beautiful, funny, sad & true

Boy, was this trip to Yakima a weird one. Quite possibly the weirdest one yet.

I was planning to go see DrummerAdam play with Chuck Prophet. Turned out that I was mistaken, and Adam’s band was OPENING for Chuck Prophet. That’s still very cool, and well worth the drive. The band he was playing with was a person whose CD I played on, and on Wednesday I got a text message from the band leader which said, “I heard you’re going to be in Yakima. Want to sit in with us?” I agreed on the spot.

This was not a band I normally play with, except one other time, and I played cello at that show. This time I decided to play lead guitar, so I spent the next two days learning all the songs by listening to them on my iPod at work and in my car on the way down. I was the first to arrive at the venue, which was the Yakima Sports Center. Those of us who grew up in Yakima know that it used to be one of the sleaziest places in town, second only to the infamous (and now nonexistent) Blue Banjo, at least in my book, but it was completely refurbished in the late 1990’s, and now it’s a perfectly respectable restaurant and music venue.

Most of my friends from Yakima have long since moved away, but I do still have some friends there, and they were all planning to come to the show. Two of them weren’t able to make it, but DrummerTy was, and he actually brought my guitar teacher with him. I took guitar lessons for about six months when I was fifteen years old, and I’d only seen my teacher a few times since then. He was a great guy back then, and he’s still a great guy now. It was an amazing surprise to see him again.

We were the opening act, but for some reason, our set was only a half hour long. We also played a few weird cover songs. I asked, “If our set is only a half hour, why are we playing ANY cover songs?” Apparently, there was some sort of promotion going on at the venue called “Guilty Pleasures”, so each of the three bands was expected to play a few songs that everyone would know, and would never admit to liking. I found out about that when we were on stage; I certainly didn’t see it coming. The ‘guilty pleasure’ songs we played were “Human Nature” by Michael Jackson, “I’m a Believer” by the Monkees, and “Night Moves” by Bob Seger. I was a bit embarrassed, to be honest, because my friends who hadn’t seen me play in at least thirteen years were there watching me play these ridiculous songs that I didn’t know. I was a little bit nervous, but the band is very good, and we all played well together, despite having no rehearsals beforehand, and despite those weird other songs. I wouldn’t say it was the best gig I’ve ever had, but I’ve certainly had plenty of worse ones.

After we were done, I packed my stuff off stage and went to talk to DrummerTy. We sat at the bar and unsuccessfully attempted to order a drink from the aloof waitress. Probably a good thing in retrospect, because Ty was already very drunk. He was silent for a few moments and just sat there looking at me. Finally, he said, in a strange voice, “You’re the best musician I’ve ever known.”

I sensed that something was up, and said, “Thank you. . .I think. I’m expecting a ‘but.’ ”

He looked away, looked back and said, “What the fuck are you doing? There was nothing entertaining about that. It was lame.” Suddenly the band leader appeared from behind me with a beer and set it on the counter in front of me, then disappeared back into the crowd. “LAME,” Ty repeated, to me.

“This is not my normal thing,” I said, “It was also a weird gig, because our set was only half an hour, which I didn’t know beforehand, and I certainly didn’t know we were playing all those crappy ‘guilty pleasure’ songs.”

Ty replied, “Are you trying to be a pop star? You’re not even a pop musician. You live in the abstract.”

“I’m not a pop star, I’m trying to be a producer. This was just one gig, on one night. I don’t know what you mean by ‘living in the abstract.’ ”

He rubbed his eyes, which seemed to be bothering him. “I listened to all the songs on your web site, and I don’t even like them.” That’s nothing that concerns me, so I didn’t say anything. Just then, his friend and friend’s girlfriend arrived. He didn’t introduce me. They talked among themselves for a minute, and then Ty said, to no one in particular, “I’m too drunk. I need to get outta here or I’m gonna get in a fight.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. They started to head toward the door, so I said good night, and then went over and gave my old guitar teacher a hug, and they all drove off. I went outside, feeling like I’d been sucker-punched. After a few minutes, Adam came outside, saw me, and noticed that I was bummed out. I told him what happened, and he said that he’s seen Ty like that pretty often. He goes out, drinks too much, and then gets belligerent. After having a few days to think about it, I feel like this conversation was Ty’s version of ‘tough love’ or something, but that’s certainly not the way to go about it.

This all happened during the second performer of the night, who is a songwriter from here in Portland who I’ve seen a couple of times before, and who I’m not particularly impressed with. Between my conversation with Ty and walking outside, I pretty much missed his entire set. I wanted to leave, but I also wanted to stay and see Chuck Prophet, who was absolutely awesome. I got a glass of wine and talked with our various band members for a while. I also saw a musician friend of mine from college, who went on to open a recording studio, which later closed down after a few years. I went and talked with him for a while, and it was okay, but not as much fun as I expected. He had to leave after about fifteen minutes, so I went back to hang out with the band. The show ended soon after, so I packed up my car, gave hugs all around to the band members, and left. I was still feeling really angry, and I was also exhausted after the three-hour drive to Yakima. I had come directly from work.

Around 1:30 a.m., I arrived at my mom’s empty house (she and my stepdad were in Seattle visiting my brother’s family), and when I was bringing my instruments in from the car, I noticed that I was missing my amp stand, so I had to drive clear back downtown to retrieve it. Finally, I was able to go to bed. Didn’t sleep too well, either, because my mom has three dogs, all of which wear clanky chain collars and walk around barking in the middle of the night.

This entry is getting a bit on the long side, so I think I’m going to turn this into a two-part entry.

You’ll be glad to know that Saturday was great. The second part of this story isn’t negative at all.

OneYearAgo

Just the other day, I got the invitation from my high school for my graduating class’s twentieth anniversary reunion, which is happening a month from now.  A month?  You’ve got to be kidding me.  I need much longer than that to prepare myself for that kind of trauma.  I laughed like a hyena as I crumpled up the invitation and threw it in the recycling bin.  I immediately posted a message on Twitter saying, “Got my high school reunion invitation today. Is there a polite way to say, ‘F Off, I Hated High School?’ “

The next day, I e-mailed one of my friends from back then who lives down in Newport (Oregon) now, and who tracked me down on MySpace last summer after seeing one of my gigs on TV.  I asked if he’ll be going to the reunion.  The short answer is that he will not be.  He mentioned a few people who he’d been in contact with lately, and who he wasn’t excited to see, and they were all names of people who had either bullied, ignored, or insulted me back in the day.  You see, in high school, I was a quiet, shy, kinda nerdy guy (I know, it’s hard to believe) and most people didn’t talk to me.  The ones who did talk to me usually did so in a mocking way.  The precious few who were my actual friends are some of the people I’m still in contact with today.  A handful of them I’m very close to.  There are about ten people I’d like to see, out of my graduating class of four hundred, but the rest I couldn’t care less about.  I’m not nostalgic for high school at all.  College had its moments, and its close friendships (some of which I still maintain), but I have to admit that I’m really enjoying life now much more than ever before.  Even with the extremely painful things that have happened recently, I feel alive now in a way that I never used to.  I was a shell of a person back then, and I feel like I had nothing to offer anyone.  If I were to go to a reunion now, it would just be too freakin’ weird, with people trying to talk to me as if we were friends, or trying to feign interest in my life in the interim.

Not to mention the fact that I don’t go by my middle name anymore, like I did back then, so I’d have to tell THAT story about four hundred times.  No thank you; I’ll pass.

I remember one person who I ran into when I still lived in Yakima and worked at the video store.  She walked in the door and instantly recognized me.  “Oh my gosh!  Hey [my middle name], how are you?”  She told me her name, which I recognized too.  She looked great, and had been a cheerleader all through high school, but she also played the flute, which is how I had known her.  We talked for a few minutes about the usual pleasantries, and then she said, “What’s your last name again?  I want to say [my last name], but you’d kill me.”  The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I replied, “Well it IS [my last name], and why would I want to kill you for that?”  She sputtered, “Uhhh . .ababah. . .I gotta go.  Good to see you!” waved over her shoulder, and ran out the door.  I just stood there, dumbstruck and fuming.

In other news, this trip down Memory Lane has got me thinking about someone completely different; my girlfriend from my college years.  She comes up in conversation every once in a while, and every time she does, the people who knew me then say things like, “You sure loved her a lot.”   And it’s true.  Ours was a complicated relationship that lasted for about five years, and we split up for good when I moved to Portland and she moved to Seattle.  We talked on the phone a few times after that, but then the trajectories of our lives took over, and we haven’t talked since.  She’s the one I’ve wondered about more than any other, and I’ve even looked her up occasionally online.  I’ve had the feeling that her life hasn’t gone in the way that she expected it would, and that she’s not happy about it.  What I’ve found recently is that she’s not married, she’s still living in the Seattle metropolitan area, she’s still singing both jazz and classical music, and she’s still working for a video game company.  She was doing all of those things the last time I talked to her.  I haven’t tried to e-mail her or contact her in any way.  I wouldn’t know where to begin, really, other than to say that I’ve thought about her a lot over the years, and that I really hope she’s well, and that I would love to talk to her sometime and see what she’s done with herself.

Man, life is weird, but I suppose I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Spent the weekend in Port Townsend, Washington playing with IrishBand, which was a total blast, as usual. We all stayed at the home of Violinist’s parents, which is about seven miles outside of PT. They were GraciousInvitingOpenAndFriendly, and their house – which they pretty much built themselves – was beautiful.

We arrived in PT at around two-thirty in the afternoon, just in time to set up and play an acoustic gig at the Boiler Room, which was really more of a promotion stunt to get people to come see us at Sirens later that night. I took the opportunity to walk down the street and take a few pics. Here’s one that’s okay:

While we were setting up, there was an attempted robbery at the store across the street, and when the police car pulled up and parked, I thought (before we knew what was happening) that perhaps a parking ticket or something was in my immediate future, because that’s my red Honda, snookered in by the police car.

Turns out that my fears were unfounded.

We tried to take pictures, but we couldn’t see any of the action, and before too long, the street was pretty well filled with rubberneckers anyway. After our gig was over, we packed up and headed to Violinist’s parents’ house for dinner, by way of Fort Worden and all of the abandoned military bunkers that line the hillsides along the coast. We hiked through a few of them, and even walked through some of the pitch-black tunnels that connect them. I took a few pictures, because the light and the angles were so interesting from room to room.

The homemade dinner we were served was amazing, and the show was amazing. I didn’t realize there was such a sizable Brazilian contingent in PT, but there were quite a few in attendance that night. They were right up front, dancing up a storm, which always makes for a more enjoyable show.

Afterwards, BassPlayer and BanjoPlayer went off with a couple of rockabilly girls (for the record, only BassPlayer was interested in the girls; BanjoPlayer has a great girlfriend, and he knows it) most of us went to a ‘condo’ party. I don’t know whose condo it was, but it seems to be quite the party place. The party wasn’t too much fun, actually. Violinist and Singer used to live in Port Townsend, and they knew lots of the people there, but the other three of us were a bit out of the loop. There’s a notoriously obnoxious guy who actually called Singer’s girlfriend a bitch (Twice!), so she and Singer left really early. Drummer, Violinist, Violinist’s girlfriend and I tried gamely to stick around for a while, but after we overheard a few more weird comments, we decided it was time to leave. One guy, when his Asian female friend respectfully declined to join him on an outing he invited her to, actually asked her, “Why do you have to be such a Jew?” Violinist’s girlfriend and I looked at each other in a what-planet-are-we-on-again way. Then, as we were making our way to the door to leave, overheard a conversation between Obnoxious Guy and some random guy he didn’t know. Obnoxious Guy told Random Guy, “You’re acting just like a French Canadian. I HATE French Canadians.” (Drummer said the next morning that the ultimate revenge for a guy like that would be if he met and fell in love with a nice French-Canadian girl. I thought that was hilarious.)

It was about one in the morning when we all met back up again, and caravaned back to our home base. BassPlayer left the girls at the bar, and we asked him, “Why didn’t you go home with them? It seemed like one of them was kinda into you.” He replied, in a really low drunken slur, while putting two oranges into the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt, “I woulda had a much better time. . .lying on my stomach. . .pooping.” We all cracked up laughing with surprise, and Violinist said, “What’s that from? That’s really funny.” BassPlayer replied, in the same low slur, “My diary,” which made us laugh even harder.

I slept on the sofa in the living room, in my sleeping bag, and Drummer slept on the other side of the room divider, on an air mattress on the floor. Drummer snores. A lot. He started in almost immediately, and he didn’t respond to my shaking, so I put in my ear buds and turned on my iPod just loud enough to drown him out. I can’t usually sleep to music, but I really can’t sleep to loud snoring, and the iPod did the trick.

I was the first one awake, around eight-thirty the next morning, since I hadn’t had very much to drink the night before, so I got up, took a shower, and went for a hike through the wooded five-acre property.

While I was hiking, there were homemade SausageVeggieEgg frittatas, homemade bread, homemade applesauce with mixed berries, and homemade apple juice all being born at the same time. Once they were ready, we all ate and talked and laughed outside in the morning sunshine, and then gradually packed up and made our separate ways back to Portland. Drummer and I drove along the eastern edge of the Washington peninsula, down Highway 101 until it turned inland at Olympia. We stopped along the way to take some pictures, but none of them really came out the way we had hoped. This one was probably the best, but I still don’t find it particularly compelling.

After a while, we just wanted to get home. We listened to a whole bunch of CD’s, but my favorite by far was a new band called Low Vs. Diamond. They’re really great, and we listened to their album three or four times. Listening to the songs now at that link, I was transported back to the trip, talking and laughing and eating ice cream with Drummer.

At one point, we pulled into a rest stop to get some coffee and cookies, and when we went to leave, my car refused to start. It does that occasionally, so we let it cool off for a while, but it still balked when we tried it a second time. Drummer taught me the push-start technique, and there were two guys watching and laughing at us while we pushed the car down the hill toward the on-ramp. When Drummer told me to pop the clutch, and the car started right up, he yelled triumphantly to the two guys, “That’s how you do it, boys!” and we were back on the road.

We got to Portland around six-thirty, and after dropping off Drummer, I came home to find that there was a house party in my building, planned for eight o’clock, which gave me just enough time to shower and change my sweaty clothes. The party was fun, and the festivities lasted until one a.m., when it seemed to be over, but I found out tonight that there were still people who straggled in as late as two-thirty. The party spilled over into today, in a way, because when I came walking home from work, two of my neighbor friends were sitting outside eating some of the leftover homemade salsa from last night. “Help,” they said, “we need to get rid of this.” I laughed and replied, “You don’t have to tell me twice; I’ll be right back!”

So yeah. Good times all around. It was quite the weekend. Tonight my plan is to watch a DVD (“Heathers”, a brilliant and very dark comedy starring Winona Ryder) and go to bed relatively early, to try and catch up on some well-deserved sleep.

I’m in Yakima, walking on Browne Avenue, about a block away my old apartment. Two guys, approximately ten years older than I, are standing next to the wall of an industrial-looking building that does not really exist in that location. One guy is high. He’s got his ten-speed bicycle leaning against his hip. The other guy is waiting for someone to walk by, and this time that someone is me.

“Hey, man,” he says, walking toward me. “I want to give you something.”

“Thanks, but you don’t have to do that,” I reply.

“No, man, yeah I do.” He puts his entire wallet in my hand. It looks like the black leather one I have in real life, except his is much more beat up, and is even more stuffed full of receipts, bills, and cash. Even though the wallet is in my hand, I leave my hand flat, to show that I have no intention of taking it.

“Really, that’s okay. You need your wallet.”

“Look at this,” he says, a bit incredulously. He shows me a wad of fake-looking cash that he pulls from behind his real wad of cash. “You’re crazy.”

“You need your money, I’m doing okay.” I turn to walk away.

He pulls out a six-hundred-dollar bill, and holds it in front of my face. “Then just take this.” He puts it in my hand, but again I leave my palm open. Our hands are pressed together with the bill between them.

“Really, I don’t need it. You keep it.”

Now he thinks he’s being clever. As if to entice me to stop him from doing something bad with it, he says, “I’m just gonna go buy a piece with it.” I know he’s lying.

“Keep your money. See you around.” I walk away quickly. He becomes angry, but drops his wallet at taht moment, so he can’t do anything to chase me. High Guy tries to get onto his bike to come after me, but he isn’t capable of walking, so the bike tips over, and the guy falls on his face. When he looks up after me and tries to yell something, his face is bloody on one side.

There is a woman walking past all of us, giving us wide berth as she walks quickly to her black four-door Audi and gets in. I walk down to my apartment, but I go in the side entrance, just in case the guys are still watching me, which I don’t think they are. When I get inside, I see a large group of children filing past my window, screaming loudly. My blond wife (not someone I know in real life, and I’m not married) enters the room and starts to loudly sing a nonsensical song. She looks very strange, and her face actually changes shape and become slightly disfigured as I stand there looking at her. I try to get her to stop singing by kissing her, which works somewhat, but she still continues humming while we’re kissing.

That’s when my alarm went off and I woke up.

I never felt threatened, or out of control of the situation. I was very calm, and somehow knew just the right way to interact with this guy.

Very strange morning for dreams. I was only asleep for 45 minutes, but during that time I had an uncountable number of short dreams of all types. Some were ads, for a refrigerator, and for some sort of new Google service (?), and for a couple of other things that are eluding me at the moment. Two were extremely fast-paced cartoons, one of which was about a little Peruvian donkey named Mayaya. (It makes me laugh just to write that sentence, because I know how weird it must sound.) I don’t remember the other cartoon. Out of all those dreams, the only one that had any kind of narrative that I could write out was the one about the two guys and the humming wife.

OneYearAgo

Life may imitate art, but dreams also imitate life sometimes too.

Last night, I dreamt that I was rehearsing for the play, and that it was completely chaotic, and nobody–myself included–seemed to know what was happening. So it was pretty much like last night’s tech rehearsal.

From there, the dream changed its location to a dusty basement, full of Tossed In and all the other actors. It seems we had thrown a party recently, but not cleaned up after it, so we were walking around in this basement looking at all of the stuff we’d left behind. Barbecue with the charred remains of animal of undetermined species, various dishes, cooking pots, wine bottles, everything was all over the place. Tossed In told me that if I could make a list of all the stuff that was down there, that would be great “because then we can delegate” people to clean it all up. “Okay,” I said, “but I won’t have any time to do it until after Saturday [when the play is over].”

Then I had an almost completely unrelated dream, in which I’m lying on the sofa in the same basement (the relation to the other dream stops there) cuddling with an ex-girlfriend who will remain nameless here. (It’s probably not who you think.) We’re not really doing anything, but my hand is underneath her shirt. We’re lying there silently for quite a while, when she gets up abruptly and says, “I don’t think so.” I make apologies, but she leaves. I stay on the sofa alone for a long time after that, feeling uncomfortable and remorseful.

It’s safe to say that last night wasn’t the most restful night I’ve ever had.