beautiful, funny, sad & true

Last week was our annual family trip to Cannon Beach, but with my friend’s BirthdayPartyOne (PartyTwo is happening tonight), and my trip to Montana, I haven’t had a chance to write about it yet.  Brother, his wife, their three kids, and Mom ‘n’ Stepdad arrived on Sunday, and I arrived on Monday.

Before I left Portland, I checked in with Brother to see if I needed to bring anything, and he texted back, The house is small and not very nice, just so you know. Greeeeat.  That meant I was sleeping on the floor.  I threw in my sleeping bag and pillow, as well as a blanket to throw down, just in case.  I also brought my bike this time, just in case I wanted to get away and have some solo adventures.  When I arrived, I got the low-down on the house, which Mom and BrothersWife had spent the whole day cleaning and fixing, but there were still a multitude of things that were broken or at least annoying.  They called the rental company, who sent a repair guy down to fix the more egregious things.  The house was owned by a family named Kennedy, but it must have been the Grey Gardens branch of the family, not the Hyannisport branch.  After some negotiation, Mom’s diplomacy skills got them to refund a day of the rental fee, the entire cleaning fee, and the entire pet fee.

For the most part, we did all the usual family-type things that people do on the beach.  We lit fires, we roasted marshmallows to make s’mores, and we talked and watched the kids play in the sand.  The sunset was particularly nice one night, so I managed to get some pics before my battery died.

Stepdad had been telling us about a phenomenon called ‘minus tides’, in which the tide is extra low, but this year the minus tides were up to two feet lower than usual, and about as low as they can possibly be on the Oregon coast.  Tuesday’s was the lowest tide, apparently, but if you were lucky enough to be up around five-thirty or six in the morning, you’d be able to experience the minus tides all week.  On Wednesday, the morning of my third and final day, my eyes popped open around six, so I dressed quickly, grabbed my bike, and headed for the beach.   It was very foggy, as mornings there often are, but this time it was so foggy that I couldn’t even see Haystack Rock until I was actually down on the beach and right next to it.  I rode along the dirt roads and paths, following the dune grass, until I found a set of steps leading down to the sand.  I carried my bike over my shoulder until I got onto the wet sand, because dry sand is extremely hard to ride in, and it gets in every single crevice of your bike’s mechanical parts and destroys them, so I was quite happy to wait for the wet sand.

I came across an interesting scene, which was of a series of chairs that had been left on the sand overnight, complete with peoples’ toys and jackets.  It was very eerie, almost post-apocalyptic.  I set my bike down and pulled out the camera. . .

. . .then finally made it to Haystack Rock.  It was pretty exhausting just getting down there.  It’s a pretty good walk at the normal low tides, but during the minus tide, it took forever to walk to the water’s edge.  I arrived around six-thirty, to find about ten or fifteen other intrepid explorers down there with me.  We all were walking around the edge of the rock, admiring and touching the myriad of colorful starfish and anemones that were exposed.

The ultra-low tide exposed some nefarious and debaucherous activities, as well.  These two star-crossed lovers (har har) were caught in the act of spooning on a rock. . .

. . .and here we see a perfect example of the type of forbidden love that sometimes manages to transcend the boundaries of inter-species predation.

After I pulled myself away from the starfish and their activities, I walked down to the water’s edge, which was clear down to the ‘back’ of Haystack Rock, on its ocean side.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with this area, during a normal low tide, you’re normally only able to get to the beach side of the rock, where the usual tidepools are.  This time, the rock was almost completely exposed.  Check THIS out:

I know it’s hard to convey all of this by such close-up shots, but it was absolutely stunning, and despite the lack of sleep that morning, I’m very glad to have had the opportunity to witness it.

By this time, which was now around seven-thirty, the tide was just beginning to come in again, and some of us who were engrossed in our photography had to scramble from a couple of waves.  I turned around to find a little rock and tidepool formation that I’d attempted to photograph earlier, but the light had changed enough that it was particularly eerie and beautiful.

After that, I put my bike back over my shoulder and trudged back through the thick fog toward town.  I navigated through the stairway and parking lot of a time-share condo in order to do so, and took the liberty of using their rinsing shower on my bike as well.  Don’t tell anybody.  From there, I headed to my favorite coffee shop, Bella Espresso, for my favorite beach drink, a white chocolate raspberry mocha.  Mmmmmm.  I was the second customer of the day, and arrived just as they were opening, so I sat in the courtyard and watched people on the street while I sipped my coffee, before I rode back to our ‘small and not very nice’ rental house.

This was the fifth year in a row that we’ve done a Cannon Beach vacation.  This one was quite a bit more stressful than usual, due to the fact that the rental house was so small, and awkwardly laid out, and dirty.   The kids were also a bit much to deal with this time, at least for me.  Eight-year-old Niece is usually really great, but when she’s having an off day, she can be almost insufferable.  Three-year-old Nephew is, well. . .three, so he’s at the Constantly Looming Tantrum stage of life.  There are very few things that are more annoying to me than little kids’ tantrums (especially since I’m not much of a ‘kid person’ anyway), so I took the opportunities for quiet getaways whenever I got the chance.

This trip was fine and everything, but I’m sure next year’s trip will be better.

Just got home from a gig in Whitefish, Montana.  First time I’ve ever been there, and I have to start by saying that it’s a supremely beautiful little town.  It was my first gig with ModeratelyFamousBanjoPlayer, and despite the fact that it was very loose and unrehearsed (I’d never even met the drummer before, let alone played with him before), AND despite the fact that Southwest Airlines’ baggage handlers banged up my accordion enough that it needs to be repaired now, AND despite the fact that the stage was a truck trailer which bounced around so much that my acoustic guitar fell off it and got a nice big war wound on it, AND despite the fact that we got up at 5:30 a.m. (Mountain Time, which felt like 4:30 Pacific Time!) this morning to drive back to the airport at Spokane, AND despite the fact that I got stung by a bee (how random is that?) at the rental car place in Spokane. . .it was a triumphant show.

No pictures to speak of, unfortunately, because we were on such a tight schedule the entire time, and we were always either in the car, at the gig, or in the hotel room.  Okay, well, here’s what I mean.  This is Mount St. Helens from the airplane. . .

. . .and here’s ModeratelyFamousBanjoPlayer in his solo set.

After he was done, we all ate dinner (of delicious fish tacos!) and then set up the rest of the equipment for the full-band evening show.  I have to give extra-special thanks to SoundGuyToby, who came through with an accordion for me after I found that mine had been damaged by Southwest Airlines’ rough handling during the flight over.  He absolutely saved the gig for me.  The show would have been accordion-free without Toby.

Oh yeah, and the guitar.  The stage was a truck trailer, which bounced around like crazy while we were playing.  My acoustic guitar was sitting next to the edge of the stage, and and one point it tipped right off and landed directly on the metal bar that connects to the hitch.  So it has a huge wound on it, right on the front corner, in one of the most visible places it could possibly have a wound.  I hope to gawd that it can be fixed.  I’ll never be able to sell it for anything close to what I paid for it now.  SUCKS.  It still plays fine, though, and that’s what counts, but that just sucks.  Combine that with the accordion repair and this one gig is really gonna set me back.

I also need to mention the people we met.  They were sweet, accommodating, friendly, drunken, and a metric ton of fun.  After the show, we got a lot of handshakes and “Oh MAN you guys were great.  Thanks so much for coming all the way out here!  We had a blast. . .”, etc.  We also got invited to quite a few parties afterwards (“There are bikes enough for everyone!”) which we had to respectfully decline, unfortunately.  It seems like a great town, especially if you’re an outdoorsy person.

We got to our hotel rooms around 10:30 p.m., then I took a shower and spent the next four hours watching a TV show I’d never seen before called Ice Road Truckers.  You’d think it would be the most boring show in the world, and maybe it was just my mental and physical state at the time, but I was riveted to that crazy show.  It was surprisingly suspenseful.

Oh yeah.  In the four hours during which I actually slept, I had a horrible dream in which three different friends (each of whom I know in real life) told me either to fuck off or “Y’know what?  Go fuck yourself,” and gave me some very specific reasons why they thought I should do that.  One even went so far as to add, “God, it feels so good to say that!”   It wasn’t the best dream I’ve ever had.

So I napped in the car, and then we flew home.  A very nice couple from Spokane sat next to me on the plane, and the guy was actually from Whitefish, so that was a nice coincidence.  They even gave me a copy of Rolling Stone magazine (“Would you like this?  It’s a good one. . .”) just before we landed.  It’s one of the issues with Barack Obama on the cover.

So that was pretty cool.

I’m just glad to be home.  Usually when I’m traveling, I’m much more ‘in the moment’ than I was this weekend, but it was busy enough, and with all the instrument issues it was stressful enough, that I was emotionally done last night.  I wasn’t bummed out or anything, I just wanted to be home so that I could take care of these things that need to be taken care of, and now I can do just that.

I’m going to start with myself.  First a nap, then a shower, then I’m going to a dinner party with a couple of friends.  I’ll worry about the accordion tomorrow.

I had a funny dream the other day, in which I was out with a guy friend from real life and a girl and guy with whom he works.  We were at a pub drinking a bunch of beers, talking and laughing and all of a sudden the girl was talking about plumbing, and her faucet.  When she said the word ‘faucet’, I laughed and gestured toward my friend, “Or FLAUCET, as he used to say.”

By way of a snappy comeback, my friend pointed at me and told her, “Yeah, well one time HE said that he was gonna give me a hand job.”  Everybody laughed and I said, “I reMEMber that!  My sixth girlfriend and I used to joke about that all the time, so that’s why you weren’t surprised when that came flying out of my mouth.”

The girl turned to me and asked, “Sixth girlfriend, huh?”

I said, “Yup,” and then launched into a long, supremely boring story about her and me that even I wasn’t interested in listening to, so I cut it short and said, “What can I say?  I like shock value.”  My friend laughed a little, and then everyone went back to talking about whatever subjects we’d been talking about before, and continued to drink our beers.

* * * * *

Incidentally, my friend really did think the word was ‘flaucet.’  I don’t know why he thought that, and neither does he, but I’ve always found it amusing.  Also incidentally, my sixth girlfriend reads my blog, and she even has her own that’s listed in my blogroll.  But we certainly never joked around about hand jobs, nor have I ever offered (or wanted) to give my friend one, so I have no idea where that particular subplot came from.

Anyway.   All that’s neither here nor there.

I love accents, and I kinda always have.  I also love to learn how to mimic them, and I kinda always have.  When I was a kid, I used to think that someday I would grow out of this tendency, but so far it’s still with me, and thank gawd for that.  My favorite accents to do are two of the most difficult ones.  Liverpudlian (from Liverpool, England), otherwise known as the Beatles’ accent,  with its sing-songy inflections and cadences and hard G’s on the ends of words (like ‘everythinG’) took quite a while and many repeated viewings of A Hard Day’s Night in order to master it.

My newest favorite is Australian, which I could never figure out until I listened to a book on tape, and found to my eternal delight that since it was an Australian story, they used an Australian actor to read it.  Brilliant!  Finally I had the chance to really hone in on the details of the accent, and realized that it’s all in the vowels.  They change, halfway through, as you flatten out the back of your tongue.  In fact, the phrase ‘change halfway through’ is the phrase that I used to lapse into the accent, and it’s now the phrase I use to explain to people how to hear it.

I told you that story to tell you this one.  The other night, I had just gotten home from seeing Ponyo with LJ (we both were lukewarm about it; it’s meant more for kids than many of his others are) and my building mates were standing in the street talking as I parked my car.  They were going to the Sandy Hut, and they invited me to join them.  We jumped in Flutist’s car and off we went.  While there, Cellist and his girlfriend have a favorite video game they like to play, so when it was free, they got up to play, and that left Flutist and me by ourselves.

We were sitting and talking, when a girl walked up next to our table to look at the mural that’s on the wall.  (I find it hard to believe that multiple Internet searches were unable to find me a picture of said mural.)  It’s a collage of a bunch of caricatures of famous people from the past, like W.C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, people like that, and it’s fair to say that it does attract attention and start conversations.  So anyway, the girl.  She stood there looking at the mural, and asked us who this one particular person was supposed to be.  So we all started talking about that, and that’s when Flutist and I noticed that she had an Australian accent.  Turned out that she was traveling with two or three of her guy friends, and they found themselves in Portland for a day or so.  We talked about that, and Flutist has been to Australia a couple of times (has family there, in fact) and she told the girl that I do a great accent.  The girl actually wanted to introduce me to her friends, because it was the best accent she’d heard so far, and she thought it would be funny to make a new Aussie friend in a random bar in a random part of this crazy little city.  She asked how I did it, and I told her about the ‘halfway through’ thing, which Flutist is aware of too, because I’ve told her about it before.

After the discussion of accents (she also wanted to know how to improve her American), she started to tell me and Flutist about an idea for a comedy skit she’d been working on.  She explained it to us, and it was something about two guys who go outside to smoke, and something about getting ‘halfway through’ their cigarettes when hijinks suddenly ensue.  Flutist and I cracked up laughing every time she said ‘halfway through’ so we missed a little bit of what she was trying to tell us.  We did get the gist, however, and it was kind of funny, but she interpreted our outbursts as if we were laughing at the actual joke, so she asked, “So you guys thought it was that funny?  You think it could really go somewhere?”  With a healthy dose of diplomacy, we told her that it was pretty funny, but what actually sent us into hysterics was the fact that she said ‘halfway through’ about four times, and Flutist knows that’s my Australian catch phrase, so to be sitting next to a cute Australian girl who was using that exact phrase was just too perfect.

After about fifteen more minutes, her friends whisked her away and they all left to go elsewhere.  Flutist and I filled in Cellist and his girlfriend, who had returned to our table during the telling of the joke, on the back story and the significance of of the coincidental phrase, and Flutist added, to me, “You charmed the pants off her.”  “I’ve got my moments,” I replied through a wry smile.

The young kid in me, who loved accents but always thought that he would eventually grow out of all this nonsense, was overjoyed and felt completely vindicated by the whole experience.  Funny how life works sometimes.

I just woke from a dream, the story of which wasn’t interesting, but there were some details that were very interesting.

I was at a dinner party in a large hotel suite, and since the friend I was meeting there hadn’t arrived yet, I didn’t really know anyone.  There were a couple of people I’d seen once or twice before, at previous gatherings, but there was a lot of awkward conversation as more and more people entered the room.  I was sitting next to a young woman who was one of the people I’d met previously, and when her older sister arrived, she introduced me as William.  I shook her hand and said, “Todd; nice to meet you.”  The sister sat on my other side, and we chatted easily and got along very well, until some people on the other end of the table kept asking her things, seemingly to keep her from talking to me.  I decided to pull out my ‘Face Book’, which was an enormous coffee table book full of peoples’ pictures and updates.

I flipped through it for a few minutes, and then decided to put it down on the floor.  I turned around and leaned it vertically against the wall behind my chair, and that’s when my new friend turned to me and asked if she could take a look too.  I grabbed it and handed it to her, and she took it and turned completely away from me to read it.   I decided to go to the bathroom, and as soon as I stood up, I noticed that I was wearing a police uniform.

I wanted to be a little less conspicuous, so I unhooked my name badge and slipped it into my pocket just before entering the mens’ room.  As I pushed the door open, I noticed a disheveled guy sitting next to the door, slightly sprawled out with his back against the wall.  I turned my head to the left, and saw two guys entering the building through the side entrance.  I turned back and entered the restroom.

I felt I should pay attention to what everyone else in the room was doing.  As I was urinating, the two guys entered the mens’ room also, and went into a darkened side room for a minute.  When they came out, one of them tried to turn the light switch off (even though the room they’d just left was dark already) and he seemed to have great difficulty doing so, as if he was extremely drunk.  I thought to myself, ‘Someone ought to report him.  I should tell the guy next to me, who’s urinating also, but he’ll probably think I’m a cop since I’m wearing this stupid uniform.’

I continued to urinate, and in fact woke up as I was doing that.  Quite a strange sensation, by the way, to dream that you’re urinating and then wake up to find that you’re not urinating anymore.  Once again, I’m grateful for dopamine, so that our bodies don’t act out our dreams.