beautiful, funny, sad & true

Spent the day doing laundry and packing for another trip with IrishBand to the beautiful seaport town of Port Townsend, Washington.  I’ll be there all weekend, and The Plan is to come back with a bunch of stories and pictures.  Here are some links to the entries from our previous trips:

IrishBand Goes to Port Townsend

A Great Weekend in PT

No Strings to Hold Me Down

Those should tie you over until I get back and have time to share the New Adventures of IrishBand.

In other news, we had a fun and slightly drunken gig tonight, and then I came home and had a nice long phone conversation with BoringFish.  Afterwards, I gave myself a haircut; my first time ever doing that.  And now, it’s almost 3:00 a.m., and time to go to bed.  Singer is picking me up at 9:30, which is the earliest I’ve had to get up in the last two months.  Yikes!  Wish me luck.

Off to sleep (perchance to dream) and then bright and early to PT.  See you when I get back!

I saw the new Star Trek movie the other day, and totally loved it.  It had a story line that could clearly stand on its own, but still featured enough geek-out material and historical information for old-school (or just plain old!) fans of the original series.

I found myself thinking a couple of things during the movie, though.  They aren’t story spoilers at all, but if you haven’t seen it yet, and you absolutely don’t want to know anything about the movie before you do, then you may want to just skip ahead a couple of paragraphs.  Now then.  I thought that the orange creature from the ice planet didn’t look like it was the kind of creature that would survive in an environment like that.  No fur, no feet even, just spindly little insect legs and a safety-orange body (absolutely zero camouflage in white and gray surroundings) which was seemingly held together by anger alone.  Please.

Also (and this is not Star Trek’s fault, per se, I’ve noticed it in about a billion other movies), I’m tired of the cliché that good guys live and work in bright, pristinely clean buildings and spaceships, and bad guys ooze through space in ramshackle ships that resemble floating sewers on the inside, with steam and water seeping everywhere, and half-destroyed (or half-built, depending on your view of life) landings and walkways that constantly teeter the pedestrians along the edge of bottomless abysses, without so much as a handrail between them and certain death.  WTF?  Just once I would love to see a bad guy who didn’t instantly LOOK like the bad guy, and who didn’t live in a sewer with countless elevated walkways.  Please?  Thank you.

All that being said, the movie was really awesome, and you should totally go see it.  I may see it again once it makes its way into the second-run theaters.

Oh yeah. . .just for the record, the actress who plays Uhura is smokin’ hot.  I’m just saying.

I’ve had the same person in five different dreams now.  I haven’t posted any of them here because they’re not interesting as far as dream narratives go (especially my dream narratives. . .she’s up against stiff competition!), except for the fact that she’s been in all of them.  The first three were in February and March (I checked in my e-mail and Twitter), and the most recent one was a couple of days ago.

She’s not anyone I know from real life, and she’s not anyone famous either.   She’s pretty in an understated way, fairly petite, with straight, shoulder-length blond hair (not normally my preference, but I’ve certainly made exceptions!) and she has a brown-and-white tabby cat who has also appeared in three of the dreams.  The dreams are romantic, but have never been sexual.  They always feel like they’re more about the connection that exists between us.  In one of them, we were sitting next to the window in her house, quietly talking and enjoying the sunshine, with the cat draped across both of our laps, purring.   In the most recent one, we were walking in a grassy lot outside of town, near some sort of cluster of buildings, and trying to figure out how to get back to the highway where my car was parked, so that we could get back.  Suddenly she stopped walking and turned to look at me.  “I think I’m in love with you,” she said.  I was pleasantly surprised by this news, and I hugged her and told her I loved her too.  “And I’ve always known it.”   I love the random, awkwardly worded things that come flying out of my mouth in dreams.   For the record, my all-time favorite dream quote is “Gah! What’d you do that for, you penis hole?!“ but there are plenty of other classics.  Almost every single one of my dreams involves weird dialogue of some sort.

So.  Moving on.

One dream involving The Girl was an extremely short one in which she appeared just long enough to say, “My name’s Christine, by the way.”  That was it; the entire dream.  A friend told me the other day that what her name means (“follower of Christ”) is much more important than her physical characteristics.  I told a different friend about that, and her response was [I'm condensing a few of her responses into one, actually], “I sure hope there is some meaning behind her name beyond that.  If not, what a disappointment. Maybe you passed her on the street one day.  Just because you don’t recognize her doesn’t mean you’ve never seen her.  . .just a thought. Her face could just be ‘filler’.  It seems she made a point to tell you her name.”

Very interesting.  RockShowGirl is convinced that this person is my ideal partner.  I don’t know that such a thing really exists, but it is a really nice thought.  I do know that the way to meet an ‘ideal partner’ is to always be the best and most honest version of myself that I can be, and that will attract the kind of people – either romantic, platonic, musical, or anything – that I want to spend time with.

Le Sigh.

Every night I look forward to dreaming, and I even find myself wanting to sleep much more than usual in order to see what happens next in our saga, but I’m guessing that sleeping twenty hours a day may not be the most conducive way of finding and kindling a relationship.  Just a hunch.

I had two interesting conversations via text message yesterday that I thought would be funny and/or interesting enough to share with you.

MP (bass player friend): hey, lady. do you have Joel’s #? u better come to the show on May 17!
me (I’m a guy, by the way.): ‘Hey lady’? I suspect this message may have been meant for someone else. Just a hunch. :)
MP: nope, u lindsey. . .:) I need the sound guy’s #.
me: Yeah, but this is [my name], though. :) God bless ya for being persistent.
MP: hahaha. I am a dope.

And then the one late last night:

LJ: Yay insomnia.
me: Again? I’m up too, naturally. Watching anime.
LJ: I’m contemplating whether or not insanity leads to a heightened sense of living.
[I think this is too big and interesting a subject to discuss via text, so I call her. No answer.]
me: Tried to call you. Not answering?
LJ: [after long pause] Was in the bathroom. Going to bed. G’nite.
me: Okay. Talk to you soon!

Pfft. DisapPOINTed. I was looking forward to hearing about whether or not insanity leads to a heightened sense of living. Last night. Conversations like that are always best when they happen well after midnight.

Oh yeah. The anime I was watching was called Ghost Hound. I was going to post a link to a web site about it, but it has a bunch of story details, and since I’ve only seen three episodes (out of twenty two, I think it is), I didn’t want to spoil it for myself, so I stopped reading. I’ll have to write about some of the series I’ve found lately, and how I don’t like most anime, but that’ll be an entry for another day.

When I was about eighteen, I had a girlfriend, B, whose estranged, abusive stepfather was the guy in town who sold worms out of his front yard. He had a very famous and weatherbeaten sign facing Sixteenth Avenue that said in scrawled black letters, ‘BAIT WORMS HELLGAMITS’. I still have no idea what ‘hellgamits’ are, but based on his childlike handwriting and second-grade education, I strongly suspect a misspelling.  Yeah, I know, an internet search would reveal the answer easily enough, but I actually like holding onto that particular little mystery.

As far as I know, he’s still in business.  I haven’t driven that stretch of Sixteenth Avenue during the last couple of times I was in town, but as of a few years ago, he was still at it.  And no, I didn’t stop by to say hello or anything.  In fact, I never met him back in the day, and I didn’t want to, either, all things considered.

And what happened to B?  Well, I was in college at the time, and one of the things college is good for (aside from the whole getting-an-education thing) is meeting significant others.  I think you can imagine where this is going.  After a couple months of dating B, I met K, who would change the course of my life, and I knew that our orbits would synchronize from the first minute we met.  K and I would be together on-again-off-again for the next five years, through both of my mullet haircuts.  B joined the Navy and I’m sure is living a perfectly functional life somewhere.   Last I heard, she got married and had a baby when she was around twenty years old.  My mom really liked B, actually, and they kept a friendship going for about a year or so after that, and wrote long letters back and forth, much to my annoyance, because I felt it sent a terrible message to K, who I count among the great loves of my life.

I still find myself wondering about K occasionally.  She moved to EmeraldCity at the exact same time I moved to Portland, and we went our separate ways and lost contact, somewhat surprisingly, after that.  She’s not on any of the usual social networking sites, and doesn’t seem to have an online presence, despite the fact that she works as an artist for a well-known video game company.

I’m not feeling romantically nostalgic for her, even though it may seem like I am.  I am curious, however, to see how her life has turned out, and every once in a while I’ll see something or someone that reminds me of her, and that will make me start to wonder.  We’ve all known people who really made their way deeply into our hearts, and sometimes the echoes of their voices seem to reverberate back into the world again.

But I’m not a Pollyanna, and I’m not stupid.  There were good reasons for us to split up, despite how much we loved each other, and I’ve never regretted our decision.  Most important of all is the fact that if we had stayed together, I would never have met the myriad of great people I have in my life now (hello, myriad of great people!), or made the changes in myself that needed to be made.  The people I’ve been with since then have affected me even more deeply, thanks in part to the experiences and expectations that I learned from my time with K, but also thanks to all those years of therapy, if we’re being completely honest here.   Doesn’t mean that I can’t wonder about her sometimes, though, and that’s perfectly okay.

There’s a Decemberists song, one of my very favorites, called Red Right Ankle, which has a poignant final verse that sorta sums up this weird, non-nostalgic nostalgia that I’m feeling, and I’m going to use it in an attempt to tie up all of the loose ends of this entry into a neat, tidy little Scooby Doo ending.

This is the story of the boys who loved you, who love you now and loved you then
Some were sweet and some were cold and snuffed you, some just laid around in bed
Some had crumbled you straight to your knees, did it cruel, did it tenderly
Some had crawled their way into your heart, to rend your ventricles apart
This is the story of the boys who loved you
This is the story of your red right ankle.

What a strange feeling this is.   What a strange entry this is.  And not a bit of Scooby Doo in the ending after all.  Sorry about that.