel and oyster shells, which were everywhere.  I must have been gone for about an hour or so, when I got a phone call from Violinist saying, “Hey, noticed you weren’t around.  Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.  I just needed to be away from the verbal abuse.  I also wanted some quiet anyway.  I’m down on the beach.”

“Really?  You walked clear over there?  By the fort?”

“No, the marina.  I’m sitting on a log as we speak.  I’ll be back before too long, but I’m kind of enjoying being here by myself for a while.”

“Oh, really?  Cause we were gonna walk down there after the game is over.”

So I walked around on the beach for another half hour or so, then headed back, clear around the marina and the condos, and then up the hill to the party house.  The soccer game was just about over, so we all started looking for the next distraction.  It came in the form of a cooler that someone had ingeniously attached wheels, handlebars, and an electric motor to (you’d have to see it to believe it) to create a miniature electric scooter, so we each took a couple of turns riding it around the block.  My pictures didn’t come out, but I think Violinist may have some.  It was pretty dang funny.  When the batteries started to lose their charge, we put the scooter away to charge it up again, and then all walked down to the park near the beach.  ObnoxiousDrunk was up to his usual antics, so the rest of us were pretty much trying to keep as much distance between him and ourselves as we could.

Drummer and I walked down to the beach for a little while, and I told him about the multitude of shells that were down there, so he wanted to grab a few for his lady friend, and also get a temporary reprieve from ObnoxiousDrunk.  This post is getting long, so I’ll just say that there was Thai food involved, and more walking, and lots more drinking, and then around midnight we walked back down the hill to see a punk band (who will remain nameless) play.

They were pretty good (unlike my pictures from the show!), but the general concensus was that eight or ten years ago, everybody thought that they were the coolest band anywhere.  These days, however, their lifestyle of excess is starting to take its toll on the band members, and apparently it’s really starting to show.  Luckily, we had snuck into the show for free, by way of a side door near the bar in the front of the buildng.  Don’t tell the band.

Did I mention that after the show, it was around one-thirty in the morning?  Naturally, that meant we had to go back to the party house to continue the festivities before heading back to Violinist’s house at around three.  Apparently our car got egged on the way back, but I don’t even remember it, quite honestly, because my body was already beginning to shut itself down.  We got to Violinist’s house and I just kinda collapsed on my bed.  I started to check my text messages and voice mails, but I ended up falling asleep right away and snoring really loudly.  So loudly, in fact, that Singer walked by the room I was in and poked his head in the door to check on me.  He laughed and ran downstairs, telling the other guys, “C’mere, you have to see this!”

This was all unknown to me, obviously, until the next morning when I woke up to find that I had some messages saying things like, “Ha ha” and “We’re watching you!”  Apparently I’d fallen asleep with my glasses on, and they’d fallen halfway off my face, and my phone was sitting on my chest.  Hilarious.  No pictures of that, thank gawd.   It was as if my body was determined to stop me from doing absolutely any other movement that day.   And no wonder, too; it was a crazy day.

In the morning we woke up to another amazing breakfast and conversation with Violinist’s parents, then after a few hours said our goodbyes and headed to a friend’s house, where there was yet another barbecue and party happening.  We were all still stuffed from our enormous breakfast, so we gave the food a miss, but a couple of the guys did have a drink.  I gorged myself on cup after cup of water, which my poor little body was so thirsty for.  We hung out there for an hour or two, and then slowly made our way out of town.  Drummer was really impatient to get back home, and sat fuming silently in Violinist’s car while the rest of us ran a few more errands.  Manager needed to buy some parts for his motorcycle, and then had to make a few small repairs on it.  Then we needed to stop for gas, and made another stop at a hardware store.  Drummer practically had steam coming out of his ears by the time we left Port Townsend, and Singer and I (in Singer’s car) could only imagine how frustrated Violinist must have been with him on the four-hour drive back to Portland.

So there you go; another crazy trip to PT under our metaphorical belts.

The rest of this week has been a blur of activity as well, which is why it took me so long to write this entry in the first place.