Isn’t that adorable and strange?  (Adorable & Strange. . .hmmm.  I think I sense a new blog in my future!)  I wish I had made a video of the cats at feeding time, because the three of them instantaneously transform from lovable balls of fluff into whirling little hurricanes, and that happens at every single meal.  Love ‘em.

Anyway, on to the Best Of.  I love doing these each year, since it gives us the chance to revisit some of the things that may have receded into the shadows.  Some of them are a bit on the lengthy side, as you can imagine, so grab a snack and your beverage of choice, and enjoy the most beautiful, the funniest, the saddest, and the truest entries from this past year.

Brrrrrains!

calling all sausage packers

fifth and sixth

mountains and molehills

auditions

one in a million

How was YOUR day?

one in a million, part two

How do you say ‘dopamine’ in Chinese?

the pillow incident

Enigma  -  Enigma and Otis  -  Enigma and Fire

jindiggots

Monty Python Day

World Accordion Day

more than just a halo

they’re not for me

a strange evening

homemade Pac-Man

the cloths of heaven

As always, thank you for reading, and for sticking with this crazy blog thing into its fifth year of existence.  There is more to come.

Well, huzzah.

Beautiful, Funny, Sad & True is celebrating its fifth anniversary today, and I’d like to take the opportunity to thank you for sticking around and reading.  I realize that updates and stories have been a little sporadic around here lately; I’m working on rectifying that situation.  Five years is a long time to keep a blog.  Actually, including the previous incarnations of BFS&T on Blogger and that other social network, it’s been more like eight years, which is a bit mind-boggling.

Here are some updates I can provide you with, and I’ll divide them into the quadrants that create the name of this place.

beautiful:  My friend and I started writing and recording an album together a year ago, and it’s getting very close to completion.  We’re aiming for a release date this spring.  We’re thrilled to finally have a bassist (who also plays a number of other instruments) on board with us, and an excellent drummer is in the works as well.  Exciting times!

funny:  I could split hairs and wonder if this means funny/strange or funny/ha-ha, but either way I’m at a bit of a loss on this one.   Well, okay, here’s a little joke.

JOHN:  Ask me if I’m a truck.

PAUL:  Are you a truck?

JOHN:  No.

Ha ha.  Don’t worry if you don’t get it; there’s really nothing to get.  It’s just absurdist, and you either like it or you don’t.  I happen to like it.

sad:  Holidays are tough.  I tend to get the blues around this time every year.  It’s not seasonal affect disorder, I just find myself ruminating a lot about the things in my life (or even in myself) that are missing or lacking.  That’s about all I’ll say on the subject here, but I thought I’d let you know that’s what I’m dealing with at the moment.

true:  I went to visit my dad a couple of weeks ago, and came home with two big boxes of LP records.  Almost all of them are classical, and many are the same ones that I grew up listening to.  Some I know by heart, like the Glenn Gould piano recordings and Bach organ recordings, while others are ones I wasn’t familiar with back then but am totally interested in now.  There were a few surprises in there, too, like Johnny Cash’s greatest hits (from the 1960′s! and a couple of Moody Blues and Chet Atkins records that I doubt have ever been listened to.  I certainly don’t remember hearing that stuff in our house when I was growing up.  Certainly am glad to have them now, though.  I’m totally looking forward to plowing through all of them and giving them the attention they deserve.

So that’s what’s happening on this Very Special day.  Here’s to another five years!

Luckily, this story won’t take long, since it’s about a dream I had this morning that I don’t remember very well.  It was kinda dumb, overall—well, it was—but it did end with a funny conversation.  The dream was about international spies, which you’d think would make it inherently cool, but people spent an inordinate amount of time discussing the kinds of cars they drove (Mercedes and BMW) as opposed to those driven by the police (boring American cars).  It was as though I was watching a movie, rather than participating in the action, which is probably why it was so boring.  I’d love to be an international man of mystery, but I’ll need to get a passport first.

MainCharacterGuy had a sexy, blonde female sidekick who was twenty years his junior, and there were two other people in the dream, a man and a woman, who commented about her to each other.

“Why’s he with her?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Why’s he gotta pay her?”

“He pays her so she’ll fall in love with him.  He loves her cause—” and the second person chimed in to say, tautologically, “—he loves her.”

That’s when I woke up.

Incidentally, I haven’t forgotten that I owe you a story about hand jobs.  I’ve been trying to think of a way that I can tell it that won’t just be crass, but I’m not sure that’s gonna be possible, so I guess I’ll just keep it simple for once.

I can’t give a woman a hand job.  I mean, I CAN, but that’s not what it’s called, and I only found that out a week or so ago.  You see, I thought it was still called a hand job, whether it was done to a man or to a woman.  My friend thought it was hilarious that I used the term interchangeably that way, and he patiently explained it to me.  Turns out that the term ‘hand job’ is like ‘blow job’; it’s what a woman (or a man, for that matter) does to a man.  If a man (or a woman, for that matter) does the equivalent to a woman, then it’s called one of the million other terms that are floating around in our vernacular—which I will let you discover on your own, rather than listing them all here—but NOT a ‘hand job.’  You’re welcome.  I’m really glad we’ve had this discussion.

This calls for a new slogan.

BFS&T:  Now With 30% More Hand Jobs!

By way of a reward, here’s a hilarious video montage of all the references to hand jobs in the movie Rushmore. If you’ve never seen that movie, then see it.  If you haven’t, then this may be a bit of a spoiler, but I think you’ll find it entertaining.  It’s only a tiny bit of the overall story, and everything’s completely out of context, anyway.  All that being said, enjoy the video.

It’s been a while since I wrote, a fact for which I must apologize, but I had to take a bit of a hiatus to see how everything was going to pan out.  Three weeks later, inertia has settled over me, and I feel like I’m getting too far behind.  I do have other things I want to write about, too, but I feel I should  wrap up this story first.

The DUI was dropped, which was an obvious choice since I wasn’t even impaired.  The related charge of reckless driving was also dropped, but they did decide to charge me with careless driving, which amounts to about the same thing as a speeding ticket.  They cited me for a wide turn onto Lloyd Boulevard, which seems ridiculously trumped up, but they also agreed to lower the price of the ticket from six hundred dollars to two hundred since I had a clean record.  I decided to plead guilty and quit while I was ahead.

A friend took the liberty of finding me in one of those newspapers that publishes mug shots, which I thought was humiliating but also kinda funny.  At least they don’t publish peoples’ names.  I thought it was funny until yesterday, when it occurred to me that while I may not care too much about ephemeral newspapers, I should probably see what’s out there online.  I typed my name, and the first two results featured my mug shot.  My blood turned to ice.  Fucking hell, I thought, that’s the last thing I need. I e-mailed both of the web sites to have them remove the offending pages.  It’s insult to injury, if you ask me.

Let’s hope that’s the end of the story.  I’ll be quite happy when this stupid incident is nothing but a distant memory.

There were some standout moments from this last year that didn’t manage to make it into the blog, for various reasons.  For example, here’s a video of a particularly interesting recording session that I was lucky enough to be involved with, albeit in a small way.  A local singer-songwriter, who is also a friend, put the word out on SocialNetwork that she wanted to create a cacaphony of 50 pianos, all playing an F chord at the same time.  I jumped at the chance.  She rented a piano showroom downtown, and my friend and I (and forty eight or so other people) joined in to participate.  I brought my camera to capture a bit of the action.

Another memorable moment from this last year was Trek in the Park.  This theater group gets together every year to re-create a famous episode from the original Star Trek television series.  This year’s was Space Seed, in which we meet the infamous character Khan (who returned in the movie The Wrath of Khan).  It was a very well-done production, with live music and everything. . .and it was all free of charge.  Here’s the climactic fight sequence between Kirk and Khan.

IrishBand released our self-titled EP this year, as well as an amazing animated video that a friend created for us.  I would post that here, but our band name is very unusual, hence the pseudonym.  To celebrate, we went to Port Townsend, Washington (the hometown of three of the band members, and an adopted home away from home for the rest of us) to play a CD release party and catch the Rhododendron Festival and parade and everything.  It’s always a huge party weekend for PT, and this year was the tenth reunion for PT High School, which included Violinist and a bunch of other friends, so I actually went to the reunion barbecue in Chetzemoka Park during the afternoon, since I knew so many of the people there.  (God forbid that I actually go to any of my own class reunions; I haven’t yet.)  I also performed in the parade, in disguise, as an honorary member of Nanda.  I’m the guy with the Mexican wrestling mask, playing the bass, miming along to the dance music that was blaring from the speakers in the back of the truck.

I had the opportunity to see the Oregon Symphony perform many times this last year, with some pretty big-name performers.  Violinists Midori and Hilary Hahn, violinist Pinchas Zukerman and his cellist wife Amanda Forsyth (who, incidentally, gave a cello master class at the Old Church that afternoon, which I also attended, even though I’m far from being a cello master) who performed Brahms’s Double Concerto together, and a number of others.  This month, I have a ticket for pianist Emanuel Ax’s concert, which I’m very much looking forward to.  Yo-Yo Ma performed here a month or so ago, but his concert was sold out in the spring, only a few weeks after tickets went on sale.  Curses.

So it’s been a good year, overall, but I’m really hoping that 2011 is better, or less confusing at the very least.  I have lofty goals for the upcoming year, which include finding a job, finding love and a real relationship, taking care of some things that have been dogging me for a while now, and producing more CD’s.  I have a bit of news on the music front, actually.  A friend of mine hurt her arms a year ago, and has since been unable to play the piano, but that hasn’t stopped her from singing, or from writing lyrics and melodies, or from having tons of ideas.  She e-mailed me at some point to ask what people in her position do in the music business.  I told her I don’t know about ‘the music business’, but I’d love to give the songs a listen, and that maybe I could put music to them.  She sent me some mp3′s, and I instantly felt like I knew where the songs should go.  They felt familiar without being predictable, which is always a good sign.  That was about two months ago, and we already have five or six collaborations in the works.  Pretty awesome and exciting.

In other news, December is the fourth anniversary of this blog, so it seems appropriate to have a little birthday party, no?  Come on, let’s have some sis-boom-bah.

So anyway, on to the Best Of.  Here are the lists of what I consider to the best entries BFS&T has to offer from this past year, which naturally includes a list of the most interesting dreams, as well.  Enjoy!

THE ENTRIES:

SteamCon – the steampunk convention in Seattle in which PolishCellist and I played, and had a total blast doing so

tragedy – the death of Stepdad

struggle – the early aftermath of the death of Stepdad

sitting here thinking about the Holocaust – one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard on the radio

folk festival fun – Portland Folk Festival, starring IrishBand, Dan Bern, Roll Out Cowboy, etc.

I’m kind of an a-hole – see for yourself

birthday present – prostitute schmostitute

the unicorn code – love it, learn it, LIVE IT

no one’s laughing – a peek into our family dynamics

déja vu – what it feels like, and a friend who claims to never have experienced one

the truth is out there – interesting UFO story, I promise

it’s not for shaving – Occam’s Razor, and how it applies to recording music

what if it is? – a very memorable and touching moment from the show Six Feet Under

THE CHILDHOOD STORIES:

shuttlecock

love and curiosity

he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother

the final innocent tryst

synchronicity

THE DREAMS:

lights, camera, dream

festival dream

shape shifters

inimitable and imitable

subconscious and libido

this needs a name

frozen

Just in case this wasn’t enough for your insatiable appetite for blog entries, here’s the Best of BFS&T 2009 entry, for your gluttonous pleasure.

Thanks for being here and reading all this, and for supporting this blog for such a long time now.  I really appreciate it.  I hope we all have an excellent New Year’s Eve, and Day, and that 2011 allows us to learn, and to grow, and to change for the better, a little bit each day.

Happy New Year!

Money has been a bit tight, after a flurry of gigs with little or no pay.  That’s frustrating, because while I love all the people I play with, it’s really hard to keep a high level of motivation when you put your heart and soul (and time, and energy, and gas, and expensive musical instruments) into something and you’re compensated with gratitude. . .which is great, don’t get me wrong, but gratitude doesn’t pay the bills.

About three months ago, I managed to scratch both of my eyes within a week of each other.  That was a pretty miserable couple of weeks.  Why am I bringing that up now?  Because a couple of nights ago, I scratched my right eye again.  Driving to rehearsal that evening, in rush hour traffic, through the rain and fog, didn’t do much to improve the situation, either.  Last night’s unpaid gig was really great, and really fun, but also really painful, and I had to reschedule tonight’s dinner plans for Sunday night instead.

I feel like I’m being a CrankyPants lately, instead of my usually indomitable self.  I did have a bunch of excellent dreams last night, however, which were a saving grace after my scratched eye kept me awake for much of the night.  I’ll have to include them here, once I decide how to share them.

I have two funny things to report.  The first is that last night, after the gig, I was loading my instruments to the car in a torrential downpour, which is still dumping on OurFairCity as I’m writing this.  A homeless guy walked up with a small spray bottle and offered to wash my window.  “I’ll do a real good job,” he said.  I was unable to keep from chuckling a little as I gestured to the sheets of rain.  “I’d say it’s getting taken care of already.”

The second thing is someone I overheard when I was at the grocery store this afternoon, buying a new headlight bulb for my car.  (On every other car I’ve had, changing headlight bulbs has been a breeze, but on my Honda, it’s a gigantic pain in the ass. . .but I digress.)  This person was talking into her cell phone, and I can only imagine the other end of the conversation.  I’ll leave you with this:

“Remember that time I karate-kicked you in the face?  On accident?”

IrishBand had an amazing EP release show last Friday, which also helped with my mood, although the show left me completely physically exhausted for the next couple of days after that.  It was the good kind of exhaustion, though, the kind where you feel like you’ve got something to show for your hard work.

I was still feeling weird on Halloween, and I almost gave it a miss.  One of my friends invited me to the Erotic Ball that takes place every year, but I declined.  “It’s not my thing,” I told her.  “Ever, or just right now?” she asked.  “Ever,” I said, and smiled a little so I didn’t sound harsh.  “It’s just. . .not my thing.”  A couple of my friends who were checking up on me said that I should really go out that night, instead of just sitting home and ruminating.  So I did.  I didn’t dress up, but I did go to a party.  I arrived when the party was in full swing, so it took a little while to adjust to the craziness.  The hostess was glad I came, but she told me that I really should have a costume – since everyone else did – and that she could probably scrounge something up for me.  She said, “How about a hat?”  Sounds great.  She went into her room and came out with a cool fedora.  “How about a really big camera?”  How about it?  She reached into her closet and pulled down a serious thirty-five-millimeter camera with a huge lens on it, and put it around my neck.  “Awesome,” I said.  “instant photojournalist.”  At a certain point, we trundled through the pouring rain to a nearby bar to continue the celebration.  The place was completely dead until the twenty-five of us rushed in.  We soaked the clean floor, and a few people spilled drinks, and some even broke glasses.  It was pandemonium.  There were two Snookies in our group, one of whom was a guy.

He wore the requisite wig and gold sparkle dress, and even made a point of telling us that he wasn’t wearing any underwear.  It turned out later that he didn’t need to tell us that, because we found out for ourselves when the dress slipped off at the bar.  A couple of us looked over at one point to see a bare ass hanging out of the top of the dress.  Niiiiiice.  Right after that, someone narrowly made it outside the front door to throw up, so we figured the party had hit critical mass.  We took a few group photos and called it good.  And yes, I’m glad I was there.

The moral of all this is that I’m starting to feel my equilibrium returning, and you can expect to see BFS&T return to its usual self very soon as well.