beautiful, funny, sad & true

While driving home from the store today, I saw a police car along the side of the road with the words “UFO Response Team” emblazoned on the back, and the little kid in me got all excited thinking about all that stuff again.  You see, when I was young, I had an endless fascination for UFO’s.  I had a stack of books about them (by authors like J. Allen Hynek and John Mack) and I watched every TV show I could.  The Air Force used to have a special team called Project Blue Book that investigated sightings and stories, and for about two seconds in the late 1970’s, long before “The X-Files”, there was a TV show based on Project Blue Book cases that was called “Project U.F.O.”

Long before conspiracy theories abounded or distrust of the government became de riguer, there seemed to be a kind of mythology about UFO’s.  One show described an ancient site in South America that was given the insipid name of EarthBaseOne, which (after decades of retrospect) looked like an Inca temple.  It was a large square, with no roof, and in the walls of the square were carvings of skulls.  One was human, and the others (all around the walls) were slight variations on human faces.  Some were very similar to our current visage, while others were grotesquely misshapen.  A quick Google search revealed that the site’s real name is Tiahuanaco, in Bolivia.

Anyway, the show put forward the idea that extraterrestrial life forms created humanity, and that Tiahuanaco was the place where they worked out their ‘design’ for us.   An interesting theory, and one that I’ve never forgotten.

So anyway, I got to thinking about all that UFO business again this afternoon, and I really wanted to see the show “Project U.F.O.” again.  It took longer than I would have thought to scrounge up an actual episode (Due to a government cover-up, perhaps? KIDDING!), but here’s one for you.

Warning:  WATCH THIS CLIP AT YOUR OWN RISK.  It may have been based on an interesting premise, but the show is a complete and utter turd.  Do not attempt to drive or use heavy machinery after watching it.

You’ve been warned.

There, see?  I warned you.

Too busy to post again lately.  What have I been up to?  By way of an answer, I’ll show you a few pictures, and give you the quick run-down.

I played one of the best and most memorable shows I’ve ever had. . .

. . .I went to see some friends play a very cool night of cello music, and might have come away with a new instructor (it doesn’t hurt that she’s incredibly cute, too!). . .

. . .I made a new friend, who’s a friend of friend.  My friend in question told me that she is “Japanese, and a pianist, and she’s looking for new musical friends.  I thought of you.”  She came to the IrishBand show in StateCapitol last Wednesday, and then came up here to Portland on Saturday night.  No pics of her yet, unfortunately. . .

. . .IrishBand’s Violinist and I played our first wedding, and had a blast during the extra-curricular activities as well. . .

. . .I got me a good ol’ 4-track cassette recorder for archiving FirstBand’s tapes. . .

. . .I recorded some new tracks (using the computer, not the 4-track!) on IrishBand’s theme song. . .

. . .I created a fairly esoteric (but fun!) new blog, which you probably wouldn’t be interested in, and which I will not be posting a link to. . .

. . .and I went out for dinner, a walk, and coffee with a friend who I haven’t seen in months, and took some nice pictures along the way.

Times have been good, overall, I’d say.

Tonight, I think a friend and I are going to hit the Last Thursday art ‘scene’ on Alberta Street.  I haven’t had the chance to do that in ages, because I always seem to have gigs on both First AND Last Thursdays.

So there you go; you’re all caught up now, and I feel much better too.

I went to see Flogging Molly last night, for the first time, and I have to say that it was the most fun show I’ve ever been to.  I’ve never danced so much, or sweated so much before.  I was wearing three layers of shirts (undershirt and the T-shirt I was wearing, plus the FM T-shirt I bought last night) and they were all drenched by my own sweat and that of a myriad of other people.  Even my jeans were soaked clear through.  It was a total blast.  My friends and I were about four or five rows from the front, just to the left of center, and just on the edge of the mosh pit.  It was the perfect spot.

A different friend who came on her own (we weren’t able to find each other at the show) was brave enough to bring her camera and take a couple of pictures, and here they are.

She was to the right of me, and a tiny bit further back, but it seems like she had a better view.

She must have walked around a bit, because this was about what my view was like.   After I told her where I was, she sent me this picture and said there’s a decent chance I may be in it, based on my description.  So I like to think I’m in there somewhere.  :)

Man, I really smell horrible today, after the sweat-a-thon show last night.  I can smell myself as I’m sitting here.  I need to go take a shower now.  Yeesh.

IrishBand is playing a show down in StateCapitol tonight, for the first time, and we’re very much looking forward to it.

In other news, i may be getting a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder this weekend, for all of the archiving of Iron Horse (my first band) songs on my computer.  Very exciting!  How 1989 of me.  Hey, if it’s good enough for DJ Shadow, it’s certainly good enough for Iron Horse.

This is my all-time favorite dream, which I had when I was eighteen years old.  I found it written out on an old floppy disk, along with my other two favorite dreams, George Harrison and The Organ Man.  I’m sure you’ll enjoy all three of them.

* * * * *

It was a beautiful spring day, and I was sitting on my old Honda motorcycle outside a small outdoor shopping center in Yakima with a railroad theme.  It was one of the few historical landmarks in town, and there was a great little ice cream shop there, with a cute server girl who was a friend of mine.

I was holding a bag of Hydrox cookies in a plastic grocery bag that was dangling from my handlebars.  It’s amazing what one can accomplish when one has no other options.  I’ve held many a bag of groceries from the handlebars of that motorcycle, let me tell you.  As I was looking left and right, scanning traffic to make a turn from the parking lot onto Yakima Avenue, two early teenage kids ran by and attempted to snatch my bag, but since the handles of the bag were wrapped around the handlebars, they did not succeed.  I was not amused.  “I’d better hide these,” I resolved to myself, tucking the bag inside my brown leather jacket and zipping it up all the way.

I revved the engine a bit and looked to my left at the oncoming traffic, where I saw a small crowd of maybe ten or fifteen people milling around on the sidewalk in front of the Oriental Garden restaurant about a block away.  They appeared to be looking for someone.  A middle-aged guy turned and looked directly at me for an unnerving second, then pointed me out and yelled to his cohorts, “There he is!”  They all turned and started to run in my direction.  “Let’s get him!” someone shouted.  Not being one to suffer hostile mobs gladly, I revved up the motorcycle and turned right onto Yakima Avenue, away from the crowd. Looking across the street, I saw the two kids running in the same direction I was going, and one of them had a bag of Oreo cookies in his hand, which was startlingly similar to my own bag of Hydrox. “Ah,” I realized, in a flash of inspiration.  “They must think I’m those kids.”

Suddenly the motorcycle became extremely sluggish.  When I turned the throttle, the engine revved slightly but dipped immediately afterwards.  It eventually came to a stop just short of where the kids were running, and I had to resort to the time-honored ambulatory means of escape.  The kids saw me approaching and, thinking I was chasing them, took off running even faster.  I ran across the street to the far side of Yakima Avenue.

Glancing over my shoulder to where the crowd had been only seconds before, I noticed that they were now crossing the street toward me.  I tried to run but was unable to.  I tried to walk fast, but was pathetically unable to manage that either.   Panicked now, with the crowd coming ever closer, I tried to coax my leaden legs to get me away, but it was to no avail.  The menacing mob closed in around me.  They pushed me to the ground and, despite my protestations, poked and prodded me from all sides, trying to unzip my jacket and remove my precious cargo. . .the Hydrox cookies.

Lying on my back, with the crowd of people on top of me, digging their fingers into my jacket, I finally relented, salvaging the vestiges of my dignity in the only way I could.  I fought off the offending hands with one hand, and unzipped my jacket with the other, slowly revealing the telltale blue and yellow bag.  I shouted at the crowd incredulously, desperately, gesturing frantically at the label on the bag with my free hand.  “They’re only Hydrox!  They’re only Hydrox!”

This is one of my three All-Time Favorite Dreams, along with Hydrox (which is my All-Time Favorite) and George Harrison.  I this dream when I was about twenty years old, and I just found it and the other two written out on a floppy disk in a box.  I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, and the other two as well.

* * * * *

I was leaving my parents’ house one day, after visiting them, and it was time to go back to the crappy apartment I was living in at the time.  Remind me to tell you sometime about the guy who lived upstairs from us, who had horse sex with his unattractive girlfriend while my roommate and I, the captive audience in the apartment below, listened with a mixture of glee, shame and envy, because while the guy and his girlfriend were both completely unattractive, at least he was having sex, which is much more than you could say for us at the time.  Although, to tell you the truth, I would much rather listen to that than the cute female neighbor next door to us, whose bed (on the other side of my bedroom wall) would bang against the wall when she had sex with her boyfriend.  One particularly miserable night when the guy upstairs was doing his equine thing, and the girl next door was doing her banging thing, my roommate and I just had to leave.  I went in and told him, “Man, we can NOT sit here and be surrounded by this crap.  Let’s get outta here.”

Why did I bring that up?

Oh yeah, the apartment.  What a piece of crap.

OH YEAH, my parents’ house.  I was leaving.  I walked out the front door, down the sidewalk, past the garage, and into the driveway.  This time, however, was not like any other time, before or since.   At the end of the driveway, almost to the house, was a white cup and saucer.  It was about three feet high, and it was full of a strange, soupy substance.  From a distance, the substance looked like a brownish red soup, but upon closer inspection, it turned out to be full of individual body parts.  There were livers, hearts, and organs of every kind mixed up in there, along with bones and all manner of other nastiness.

I saw the soup and thought it was just about the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen in my life.  I turned to walk past the cup and saucer to where my car was parked, when I suddenly heard this laugh.  It was a high-pitched laugh similar to that of Salacious Crumb, Jabba the Hutt’s sidekick from The Empire Strikes Back. But that’s not the weirdest thing.   The weirdest thing was that when I turned around, that’s who was sitting in the soup.  Salacious Crumb.  In the soup.  Laughing at me.  Like you probably are.

Here’s where the story gets really weird.

When I turned and saw Salacious sitting in the soup, I really wanted to show this to my parents, who were in the house.  I decided to open the garage door and go in that way.  As I was doing that, I heard this sloshing sound coming from inside the cup, and from the soup itself.  From the body parts in the soup, this. . .man suddenly appeared.  He was made up of the body parts, which, since he had no skin, were all completely visible inside him.  He just had the merest hint of a skeleton to hold all the pieces together.  Oh yeah, and he was wearing a black top hat.

Salacious let out this huge laugh, you know, the famous cackle from the movie, when he saw that I had seen the Organ Man rising from the soup.  For some reason, though, I wasn’t scared.  In fact, I found it all hysterically funny.  I knew it should be really nasty, but I just couldn’t stop laughing.  This really angered the guy in the soup, by the way.  He started to pull organs out of the soup to throw at me.  Salacious just sat there and cackled.  I was laughing so hard I could barely keep myself vertical, but when the Organ Man stood up and started to climb out of the saucer to come after me, I wasn’t stupid enough to stand there.  I turned and ran through the garage, with organs sailing past me and landing on the cement floor, which made a squishy sound, and hitting the wall next to the door to the house, which made a wooden squishy sound.  It was hilarious and terrifying at the same time.  I opened the door, jumped up the stairs into the house, and slammed the door shut behind me.  I heard a couple of organs splat against the other side of the door, and I chuckled to myself until I heard a thump which was the Organ Man banging on the door, trying to get in.  He opened the door, and I pushed against it as hard as I could to keep it shut, but he was much stronger than you would think a skeleton made of soupy organs would be.

He pushed the door open, and I sprinted up the hall to what used to be my bedroom, first door on the right.  The Organ Man was walking slowly down the hall, and by now he was becoming irate because I’d been laughing at him so much.   Luckily he couldn’t run very fast, so I went into my old room and slammed the door shut, locking it behind me.  That in itself is strange, because my bedroom door never had a lock, which once became fodder for a huge and somewhat ridiculous (in my opinion) argument between my stepdad and me, but that’s a sad story for another day.

The Organ Man came running, in his strange way, up the hall toward my room.  I had my back to the door, panting both from my sprint and from fear, when suddenly there came a mild-mannered knock from the other side of the door.  I thought to myself, Should I let him in? He gently knocked again, and again I wondered. Should I let him in?

I didn’t open the door.  I just hung out in my room for a while until the Organ Man went away.