beautiful, funny, sad & true

While I was in Seattle with my brother’s family last week for the Thanksgiving holiday, I texted SeattleFriend and told her I was in town.  She asked for how long, and I replied, “Either late Friday night or early Saturday morning.”  She invited me to go to dinner Friday or breakfast Saturday, and I took her up on breakfast Saturday.  On the way there, my car’s alternator belt broke.

I was listening to a CD and heard a weird squealing sound.  I’d never heard that particular sound effect on that particular song before, so I hit the pause button and revved up the engine a little bit.  It squealed in response, and I shifted to fifth gear to ease the load on the engine.  A minute later, I heard a THUMP from underneath the hood, and knew that couldn’t possibly be good.  The car still ran fine, so it wasn’t life-threatening.  My battery light came on, which I’ve been very familiar with recently, so I knew exactly what had happened.  I decided to go to breakfast with SeattleFriend and sort it all out later.

We ate at the Maltby Cafe in the tiny town of Maltby, Washington, which is a suburb of a suburb of Seattle.  Best breakfast I’ve had in quite some time, by the way.  Farm-fresh organic vegetables, homemade breads and biscuits, and homemade sausages and everything too, if you eat that sort of thing. Unbelievably good food, not to mention the unbelievably good time I spent with SeattleFriend.  Really nice.

So then we got down to the business of getting my car from Maltby down to the suburb of Bothell, where the KingWithGoldenTouch car repair place was.  I’d called the Portland location of KingGoldenTouch to ask what they recommended, and to see if that particular part would be covered under warranty from the repairs I’d just had the previous week.  They said to take it in, and to call them if I had any problems.  We asked a girl at one of the little shops for directions, and she completely nailed the directions.  She even had details like ‘past the construction’ and ‘through the funky intersection’ and ‘past the car dealership’.  It was amazing.  THANK YOU, BETH.  In fact, y’know what?  She was so awesome that I’m gonna give their shop a little plug.  Check out Running Wild Spirit the next time you’re in Maltby, Washington.

Turns out I needn’t have worried about the car.  Those guys at first seemed curt and grumpy, but turned out to be very accommodating and helpful.  They charged me for the part, but not for the labor, and after I spent a couple hours hanging out at SeattleFriend’s apartment watching a Boondocks DVD, they called back and told me it was ready to go.

We drove back to Bothell to get the car, and then went and got coffee at HotWire, which was also really excellent.  I decided to have some caffeine for once, since I had the long drive back to Portland ahead of me.  The coffee was excellent, and so was the company of SeattleFriend, naturally.

Okay, okay.  I can feel you wondering, ‘This is all well and good, but what does it have to do with synchronicity?’

Well, if SeattleFriend hadn’t invited me to breakfast, my car would have had this little mishap in the middle of the night on Friday, somewhere along Interstate 5, in the cold and the rain, and it would have been much worse.  GoldenTouchKing would’ve been closed, and I wouldn’t have gotten to see SeattleFriend at all, let alone spend an entire day with her.

I’d say it all worked out for the best.

OneYearAgo

Five years ago today, Elliott Smith died.

It was officially considered a suicide, but the possibility of ‘foul play’ was never really ruled out.  I’m here today to pay a small tribute to someone whose music has moved me more than almost any other.

Although he had been living in L.A. for many years, those of us from Portland will always consider him one of our own, because Portland plays a large part in his songs, and there are a multitude of locations and references to the time he spent living here.  He wrote very dark and honest songs, in a way that very few other people are brave enough to do.  He’s most famous, probably, for his music being featured prominently in the movie Goodwill Hunting, and that early-to-middle period of his songwriting is my favorite.

The album “XO” was the first one that I bought.  I heard the song Waltz #2 (XO) on the radio, but didn’t catch the name of the artist.  The next time I heard it was about a month later, in Seattle.  I was in the back seat of a car, riding around with two of my friends, and the song came on.  I said, “I love this song. . .turn it up; I need to know who this is.”  That afternoon, I drove straight to a record store in the University District and picked it up.  I will always remember driving around Seattle in my little green Toyota truck, with the windows down, listening to that CD.

Elliott recorded many of his early songs and albums at Jackpot! Studios here in Portland, and his piano was at the studio for years after he had moved away, but it has since been donated to the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle.  At the time he died, the band I was in (listen to the songs “Please Let Me”, “Shadow” and “Windows Down”) was in the process of recording our album at Jackpot, and all of the piano tracks were recorded on that piano.  It was a haunting and surreal honor to be playing it, even moreso in retrospect.

Here’s one of Elliott’s earliest songs, “The Biggest Lie”, the video for which was filmed the day after he died.  The location is the Solutions Wall in a neighborhood of L.A., which was the backdrop for Elliott’s album “Figure 8.”

Miss you, Elliott.  This planet isn’t quite the same without you on it.

OneYearAgo

Last night I had a fairly short dream involving a plane crash.  I was on the plane, which took off out of Seattle.  It had some sort of technical difficulty, so it turned back around to head back to the airport, but it never got there.  It kept going slower and slower and slower, until we were forced to land on a wide street.  Miraculously, we didn’t hit any cars, but we did slam into a mall.  (No, JBJ, it was nothing like a mini-mall.)

No one on the plane was hurt, but I don’t know about inside the mall.  Immediately after that, the pilot backed the plane up and taxied down the street.  I couldn’t believe he was trying to fly the thing after slamming it into a mall, but then I guess he knew best.

Then there was a scene in which I was walking down the street in Seattle the next day, and I saw a pair of little kids (ages two and four) who had been on the plane with me.  They were sitting on a bench next to their mother, who was reading the newspaper.  There was a story about the plane crash, and it included a picture that had been taken by someone on the plane.  The two kids were clearly visible.  They saw the picture and said, exactly in unison, ‘Who AM I?  I mean who ARE we?”

Weird.

OneYearAgo

On Sunday afternoon, I participated in Project X, a sort of time capsule event created by a theater group called Hand2Mouth.  I found out about it when I went to see a play last weekend, and I’ve been looking forward to it ever since.

The event was divided up into multiple stations.  There was a main station called ‘ground control’, which was where the lion’s share of the event took place.  For brevity’s sake, I will describe it as a place where you listen to other peoples’ stories in headphones, create your own stories, create a timeline of your own life and of events in the broader scope of human history, and choose how you would like to be remembered by future generations.  There were ample opportunities to speak, write, draw, or add whatever you felt like adding to the project.  There were also opportunities to converse with other random people, and to record those conversations via satellite for posterity.

It was an amazing experience, but it’s also a fairly daunting one.  The event asks a lot of its participants, and you have to be prepared to interact in a pretty demanding way.  I wasn’t prepared for that, quite frankly.  I made it through three of the five stations, in an hour and a half.  The two remaining stations were ones that took a bit of time, so I waited numerous times to get in, but each time I found myself turned away because the stations were occupied.  At a certain point, I decided to give up.  I had been told by my friend to allow about three hours to participate, but since I’d been so busy in the previous few days, I was starting to shut down and become anxious, so I decided to give the last two stations a miss, unfortunately.  This exhibit/performance/time capsule/event will also be conducted in Seattle next weekend, at the Bumbershoot festival, and I think that will be a tremendous experience.  I have a feeling that if I had done it up there, I’d have been much more likely to participate in all of the events, but since it was here in town, I felt my real life responsibilities creeping back in.  What’s more, I felt myself falling instantly in love with one of the women in the group, so I suddenly lost the ability to speak or think in my usual eloquent way.

If you live in the Northwest and are considering seeing the show, I definitely recommend it.  Be prepared to be there for quite a while, and know in advance that some of the stations are better equipped than others to handle more than one or two people at a time.  Perhaps this will change by the time it has its run in Seattle.

I’m very glad to have been a part of this time capsule, and my metaphorical hat goes off to Hand2Mouth for creating such an amazing event.  I hope I’m around in the future to see what becomes of it.

I woke up this morning with this ancient They Might Be Giants song burning a hole in my skull.

I thought it would make for better (and funnier!) reading, if I would edit it a bit, and then just turn it into a miniature short story.

A woman came up to me and said, “I’d like to poison your mind with wrong ideas that appeal to you, though I am not unkind.” She looked at me; I looked at something written across her scalp, and these are the words that it faintly said, as I tried to call for help:

“There’s only one thing that I know how to do well, and I’ve often been told that you only can do what you know how to do well, and thats be you. Be what you’re like. Be like yourself. And so I’m having a wonderful time, but I’d rather be whistling in the dark.”

A man came up to me and said, “I’d like to change your mind by hitting it with a rock, though I am not unkind.” We laughed at his little joke, and then I happily walked away and hit my head on the wall of the jail, where the two of us live today.

There’s only one thing that I like, and that is whistling in the dark.

Hilarious. If I was any kind of graphic designer, I’d have found a picture of a woman with a shaved head, and Photoshopped that quote around her scalp in Gothic calligraphy. (I know, I know, ‘photoshopped’ isn’t a real verb! It’s called artistic license.) Perhaps that kind of picture manipulation is a skill that you have, and you’d like to take on this little project. Perhaps you’re a tattoo artist, and you will one day be lucky enough to find some woman with a shaved head who would like to have “There’s only one thing I know how to do well. . .”, et cetera, emblazoned on her head forever. You just never know.

After all this, of course, I wanted to know what the phrase ‘whistling in the dark’ really means. A quick search showed that it means “confident that something good will happen when it is not at all likely.”

Hunh.

What a strange morning this is already turning out to be. And now it’s time to eat breakfast and pack for my trip to Seattle.

Speaking of which, through a beautiful example of irony, my brother and his family, who live in Seattle–and whose house I’m staying at–will be in Portland this weekend for a little getaway, so that means I’m going to be up in their town while they’re down here in my town at the same time.

Praise the Lord for the gift of laughter.