I’ve been feeling really good these last few days. I feel excited and driven, and I feel lots of momentum pulling in good directions again. Recently, I’ve felt like I’ve been just spinning my wheels lately, not doing some of the things that I should have been doing for a while now.
I have no doubt that part of the reason for these good feeling is that I’ve been riding my bike to and from work for a month or two now. I’ve dropped about ten pounds in that time, and lost some of the schlubbiness (Did I just make up that word?) that I’d been carrying around for the last year. The exercise has also started to improve my mood. I feel much more outgoing and spontaneous again. I’m even starting to feel slightly attractive and romantic again, after taking myself off of the market when my friend had her ‘incident’ a few months ago. See, the woman I was kind of dating at the time had her own ideas about why my friend did what she did. She was convinced that my friend was in secretly in love with me, and that her attempt was a way to reel me back in again. She also had the idea that my friend saw her as a ‘threat’, and that I should think of my friend ‘more romantically.’ It was horrible. I never talked to her again.
So I’ve spent the intervening months not dating, and not even trying to meet anyone either. I had such a bad taste in my mouth from that last person, and I was so traumatized by what my friend had done that I just wasn’t up to any kind of reaching out. I was pretty much operating on auto-pilot until I went on tour with Breanna and Justin at the end of June. That was the jump-start I needed to get my life back on track again; to get away from all of the craziness and get out of town for a while.
Two months later, I think I’m back. Finally.
The other night at the gig with IrishBand, I met a new person that I’m very interested in seeing more of. She came to the show with a guy, and since I assume that every cute girl who arrives with a guy is WITH that guy, I didn’t try too hard to ‘chat her up’ when they sat at our table, but we had a great time talking for a while, before the band had to get up and play. At the end of the night, she gave me the nicest hug ever. I’m a hug fan, and it’s hard to find people who are good huggers, so when I meet someone who does it right, I always think, ‘This is my kind of person.’ I have a feeling I’ll be writing more about her before too long. Too soon to know what will happen. I don’t even know what her situation is, either, but I’m just excited to find out.
I feel particularly good about it because I’m so open right now. It’s the perfect time to meet someone new, and just at the moment when I’ve been feeling that, here comes someone, as if by magic.
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.
June 29th was homecoming day. We slept at Breanna’s uncle and aunt’s house in Meridian, Idaho, but we had arrived so late the night before that everyone was either already in bed or pretty much comatose in front of the television. The morning was when we actually got to socialize.
Say hello to Breanna’s nephew and two nieces.
Kids kinda freak me out, especially when they’re either little, or if there are lots of ’em. Doesn’t matter how cute they are (and these kids are VERY cute), they still make me feel really anxious and weird. So I kinda kept to myself for a while, reading and then coming back in and out, or talking with Breanna’s uncle and aunt. Their house was great; it’s a shame we didn’t get any pictures of that too. Her uncle cooked Swedish pancakes and bacon and sliced some cantaloupe for breakfast, which was all completely amazing. They were very open and generous people, and I hope our paths cross again.
The drive back was beautiful and remote. Idaho and Eastern Oregon are sort of interchangeable in my mind. Every once in a while we’d pass a lovely ravine. . .
. . .or mountain (I THINK that’s Mount Hood). . .
. . .but for the most part, it looks like this.
The landscape went from greenish yellow to brownish yellow, and we went from the high desert down into the rolling hills. There are actually signs stating things like ‘now entering the Pacific Time Zone’ and ‘now crossing the 45th Parallel.’ We stopped to eat in Pendleton, at a great little 1950’s restaurant called the Main Street Diner. The way we found out about the diner was priceless. We stopped in at a convenience store to buy some water, and I asked the young guy behind the counter, “Is there a good cafe here in town?” The guy’s response was, “Uhhhh. . .for food?” Justin turned away and tried not to laugh.
After our lunch, ‘we continued on’ (Lewis and Clark’s phrase), and the temperature climbed and climbed all through eastern Oregon. I tried to take a picture of the thermometer when it read 108 degrees, but my camera’s battery was completely dead by then, so I wasn’t able to. By the time we thought to try with Breanna’s camera, the temperature had fallen to a mere 105.
The windows of the van were unpleasantly hot to the touch. We would roll them down if we wanted to take a a picture, but other than that, we kept the air conditioner turned on full blast that day. We passed what appeared to be a tree farm, in which all of the trees looked exactly the same, and were planted the exact same distance from each other, and were in plots of land that were perfectly square. On each side of those plots was normal Oregon desert. It was like, yellow desert/LUSH FOREST/yellow desert/LUSH FOREST/yellow desert. How’s that for a verbal visual aid?
Interesting.
Finally we got to the Columbia River, which is when we really started to feel like we were close to home. If you’ve ever lived in or spent much time in Portland or northern Oregon, then you know that the Columbia is the lifeline for this part of the world, and there’s something comforting about looking over and seeing that huge river beside you after you’ve been away from it for a while.
The last couple of hours we spent listening to Kathleen Edwards. If you haven’t heard her music before, you owe it to yourself. I now completely associate her music with road trips, because the first time I heard her was on last year’s trip to Nevada. Her songwriting is strong and catchy, and brutally honest. She’s really one to watch for. And her music is perfect for long, open roads.
True to form, it also started to get cloudy as we got nearer to the city, and by the time we pulled up to Breanna’s place, there was thunder and lightning, and big, threatening raindrops.
We took some end-of-the-trip pictures. . .
. . .and then I packed my stuff from the van into my own car and raced home before the rain really started. I just barely made it, too.
A trip is never really over until the rental car has been returned. This van served us so well, and was the perfect road trip vehicle. It was flawless, and quiet, and comfortable in all the heat, and it even got good gas mileage, even though it was pretty crammed full of people and their stuff.
Parting thoughts about the trip:
1) Justin and Breanna are amazing, and sweet, and talented, and genuine, and I’m very proud to call them my friends.
2) I can’t wait to hit the road again. This country has some breathtaking landscapes.
3) I want a better camera, dang it.
4) I need to work on my gangsta pouts and poses.
So that’s it. Trip’s over. Hope you enjoyed reading about it. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled witty and insightful blog, already in progress. . .
Thursday, June 26th was our longest day. We had a twelve-hour drive ahead of us, from Reno to a tiny town in Utah called Torrey.
I was the first one up, at 5:45 in the morning. I took a shower, got dressed, and then took some pictures of the hazy morning street scene of Reno. The haze is actually the smoke from the California wildfires. It didn’t clear up until we were well into Utah, by the way. Incidentally, all of these thumbnail pictures expand to full size if you click on them.
While I was packing up my suitcase, Kate woke up. We talked for a while, she in her makeshift bed in the windowsill and I on her papasan chair. I took pictures of the cats, and of her place, and out the window, and even some of her. The best ones were of her, waking up and snuggling with her cat Samantha.
From there, it was time for breakfast and various morning activities, which on that particular day meant more picture opportunities. Here we all are.
The water-drinking one actually has a little video too, as if by technology.
I would be remiss if I didn’t post a picture of Kate’s other cat, Secret. She and I became instant friends, and she actually slept on my sleeping bag for a while during the night.
Suddenly it was time to say our goodbyes, give hugs all around, and hit the road. The scenery in the rest of Nevada was uneventful. If you haven’t driven through it, it basically consists of many hours of rolling hills covered with sagebrush. There are only a couple of sections where it’s beautifully desolate in a good way, and the rest of the time it’s pretty much God-forsaken wasteland, broken up only by the occasional bit of run-down machinery or mining equipment, or even a power station out in the middle of nowhere. At one point there are even a couple of tunnels. Wowee! Breanna and I both took pictures of the tunnels, in fact. That’s how exciting it was. Nevada is a very strange place. Luckily, we had an especially deep (and private) conversation that day, with which to while away the hours.
Oh yeah, I just remembered. We stopped at the same rest area that Stephanie and I were so horrified by when she and I played in Elko last summer. This time was not nearly so eventful, but I should mention that each of the rest areas we stopped at in Nevada had neither soap nor running water, so we weren’t able wash to our hands. Pretty sexy, huh?
Incidentally, and apropos of nothing, the lasting inside joke from this day was when I told Justin, “I’m gonna punch your mouth right in the face.” That would have been the name of this entry, if I didn’t have the more plebeian title so firmly established already.
This trip, for all its amazing qualities, was not without tragedy. Justin realized at some point along the way that he had left his pillow behind in Reno. This was not just any pillow, either, but a super-special pillow that was bluish gray in color, weighed a ton, and was apparently the most comfortable pillow in the history of pillows. He was seriously distraught about it. I imagine that he’s gotten it back by now, because he offered to pay Kate a bunch of money to ship it overnight that same day.
Utah is as beautiful as Nevada is barren. Almost from the minute we crossed the state line, the landscape became more interesting. We drove through the Bonneville Salt Flats, which are gigantic, and a bit eerie too. We kept expecting the weather to be cold, because we were seeing what looked like snow on the ground everywhere. Very strange.
After that, the landscape became more green, the hills became more steep, and everything seemed more inviting somehow. In the immortal words of the Lewis and Clark journals, ‘we continued on.’
As we got closer and closer to our destination of Torrey, the landscape just kept getting more and more beautiful. The hills turned red, and the sun started getting lower and lower in the sky. The Picture of the Day Award definitely goes to Breanna for this lovely, cinematic shot. My pictures I had to touch up a bit with Photoshop, but this one is perfectly fine without any so-called enhancements.
We arrived at the venue and met Wendy, who was very sweet. She opened for us, and also took pictures for us during our set. At first we thought we’d play unplugged and unmic’ed, which ended up being too quiet, even for the smallish space we were playing in. So we mic’ed everything and played a normal show.
Can I just take a minute to say that while Reno was definitely the place I had the most fun, the gig in Torrey was by far my favorite venue we played. I mean, here’s this tiny little venue in the middle of nowhere, with these amazing red cliffs all around. And I’ve never seen as many stars as I did that night. We kept looking off into our surroundings the entire time. It’s a miracle that we didn’t play any wrong notes. Here’s what I’m talking about. Justin was singing, and Breanna and I were totally staring off into the distance. And yes, Justin and I did the same thing on Breanna’s songs too.
Between the cliffs and the stars, and the interesting people, we had a total blast. Afterwards, Wendy put us up at her place. We all stayed up for a little while, and then Justin and Breanna went to bed. Wendy and I stayed up talking, and she asked if I played with any other groups. I told her about the people I play with, and the various instruments that I play, and when I mentioned the accordion, she said, “Oh, really? I have two accordions. Maybe you could show me some things.” I agreed to do that, and we pulled them out. So after getting up at 5:45, driving twelve hours, and playing a gig, I stayed up until about 1:30 giving an impromptu accordion lesson. After a while, exhaustion got the better of me, and I had to give in and go to bed. The room I stayed in was very warm, so I opened the window and the blinds, which meant that I fell asleep staring at the huge canopy of bright stars, in which the band of the Milky Way Galaxy was clearly visible. That’s a nice way to fall asleep, by the way. I totally recommend it.
More to come in the next installment of. . .ON TOUR.
Day Three of the trip started with a surprise knock on the door around 7:00 a.m. from Breanna. “We gotta bounce. We have eleven minutes.” We thought we had plenty of time to sleep in and take our time, but Karlee’s parents were leaving, so that meant we had to leave too. I took a quick shower and packed my stuff in record time. We said our goodbyes and headed out to Country Kitchen for breakfast. After so much ice cream and stuff the night before, we were ready for some real food, which came in the form of eggs, biscuits, and potatoes in various forms. Good stuff.
As we were getting ready to leave, one of the other waitresses stopped to tell us, “You guys look like rock stars.” We all laughed and said, “Well, we’re musicians, actually, and we’re on tour from Portland. We’re on our way to Reno right now.” The waitress chatted with us for a second, wished us good luck on our trip, and then walked away, but we talked about it among ourselves for a while longer. Justin said, “I guess you look like what you do.” I replied, “Yeah, she didn’t say, ‘you guys look like bankers’ or anything else. She went straight for ‘rock stars.’ ” It was a funny and nice moment.
On our way out of town, we stopped at a Safeway gas station. This was the first time I’d ever seen a Safeway gas station, so I commented on that fact, and got out of the van to take a picture of it. Breanna and Justin both piped up, “Oh yeah, they have them all over. There’s even one in EasternPortlandSuburb,” so it suddenly lost its appeal as a novelty. Sure made for a good story, though, no?
Incidentally, there was a closed business that we drove by in Redding called Smart & Final. We all thought that was a strange name for a business of any kind, and we wondered what it was. I just now looked it up, and it appears to be sort of a grocery close-out warehouse.
So finally we headed out of town. The acrid smoke continued with us for the entire trip, as we had to drive through the mountains, where there were countless wildfires. Some were even burning along the side of the road, and we heard when we stopped at a little convenience store (where gas was five dollars per gallon!) that the Department of Transportation was considering closing the highway.
Our rental van had a GPS unit that we absolutely lived by. It could calculate our route for us, and then it would speak various commands when it was time to turn or whatever. Our favorite thing it said, if we got off course to go to a rest area or a gas station, was, “When possible, make a legal U-turn.”
In the late afternoon, we finally arrived in Sparks, Nevada. The three of us split up and went our separate ways for a while. Justin and Breanna went to find a wi-fi hotspot, and I made a couple of phone calls. My brother and I talked about funny childhood memories, and somehow started talking about steampunk too. We thought it would be funny if I dressed in that Victorian style and wore a monocle and marketed myself as the Accordionist With The Monocle. I don’t know how that conversation started, but we were cracking each other up with that.
Across from our venue was the historic and cultural hub of the city of Sparks. There was the old train station, an old locomotive and cabin cars, an old schoolhouse (not in its original location), and a good-sized modern amphitheater right next to each other. Across the street were the modern library and the spruced-up old buildings, and that’s where we played.
We spent a bunch of time taking pictures and screwing around in the amphitheater. It was really hard to choose which pictures to share, because there were so many good ones, but here are a few.
I started doing a stand-up comedy routine, telling a heightened version of one of the stories that I’d told in the van already, but telling it as if the audience was there, and ‘working the crowd’ and all that.  It was very funny. Breanna took a million pictures of that. Suddenly, it was time for us to head across the street to eat dinner and get set up for the gig.
We played with Kate and her band, and we were completely blown away by them. Kate’s songs were beautiful, and GuitaristEd and BassistGia were great as well. Here are some pictures from the show. There will be many more from this night in my upcoming ‘best pics of the tour’ blog entry. Again, it was hard to choose from so many great pictures, of both groups.
Afterwards, Kate put us up in her apartment.  This could be a whole gigantic entry by itself.  Kate was an extremely generous, friendly, and accommodating person, great in every way, and her apartment was absolutely stellar, located right on Reno’s main street. Justin and Breanna were anxious to listen to the mixes of the songs for Justin’s upcoming CD, so they stayed in and listened on Kate’s computer while I went for a walk to take pictures.
Reno looks like a regular city during the day, but it completely comes alive at night. I walked around for over an hour, until well after midnight, and took almost three hundred pictures. Â Here are some of my favorites.
When I returned, Bre and Justin were still sitting in front of the computer with the music cranked up, listening intently, and Kate was lying in the windowsill.
After they were done listening, Justin and Breanna turned off the computer and the lights and went to bed, and Kate and I sat in the dark and talked for an hour and a half. We talked about music, and what it’s like living and being a musician in our respective cities, and about life in general. I also took a few more pictures. Here’s the view from her window.
This is the day I remember most fondly from the tour, and it’s days like this that make it so exciting to be a musician on the road.  I wish every day could be like this one was. I feel incredibly lucky to have had even one day like it in my life, and this is only Day Three of the tour.
