beautiful, funny, sad & true

Last night was pretty awesome.

I got the chance to play chamber music, with an ensemble, on the cello for the first time. My friend FlutistSusan organized a ‘sight-reading party’, and since none of our apartments is large enough for such an event, she made a new plan. She called her friend who owns a big, beautiful house over in the Sullivan’s Gulch neighborhood, told her of the plan, and her friend said, “That sounds great! Why not invite people from the neighborhood and turn it into a Big Deal?”

So that’s what happened. Susan made some platters of amazing hors d’oeuvres, and it was just tremendous. The ensemble consisted of FlutistSusan, CellistSkip, ViolistAlicia who had to leave early and was replaced by ViolistTatyana, and BassistJustin. And, of course, CellistMe.

I was totally in over my head, but loved every minute of it. On the easier pieces, such as Mozart and Haydn, I played the cello parts and Skip played the second violin parts way up in the high register of the cello. On the more difficult pieces, Skip would play the cello part, and I’d come in and out as well as I could keep up.

The two pieces that were the most fun were the Bach Brandenburg Concerto #2 (an all-time favorite of mine), and “Libertango” by Astor Piazzolla, where we all let our metaphorical hair down. Since I was familiar with the song from playing it on the accordion, I didn’t use sheet music, but instead improvised lots of high melodies around the flute and viola parts, sometimes harmonizing with them and sometimes doubling them, as I felt they needed to be emphasized. It was a total blast. A night like that is the reason I started playing cello in the first place.

But it wasn’t over yet.

The Young Immortals just picked up the boxes of their new CD from the duplicators, so they decided to have an impromptu party at the cozy (tiny?) M Bar. All of the usual suspects were in attendance, and Jake gave a free CD to everyone who showed up. I opened my copy to find that I was given production credit on the CD, and that Jake had some very kind words for posterity in the ‘special thanks’ page. It was really a fun night. The guys are now headed out on tour. For the next two months, they’ll be painting this country. No, I don’t know what color they’ll be painting it; I guess you’ll just have to go see them and find out for yourself.

Today is Independence Day, so as I’m writing this I’m doing laundry (What else?), and in a little while I’m going to check in on Lady Jane (Alyssa’s cat) and get some coffee. This afternoon, I’m driving up to the little town of Woodland, Washington to spend the afternoon with Crystin Byrd and her family and parents, all of whom are some of my closest friends. Tonight I’m going over to my old apartment (Remember?) where they’re having a block party, and I’m going to watch the fireworks from the rooftop.

I’m taking tomorrow and Friday off from work, because CellistSkip and I are driving to Sisters, Oregon to play a gig with Stephanie Schneiderman. We’ll all be staying overnight and coming back sometime Friday.

It promises to be an amazing week.

I bet you never thought you’d hear me say this, but I had a great time in Yakima this weekend.

It’s true.

If you didn’t happen to see my previous post, I went up to play two gigs with Chad Bault, a singer-songwriter and friend who used to live here in Portland, but recently moved back temporarily.

DrummerAdam and I drove up there on Friday night after work, stopping only for milkshakes and prophylactics–his girlfriend lives up there–and we ended up at SongwriterChad’s house at 11:00. BassPlayerWayne and HisWifeMeg had arrived minutes before us, and Adam’sGirlfriend showed up a little later. We all had pizza and beer and talked until the wee hours, and then Adam and I went to his parents’ house to sleep.

Their house is amazing. It’s a large-ish house on the top of a hill, and the view is amazing.

My eyes popped open at 7:00, so I decided to get up and take a shower, then I went to the back yard and read in the cool morning air. After a while, Adam’s mom came and asked if I’d like some coffee and orange juice, which I dutifully accepted. I went inside and we talked for a really long time, until Adam and Adam’sGirlfriend left to go up to the lake, and Adam loaned me his Honda Element so I could explore Yakima on my own.

I went to get my hair cut and then headed out to make All The Rounds. I went to my old houses and schools. My grade school and junior high school look almost exactly the same. The high school looks mostly the same as it has for fifteen years, but it’s different than it was when I went there. There’s a hilarious new mural that involves a rock band featuring Mr. T as a heavy metal drummer (?), with a sign on the top that says something like, “The Word of T, ‘I Pity The Foo.’ ” Weirdest mural I’ve ever seen. Yes, I took pictures. I’ll have to post some in a separate blog entry. The apartment I lived in (for four years!) was a dump when I lived there fifteen years ago, and it’s only gotten worse with age.

The house I grew up in is very different. The subsequent owners have removed all the fences and almost all the trees from the yard, but the brick front steps that I rebuilt with my ten-year-old hands are still there. The house my mom lives in now–which we moved into when I was in high school–looks great. They’ve completely redone the inside, and now they’re starting to work on the outside as well.

After making The Rounds, I drove over to see my stepdad before having to pack up and head over to Songwriter Chad’s for rehearsal.

The show that night was great, except for the other guitarist who joined us. The Plan was that he was going to play pedal steel (it’s that twangy-sounding instrument that you’ll know primarily from country music), but he showed up with a regular electric guitar because his pedal steel was broken. So we all decided that since he hadn’t rehearsed with us, I would be the main lead guitarist, and he would play sparse slide guitar parts around what Chad and I were doing. But as it turned out, he kept jumping in and taking solos on every single song, and he cluttered up the whole sound of the band. I actually had to walk over and ask him to ‘please lay low on this one?’, and when we took a break, I asked Chad to have a word with him because he was totally stepping on what I was trying to do. That’s the very diplomatic way of saying it; I was about to throw my water glass at his head. So when we came back from the break, I turned up my little amp, and BassistWayne and I just played as if he wasn’t even there, which worked really well, from what I heard later. We had a blast, and the place was packed like it’s apparently never been packed before.

We went home, ate dinner, drank beer, and talked until even later into the wee hours. Adam and his girlfriend went home at 1:00 a.m., but Chad, Wayne, Meg and I stayed up to talk, so I didn’t drive over to Adam’s parents’ house to go to bed until around 3:00 a.m.

The next morning, we had a gig at 10:00 at a raise-money-for-cancer-research walk at Eisenhower High School’s football stadium. Ironically, the band I was in in high school, Iron Horse, had played the exact same event many years before. The sound guy was telling us what we could expect from the sound and from the audience, and he punctuated that by saying, “I’ve been working this fundraiser for twenty years.” I said, “Really? That’s amazing, because I played here eighteen years ago.” He asked which band I played with, so I told him, and he actually (said that he) remembered us. Riiiiight. But it was still a cool and hilarious moment, and he did say that Chad’s band was by far the best band that they’d had at the fundraiser this year, and a few of the nearby volunteers chimed in to agree with him, so that was nice.

After that, we went our own ways, I gave Chad, Wayne and Meg a hug and went to my mom’s house for the afternoon, which was really nice. We talked a lot while I rested and did a load of laundry. I found some hilarious old pictures of myself that I’ll have to post here soon, because you’ll totally crack up. For years I either had a mullet and/or huge glasses, and I looked really gay, except that I didn’t dress well. Gosh, I wonder why I didn’t have a girlfriend for years.

Anyway.

The trip was a blast. A huge thank you to everyone involved in making it the best time I’ve had in Yakima for as long as I can remember.

What a weekend it’s been already, and there are still two more whole days left.

I drove straight to Seattle after work on Friday, and had the easiest drive ever. I somehow managed to bypass all the traffic in Portland, and I-5 was moving along nicely the entire way up. I got to Seattle in record time, and after a bit of circling the block, got the best parking spot ever, right across from the movie theater.

“Paprika” was amazing. I was expecting a lot from it, and it totally delivered. If it plays in a theater anywhere else nearby, I’m going to see it again, and it will certainly be one to buy on DVD when it comes out. Jaw-dropping animation with plenty of surprises, a trippy mystery story with lots of twists and turns, and even a super-catchy theme song.

From there I went to stay up at LittleBrother’s house in Snohomish. It was midnight when I rolled in, but he heard me arrive, so he came down and we talked and played a couple of games of pool on their new pool table. We finally went to bed around 1:45.

At 6:45, I was awakened by Niece. She was already going a hundred miles an hour, which meant that resistance on my part was futile, so I got up and played with her and LitteBrother while BabyNephew was awakened and fed by Brother’sWife. Before they left for Yakima that morning, they each gave me a huge hug and said, “You’ve sure had a tough time lately. Hang in there. We’re really proud of you.” That just about made me cry.

Then, after feeling sick to my stomach all morning, I started to take a turn for the worse, so I went in and had a nice bout of. . .um. . .diarrhea. (Well? I did.) After that, I felt extremely weak, and after such an early morning of playing with Niece, I decided it was time for a little nap.

After said nap, I headed down to Seattle to meet my friend RoMo, who used to live here in Portland. We walked around in her neighborhood of Fremont for a long time and caught up on each other’s lives as we walked along the canal. Then we walked back up to my car and drove to the Ballard neighborhood, where we ate lunch at a sushi restaurant, where I had exactly one little bowl of miso soup and one piece of maguro nigiri before having to stop because my stomach was feeling so strange. She finished her sushi and beer and then we headed out. I coughed and said, “Wow. . .I barely kept everything down when I coughed just now.” She looked concerned and said, “Really? Do you need to go to the drug store across the street?” “I don’t think I’ll make it there,” I said, and walked into the alley behind the sushi restaurant, at which point the contents of my stomach erupted into the bushes three times.

We walked across to the drug store and I got some FamousPinkLiquid, which made the rest of the afternoon’s activities possible.

We explored a bit more in Ballard, then drove down to the Ballard Locks, a busy shipping canal, dam and fish ladder. It was all really beautiful and interesting. It’s easy to see that you could spend all day watching the different activities that go on there, plus the gardens and grounds are really beautiful too. In fact, we saw a wedding ceremony happening in a different section of the park.

So it’s already been quite a weekend, with an awesome movie, seeing family and a good friend for the first time in months, not to mention a whole bunch of cool sights and even some stomach difficulties to make for an eventful weekend.

Tomorrow, Crystin and I start work on the song for the movie soundtrack, and my neighbor and tango-band-mastermind Susan is leaving for Australia for three weeks. Right now I’m going to bed.

On this day, twenty seven years ago, Mount St. Helens erupted.

At the time, my family lived in Yakima, Washington, which was the first decent-sized town in the path of the ashfall. The eruption happened at about 8:30 a.m. We were just pulling up to St. Johns Episcopal Church, where my dad was the vicar, when someone called and said, “I just heard on the radio. . .Mount St. Helens erupted!” The handful of us who were there sat and thought for a few minutes, but when we saw the whole horizon turning black (on a cloudless morning), we decided we should try to get home if we could.

The ash cloud hit us halfway home. Instantly, visibility went to about two feet. It was like a warm, grey snowstorm, and it smelled horrible. We were driving about ten miles per hour, but we still almost hit a turn divider and ran off the road because we couldn’t see.

We did make it home safely, and good thing, too, because the ash fell for the next day or two. We ended up with about an inch and a half of ash everywhere. It killed plants and pets. It choked the fuel systems of cars. (Interestingly, I remember that people were able to drive their cars by stretching pantyhose over their carburetors. Isn’t that ingenious?)

I was nine years old, and I wasn’t scared at all. That’s the perfect age to be during something like that. Old enough to remember it, but young enough to be mesmerized by it.

The town completely shut down for about a week, while people shoveled their driveways and sidewalks, and street cleaners ran day and night. My brother and I would stand under the awning on the back patio and watch the ash falling for a long time. People were saying things like, “Don’t let the ash touch you, it’ll melt your skin!” and “If you breathe it in, it will kill you!” So when we did venture out, we wore those little breathing masks and sweltered in our winter coats, at least until we realized that it wasn’t THAT hot, and we could catch it in our hands.

I’ll never forget the video of the gigantic logging trucks being washed down the Toutle River, or the huge logs destroying bridges, or the picture of the newspaper photographer’s car buried by boiling mud.

One of our friends in the neighborhood drew a volcano in ball-point pen on a bunch of white T-shirts with a caption that said, “Mount St. Helens–a pain in the ASH!” O, the hilarity.

The local news had a field day with the eruption, as you can imagine. “WILL VEGETATION EVER GROW BACK?? WILL THE VOLCANO KILL YOUR PETS?? TUNE IN AT FIVE TO FIND OUT.” Well, most of the pets lived, and before too long, trees and plants were growing back stronger than before. I still remember the pictures in National Geographic of the first little sprouts growing up out of the ash.

It was an amazing experience, and one that I’ll remember as long as I live.

In case you didn’t know, I grew up in Yakima, Washington. It’s a very isolated town in the middle of Washington. People who live there may tell you that “well, it’s a good place to raise kids” or whatever, but I was a kid growing up there, and I feel like it was a difficult place, particularly compared to the city in which I was born.

It’s long been one of the drug hubs of the entire nation, and that’s especially astounding when you consider that fact per capita. I used to have a little Honda CRX when I lived there, and I’d always leave the doors unlocked, because otherwise the windows would get smashed out by drug addicts looking for things to steal. It used to get rummaged through almost every single night. In fact, I was thrilled on the rare occasions when I’d go outside in the morning and NOT find the glove compartment open, the seats pushed forward, the carpet pulled up, the little storage hatch open, and the hatchback popped open. Very often, I’d find that all of those things had been done. Seriously; Yakima’s a shit-hole (and I don’t normally throw terms like that around, either), and I hated living there.

A friend of mine saw this a couple of days ago, in McSweeney’s, and e-mailed it to me. I had to laugh. I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that Yakima is now the meth capital of Central Washington. It’s been called “Crackima” for ages, since the 80’s, when crack was the Thing to Do. Even the mayor’s son got busted for using and selling it, back in the day.

Can I just say how much life has improved since I moved to Portland? It really feels like I’ve lived two entirely separate lives, even though Portland is (I’ve HEARD) the meth capital of the whole Pacific Northwest. I will always appreciate where I am now, and how much I enjoy life now, because I spent so many years wondering why life was even worth living.

Books saved my life; “The Little Prince” came along just when I needed it. Movies saved my life; “My Dinner With Andre” and “Mindwalk” came along just when I needed them. My piano saved my life. My guitar saved my life.

Glad to be outta there, Yakima. Good riddance.