“Thank you for submitting your application materials to [CompanyName] for the [JobTitle] position.
Due to the volume of applicants, the review process took longer than usual, making the final selection even more difficult. While you were not selected for an interview, please accept our appreciation for your interest in [CompanyName].
Thank you again and good luck in your search.”
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 special 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.
I am at a house party where there are about thirty people of all ages. It is early evening, and there are lots of little kids running around, playing, and watching a DVD, while the adults are talking and drinking wine. My female neighbor friend and I are talking and sitting in two comfy chairs, when I notice that her wine glass is empty. “Here you go,” I tell her, reaching behind me to grab a bottle and refill her glass. My dad reaches over with his empty glass and snaps his fingers at me. “Sorry, Dad,” I say with a smile, “ladies first.” The party is bigger than those of us who live at the house had planned on, so we run out of wine before too long, and I volunteer to walk up the street to the store to get some more.
I walk out of the house to find deep snow on the ground. The street, incidentally, is the one on which I grew up, but the house we’re in is not that house. I walk back inside to grab a warmer coat and a scarf, and then I trudge across the yard to the street. Near the end of the street, I meet a family playing in the snow. They offer me a kids’ DVD, which happens to be the same one that the kids at our party have been watching non-stop for the last few hours. I make a face. “Thank you, but I’ve seen that too many times already.”
They laugh, and the wife says, “Yes, I can see that you have.”
“Do you hear that?” I ask them. There is music playing nearby. “I’m going to go investigate.”
I hear a band playing down the block. It’s made up of eight or ten members from WellKnownMarchingBand. They’re playing on a makeshift stage in a vacant lot with a music store on one side and an apartment building on the other. I pass a guy who’s getting out a trombone, and he asks me if I’m gonna play with the band. “I don’t know, actually. I may just watch this one.”
He looks a bit taken aback. “Isn’t it an honor, when someone invites you to–”
“–play with the FancySchmancyBandyBand? Of course it is, but I don’t want to impose on you guys. If it seems like the thing to do, I’ll jump in.” I grab a pair of drumsticks and twirl them with my fingers.
I walk past him and into the apartment building. I feel the need to change my clothes once I’m inside, and when I see an open apartment door, I walk inside and find a bedroom. No one is home, so I rummage around in the closet and find, to my surprise, a pair of pants that will fit me. I take off my own pants and and notice that there’s a window on the side wall of the bedroom; which means that the person next door can look in on me from her kitchen. I see a head-shaped shadow move across the curtain, and realize that I’m being watched. I step backwards into the closet and start to put on the pants I find there. The neighbor’s window opens and a blonde woman, slightly younger than I am, climbs down into the room I’m in, walks to the closet door (which also has a window) and peeks in at me. “I think it’s about time I saw you naked,” she said. “My name is Heather.” I feel the pile of shoes on which I’m standing slide out from underneath me, and I feel myself being pulled out of the closet.
At this point, the point of view changes. I’m driving in my red Honda at night with a female companion. We are looking for a freeway on-ramp, and there is a big mess of construction. It’s hard to tell where to turn, and there are lots of other on-ramps, and tunnels, and viaducts, and every kind of interchange. We muddle our way through it all and I start to accelerate, when a stop sign appears in the middle of the on-ramp, to keep people from driving into a big hole with a 20-foot drop. I stomp on the brake pedal, and the car skids to a stop. We narrowly avoid driving into the hole, but my car bangs into the metal sign post and knocks it to the side of the road. The on-ramp is too narrow to turn the car around, and it’s too dark to see anything, so I turn my hazard lights on, and the girl and I decide that we should leave the car there to block the hole. We get out and start to walk back up the on-ramp, and we notice that there are other cars in similar trouble. On the freeway below us is a slow-moving four-car accident. Then we turn and see a yellow Volvo station wagon on a different on-ramp drive through the hole in a different overpass. It hits hard on the pavement below and slams at high speed into a cement wall. The driver’s door flies open, but we don’t see any movement, so we run back up our own on-ramp toward a house on a bluff that overlooks the freeway. We see a couple of other people along the way who also abandoned their cars, and I tell them, “We’re going up the hill to call nine-one-one.”
We arrive at the house and look around. Somehow my companion and I get separated, and I talk on my cell phone while walking around on the lawn. I finish the call, and decide to have a look around. The house is a hundred-year-old Victorian that was historically preserved at the time the freeway was built alongside it. It is currently inhabited by an assortment of hippies, artists, musicians, slackers, and a couple of garden-variety weirdos. Since it’s a sunny afternoon, many of them are outside in the yard selling a myriad of shiny, colorful, beautiful things. I walk around the yard and greet each of the people in turn. They turn out to be a very engaging and creative bunch, and I think to myself that I would really enjoy living in a similar situation. I ask one of them if it would be okay to explore the property a little bit, and maybe even see inside the house. He agrees, and off I go.
I start in the yard, and walk around the north side, the west (front) side and then back around to the south side (where the freeway is), which is overgrown with thick blackberry bushes. As I’m walking through the bushes, I hear someone else rustling around inside them. A short, chubby old woman appears, holding a megaphone and orating crazily about witchcraft of some sort. I tell her she surprised me when she came up behind me like that, then I turn back and walk to the back yard again.
I walk into the house and up the stairs to the second floor landing. There is more selling of goods, primarily jewelry and music, going on up there, and I’m again impressed by everyone’s creativity and communal spirit. There are a handful of customers wandering around as well, and the witch woman comes out wearing a big wooden box in front of her with a small stereo inside it that’s playing an Edith Piaf song. The woman is singing along tunelessly about witchy subject matter, and the customers tell her, “That’s lovely, is it your own composition?” The woman smiles and avoids the question, so I answer, “It’s Edith Piaf, actually.” I walk toward the next person, and the woman sets down the musical box and announces, in a very loud voice, that she’s always wanted to do THIS, and she jumps in the air toward a rail above the door of one of the adjoining rooms. She kicks her legs up in the air, and holds them aloft for a long time. Since she’s so short, her legs are at everyone’s head level, so she’s letting the room know (in no uncertain terms) that she’s not wearing anything underneath her dress. Her dress slides up past her thick waist, and stays there. The customers laugh, I turn away, and two old women who live in the room next to the one in which she’s hanging appear and say to everyone and no one, “There she goes again. Why is she always doing that?”
Just then, an old man in a wheelchair appears from out of the bathroom that serves this floor. On his lap is a shaving kit; brush, mug, shaving cream, and a large circular razor. He asks me if I’d like to learn how to shave. “I’ve tried using those,” I tell him, “but I never fail to cut myself. I guess I’m just an electric guy. I could show you how to use an electric one, if you want. They’re much easier.”
“I like these,” he replies, as he stands up out of his wheelchair and sets them on a nearby wooden shelf. “I usually miss a hair or two, but these give me a much better shave overall.” He gives me a smile, and I see that he has indeed missed a hair or two.
I tell him, “I’m here because I almost wrecked my car out on the freeway last night, and my girlfriend and I saw a bad crash, so we came up here to call nine-one-one. I’m really impressed with this place. What’s it like living here?”
“It’s a pretty amazing place. Want me to show you around?”
“That’d be great. I’ll let you get dressed first.”
So he goes off to get dressed, and in the meantime I walk back downstairs and out into the yard again. Before long, the old man comes wheeling out to meet me in the middle of the yard. He says, “Show me what happened last night, and where your car is. Maybe by now we’ll be able to get it out of there.” I take him toward the edge of the bluff, to overlook the various interchanges, but I’m unable to find the one on which my car is parked. Traffic is moving along briskly on one freeway, but the other freeway and its myriad of on-ramps are clogged with stopped cars and holes in the road, and a few drivers are trying to maneuver their cars around all that. It’s complete chaos. “I see what you mean,” the old man says. “What a nightmare. Seems like you’re better off up here. Grab that bike over there.” He nods his head toward a dilapidated mountain bike that’s leaning against the side of the house. I walk over, grab the bike, and roll it to the edge of the yard where he’s sitting. “Come on,” he says, pointing at a small structure on the house’s property near the corner of the bluff, with a door and a stairway leading down. “I’ve been wanting for ages to find out where that goes.”
The building is tiny, with windows on all sides, built in the same style as the house, and is only big enough for a door and the stairway. We open the door, and he stands up and walks down the stairs in front of me. I’m carrying the bike over my shoulder while I walk down. There are three or four flights of stairs, with a couple of short landings along the way. At the bottom is a tiny enclosed area, about ten feet square, with windows on all sides and daylight flooding in from somewhere. We seem to be underneath one of the freeway overpasses. There are a few scruffy people, also attempting to sell things; mostly art, and mostly either out of their bare hands or off of the walls, since there’s no room for tables or anything. They all know the old man, of course, so they know not to sell me anything, but there are two young Asian boys (maybe five and eight years old) who are too young to know who’s a customer and who’s not, so they try their usual aggressive selling tactics, by cornering me and blocking my bike, chattering all the while about their tiny pictures and thrusting them in my face. One of the other artists smiles at us and makes a gesture to help me lift my bike over their heads. The old man and I walk back up the stairs and out of the structure onto the lawn. I notice that the bike has a pseudo-Japanese brand name on it, something like Fujasoki, which isn’t even a real Japanese word.
“What was that all about?” the man asks me, clearly amused by the entire endeavor. “I had no idea that was down there.”
“Seems like a tough way to make a living,” I reply, just as a familiar blonde woman comes out of the house and down the steps. “Oh, hey, Heather,” I say. “Do you live here too?”
“Yes,” she says, and gives me a little laugh. “Are you naked yet?”
I laugh too. “Not yet, as you can see.”
The old man chuckles at our bizarre conversation, and looks back and forth at us. “You two know each other?”
“Sure,” I say. “We go way back.”
“That’s right,” Heather replies.
I tell them that I want to go back in the house to look around for a while, so we say the usual pleasantries and I make my way inside. I have a terrible time remembering everyone’s name, including the old man’s. I want to inquire about renting an apartment in this house, but I’m not sure who to ask, since everyone seems to be busy selling their various wares.
* * * * * *
That’s when I woke up, fully aware that I had to write this all down before I forgot any of the zillions of precious details.
I wake up in what used to be my bedroom in my childhood home. I’m lying on my back with my head propped up on two pillows, staring at the large TV that is mounted on the wall above the door. That’s weird, I think to myself, I never had a TV on the wall in my room. On the screen is snow; apparently I turned off the cable box the night before, but neglected to turn off the TV before I fell asleep. I am weak, and unable to move my head enough to look around, so I use my arm to feel around on the blankets for the remote, which I do not find.
A nurse appears by my bedside, wearing one of those little face masks that people wear if they’re worried about germs on the subway. She sees that the TV is still on, grabs the remote from the night stand, and turns it off. She says to me, “We thought it best to bring you here.” She moves her eyes to the side and then back toward me, in a gesture that tells me she’s referring to my old room. “You’re lucky to be alive,” she continues, placing a ring in the palm of my hand. The band is tiny and gold, and the stone is small and blue, with a five-pointed star pattern that very subtly fades to white against the blue background of the stone.
While I’m looking at the ring, she hands me a blue circular jar that is the same shade of blue as the ring, with a similar white star pattern on the surface. The jar fits in the palm of my hand. “We removed both of these items from your stomach last night,” the nurse tells me. “You seem to have ‘daddy issues.’ Would you care to explain any of this?”
I make an attempt to speak, but my lips have been frozen (but are just beginning to thaw) and there is a single strong thread tied vertically between them, so that my mouth is neither able to close nor open. I say, as best I can, trying to be deliberately vague, “I certainly don’t remember passing this. . .but then I didn’t, did I?” The nurse gives me an exasperated look, then turns and walks out of the room.
After she’s gone, I think, She doesn’t need to know about the ritual, or that I tried to castrate myself. I reach my left hand down to feel a testicle. It’s there, but frozen and thawing in the same way that my lips are. I think, Is it real or synthetic? I don’t know; can’t tell. I move my hand away and lie there for a while, until I decide to get out of bed.
I get up and hobble slowly across the hall to the bathroom. There is a large mirror on the wall behind the sink, and I look at my reflection. I’m wearing a light blue V-necked hospital shirt. My skin is pale, waxy, and withdrawn. My hair is three inches longer than normal, unwashed, and extremely disheveled. My lips are frozen and held apart by a strong surgical thread. My eyes are blue and huge, and I look as if I am haunted. I think, When did this happen to me? When did I become this person? I can’t bear to look anymore, so I turn and shuffle back into the bedroom. I put my arms against the walls to keep myself steady as I make my way to the bed, shaking with fright, waiting for the nurse to return.
* * * * *
I woke up in the same position in which I’d been lying in my dream. No idea where all that came from. This is one of the most disturbing dreams I’ve ever had.
Last night’s dream took a while to get going, but it ended in a classic BFST way.
I am sitting in the back seat of a van in the driveway of my childhood home in Yakima with my two estranged stepsisters and one’s husband, drinking a concoction that the younger stepsister made from lemonade, vodka and whiskey or something. We are sitting and talking awkwardly, and the husband calls me by a different name, so I say automatically, “You mean Todd.” He gives me a little laugh and shrugs it off. I set down my mostly full glass, stand up, climb out of the van, and walk across the front yard into the house.
As soon as I get inside, the dream’s location changes to that of a busy office setting. I duck into the bathroom, pull down my pants, and start to. . .um. . .go Number Two. As I’m doing that, the door starts to open. It’s C, one of my real-life friends, so I tell him, “Hey, I’ll be out in a second.” I reach over to lock the door, but the lock is broken. I stand by the door, pants down, and try to maneuver the door into position in such a way that it will latch and lock. C says, “Oh yeah, I think they said something about the lock being messed up. Here let me just [he opens the door enough to reach through] try and jimmy it.”
I say, “Just. . .hang on. I’ll be done pretty quick. Let me finish up in here first.” C ignores me and continues to fidget with the door. Pretty soon, there are five or six people walking around in the large bathroom, which turns out to be sort of a hallway that leads elsewhere in the building; a very high-traffic area normally. I tug at my pants and tell everyone that I’m almost done, and that they should be patient for just another minute. I finally get them corralled out the door, when a co-worker of mine runs into the room, smiling mischievously, knowing that she’s consciously disturbing me.
I make a sort of growling noise under my breath, and she asks, “What?” She has her hand over her mouth, and is clearly trying not to laugh, which makes me totally furious.
I can’t contain my anger anymore. “I’M WIPING MY ASS, EVERYONE,” I say loudly and exasperatedly. “GO AWAY.”
She runs out the door, and I wake up, laughing at another crazy ending to another crazy dream.
Here’s the first segment; you know what to do if you want to watch the rest of them.
Well.
This is the infamous Super Bowl Sunday, and I for one could not care less about that. In fact, if it wasn’t for Twitter, I wouldn’t have known that today is the day. That’s how little I follow sports.
I know what I said a couple of weeks ago about how ‘the hiatus is over’ and all that, but life seems to have gone into overdrive since then, and I haven’t had two minutes to rub together to write anything new.
Two weekends ago, I went to Waldport, Oregon to spend the weekend with a childhood friend whose job is about to end, which will force him to move away from that pretty little town. (Photos to come, as soon as I get the chance to go through them.)
IrishBand has a friend who’s creating an animated video for one of our songs, and it’s tremendous! It should be done within a couple of weeks, and then I’ll be able to share it here. It’s been quite a process, and very exciting to watch it all come together. We needed to create an ‘intro’ section for it (you’ll see what I mean) that featured the sound of the band setting up their instruments and tuning up and whatnot. Since two of the band members are busy in school, we weren’t able to schedule a rehearsal, so I set up the instruments (drums, bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, and cello played up high to simulate a violin) in my living room and recorded them using one microphone to simulate a camera person walking in and recording us that way. (Photos to come, once I have a chance to go through them.)
I spent last weekend in Seattle to see a pipe organ concert at my brother’s church and to celebrate BabyNiece’s first birthday. It was really fun, and super cute, and a bit stressful all at the same time. (Photos to come, as soon as I get the chance to go through them.) I drove back late Saturday night so that I could attend the Oregon Symphony the next afternoon. They were featuring Jean-Philippe Collard performing Ravel’s beautiful Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, which I love and didn’t want to miss. (Extra-special thanks to Kelly V. for making it possible for me and my companion to go!) Hmm. . .’companion’ makes it sound like I’m gay, which I’m not. For the record, my companion was a girl.
Anyway.
I couldn’t find a video of Collard playing the Left Hand, but here’s one of him playing a similar piece by Ravel, for solo piano.
It was an incredible and beautiful show. The orchestra started with a piece by Thomas Adés called “Powder Her Face”, which was very colorful and enchanting. Next up was the Ravel concerto, followed by Gustav Holst’s “Egdon Heath” and one of the lesser-known Mozart symphonies, number thirty four. The Ravel was the only piece either of us (and I daresay the majority of the audience, as well) was familiar with. I love the way the conductor, Carlos, Kalmar, chooses music for his programs. This is the second one I’ve seen so far this season, and he likes to blend the familiar with the unfamiliar in an intriguing way.
Speaking of the Oregon Symphony, next season promises to be world-class. Yo-Yo Ma, Joshua Bell, Hillary Hahn, Emmanuel Ax, Lang Lang. . .and that’s not even close to a complete list. We are in for a treat multiple treats!
I had the opportunity to play with two nationally-known songwriters this week, in the same venue, on different days. The first was Tony Furtado (a friend with whom I play fairly regularly) and the second was Dan Bern, who I had just met earlier in the day, when I helped my friend John by engineering and sort of co-hosting a podcast for KZME Radio called Hello Cruel World. This was the second time I’ve had the opportunity to do that, the first being a couple weeks prior, when we interviewed an excellent new songwriter from Seattle named Tamara Power-Drutis. Anyway, we were talking with Dan about the times we’ve seen him in concert. John mentioned to Dan that I play accordion and multiple other things, and Dan asked if I know his music. “Yes, I do,” I answered. He asked, “Do you want to come play at the show tonight?” “Absolutely!”
This picture was taken during the song God Said No.
So yeah, between the multiple out-of-town trips, the stellar gigs, the birthday parties and the nights out, it’s been quite a fun couple of weeks. Now I’m off to meet a friend for dinner, and tomorrow I’ll be mixing some more songs for IrishBand.
I’m off of blogging hiatus, but we’ll see how long it takes before I have time to write again. I don’t imagine it’ll be this long.
This is dying to be shared with everyone. It’s the original Apple iPad, courtesy of Mad TV, FIVE YEARS AGO.
