beautiful, funny, sad & true

I came home for lunch today, and was greeted by the sound of huge crashes and bangs coming from the basement.  Apparently our old furnace was being removed.  The noise was so loud that I couldn’t even stand to be in the building.  I went to the kitchen and tried to find something to make for lunch, and I heard a BAM BAM BAM BAM from everywhere underneath me, but it sounded like it was coming from inside my skull.  The walls were actually shaking from the blows of all the hammers.  I got right back on my bike and decided to eat lunch elsewhere.

When I got home from work tonight, I took my bike down to the basement like always, but when I got down there, my jaw dropped.  I started to utter an F-bomb, but my tongue never even made it to the final consonants to enunciate the entire word.  This is the scene that was waiting for me down there:

Everyone’s stuff is intermingled and haphazardly piled on top of everyone else’s, and it’s like that in every room.  It’s a total nightmare.  I must have been down there for ten minutes, with my mouth hanging open.  Even the rugs are rolled up and stuffed in there somewhere, and big drums are on top of smaller, more fragile things.

Yikes.

It looks like the workers will be back down there tomorrow, too, so we don’t dare start putting things back yet.

Double yikes.  This is gonna be a really fun weekend.

OneYearAgo

I’m always interested in finding out the ways in which people stumble upon blogs, specifically this blog.  Tonight I found out that someone had found me by typing in the phrase ‘urinating loudly.’  After I stopped laughing, I decided to share some of the recent searches that people have used:

music sad beautiful pensive

virtual bachelorette party

funny definition of caretaker

BMW 2002

funny things to say when sad

elliott smith xo

urinating loudly

I really should keep a log of these things.

Wow, it seems like every time I go a day or two between entries, and I’m planning what to write about next, I always have a super-weird dream that fills in the gaps nicely.

Last night’s dream I don’t remember linearly enough to tell it all, but what I do remember needs to be captured, so here you go.

I’m on tour with a band, and we’ve just played a show in Denver, on our way to Salt Lake City.  We each drove separately, for some reason, and I’m out in SLC, looking for a place to eat dinner.  I park at a restaurant, walk inside, and see a glass of DewFromMountains on the table, and to me that means only one thing:  Ozzy Osbourne must be here, somewhere.

Sure enough, he walks around the corner just then, and I introduce myself.  “Hi, I’m Todd.  I’m a guitarist. . .YOUR guitarist!. . .(pause). . .Kidding!  Zakk Wylde is totally your guy.”

“Zakk doesn’t play with me anymore.  I found a new kid who’s fourteen years old, and he’s amazing.”

We end up hanging out, eating dinner together, and then he sort of comes along with me while I check into my hotel room and everything.  I start to unpack my clothes and guitars and amps and stuff, and I call one of my bandmates.  “Hey.  You’ll never guess who I’m hanging out with right now. . .Ozzy!  Osbourne!. . .I know, it’s crazy.  Hey, what time’s our show tonight?”

“It’s already over.  You missed it.”

“Get OUTTA here.  It is not.  Over.  It’s only 5:30; what kind of show is over by 5:30?”

“This one.  So we’re packing our stuff up right now.”

“That’s so lame!  Well, sorry about that.  I guess you guys can just split the money between you, and leave me out of the pay for this one.”  I hang up and tell Ozzy that I missed the show.  I tell him that my mom lives here in Salt Lake City (which she doesn’t, really) and that we can go eat and do laundry at her place.  The dream changes, and we’re at my mom’s place.  No one else is home, and I start to pile up my dirty laundry.  Her tiny little kitten (which she doesn’t really have) starts to run through the room and claw at our clothes and guitars.  I tell Ozzy, “We need to keep that kitten out of here.  He sprays, and he’ll destroy all our stuff.”  I grab the kitten and put him next to the back door.

I walk back into the other room, and find a T-shirt that one of my bandmates has made, for us only, to commemorate the tour.  It’s white, with a bunch of colored boxes with comic-style writing that tells inside jokes and rhymes.

“B_ _ _ _ _ fails!”

“7 + 5/2 – (the ‘square root of’)12 = Rawk!”

“And B_ _ _ _ _ is not a dork!”

I start to tell Ozzy that I can’t remember where I left my rental car, and that I’m worried about how I’m going to meet up with the rest of the band.  He laughs and tells me that I’m welcome to crash at his hotel room if I need to.  “Thanks,” I say, “but that won’t really solve the problem.”

That’s all I remember.  You can tell this was a dream because I was actually looking around for a place to eat while I was in Salt Lake City, whereas if I was awake I’d be heading to the Sego Lily Cafe over in Bountiful, which is my favorite cafe ever.

I need to start taking drugs, so that I can have an excuse for all these weird dreams.

OneYearAgo

One of the things you experience as a cellist (aside from people constantly telling you how much they love it, and how it’s the sexiest instrument EVER) is the myriad of jokes about the case.  Every time I leave home with it, I get comments.

For tonight’s gig, I rode the bus because my Honda’s alternator is on its last legs, and I’ll be left stranded if I drive it too much.  So I got on the bus and the conversation instantly went like this:

Driver:  “I’m pretty sure that’s not a body in there.”

Me:  “Heh.  Yeah, it’d be a pretty small body.”

Driver:  “Well, you could’ve chopped it up into a bunch of little pieces.”

Me:  (awkwardly)   “Ha ha. . .okay, I’m just gonna go. . .uhh. . .sit over here.”

Luckily, one of the passengers struck up a conversation, asking if I’ve ever seen the movie August Rush, which apparently includes a cellist as part of the story.  I haven’t seen it, but I told him that it sounds really great, and that I’ll check it out.

My all-time favorite odd cello-related conversation took place a couple of months ago, when I had the cello in the back of the car, on my way to a gig down in Salem, and I stopped at CarapaceGasStation to fill up the tank.  The back seats were folded down, and the cello case was clearly visible through the window.  This being Oregon, where it’s illegal for us to pump our own gas, I opened the sunroof to tell the attendant to ‘fill it up with Plus, please.’  While he was doing that, he looked in the back window and noticed the cello case.  “Hey,” he said, “you got a body in there?  Looks like a pregnant woman.”

Me:  (nonchalantly; heard it a hundred times before)  “Nope, it’s a cello.”

Attendant:  “Oh. . .heh heh. . .cause it looks like you killed my wife and crammed her in there.”

Me:  “. . .”  (silent. . .don’t know what to say.)

The attendant flitted between the various cars that were having their gas tanks filled, and when mine was done, he handed me my debit card and receipt through the open sunroof and called out, uncomfortably loudly, “Thanks a lot, sir.  GOOD LUCK DRIVING AROUND WITH MY DEAD, PREGNANT WIFE.” I laughed and gave him a half-hearted salute as I closed the sunroof and drove off into the twilight.

Luckily I got a ride home from the gig tonight, so I didn’t have to suffer the slings and the arrows of lame cello case humor.  And since we’re on the subject, here are some lame cello jokes that I just scrounged up from the Interweb:

Q: What’s the difference between a cello and a coffin?
A: The coffin has the dead person on the inside.

Q: Why did the cellist marry the accordion player?
A: Upward mobility.  [Note:  I’m both a cellist AND an accordion player!]

Q: Did you hear about the cellist who played in tune?
A: Neither did I.

Q: How can you tell when a cellist is playing out of tune?
A: The bow is moving.

Ah, praise the Lord for the gift of laughter.

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