beautiful, funny, sad & true

After a long day of sleeping, sweating (I stayed home from work with a fever today), dinking around on the computer and washing dishes, I decided to go back to bed and read for a while. I’m still reading Catcher in the Rye. I got to the part where Our Hero sneaks into his parents’ home in the middle of the night–cause he’s home a couple of days early due to being kicked out of school, and he doesn’t want his parents to find out yet–to see his little sister. That scenario reminded me of the line from the play Our Town. You know the one; “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.”

I hadn’t seen that play since I was in junior high, and I wanted to see it again and remember the context of that great line, so I scrounged around a bit and watched the 1940 version of the movie on Google. I didn’t hear that line, but the movie was certainly excellent and moving. The crux of it is that we all sort of zoom through our lives without taking time to even see the people that are closest to us, until it’s too late. And if I’m not mistaken, the ending of the movie was different from that of the play…? I don’t remember the play having a Hollywood happy ending.

After all that, it turned out that the line was not from Our Town after all, but from a poem by Robert Frost called The Death of the Hired Man, which I somehow remember reading in fifth grade–and not really understanding it–but that line certainly stuck with me all this time. It also turns out that I had it slightly wrong. The actual line is this:

And now that I’m in my mid-thirties, and gone through some pretty hard times, I feel like I understand and appreciate it.

Amazing how certain things you read can stick with you. I read the poem when I was just ten years old, but the line is so strong that it called out to my little brain and then waited for me to come around and discover it again. Re-reading Catcher in the Rye has been a bit like that too. Even though I read it as an adult (albeit barely; I think I was eighteen), and I should have been able to relate to it completely, I hadn’t really started to live yet, so it was just as remote as reading Isaac Asimov or something. Now I actually find myself relating to the confusion, the humor, and even the darkness that seems to jump out from every page.

Makes me want to go back and re-read every book I thought I’d read before.

Yesterday at work I felt achy and weird all day. Didn’t feel sick as much as exhausted and spacy. Walked home and decided that a bath was the best idea ever. Someone in my building must have been doing laundry at the same time or something, because the water never really got more than lukewarm. I had already ‘committed’ to the idea of a bath, though, so I took one anyway. When I got out I started shivering like crazy, so I bundled up and went to bed at 6:00 p.m., and I stayed there until about ten minutes ago. It’s now 11:30ish the next morning. The moral of the story is, IF YOU”RE SICK, STAY HOME FROM WORK. This guy I work with has had a fever for the last two weeks, and he refuses to stay home. Thanks, a-hole. Thanks for passing your Ebola on to the rest of us.

I’m supposed to go see Ben Lee tonight with my friend Shelby. Hope I feel up to it. I sure don’t want to miss the show, though. Guess I’ll stay in bed all day and see how I feel when the time comes. I’m feeling much better after spending the last seventeen and a half hours in bed. I’m also hungry, which is a good sign.

I have lots of things I’ve been wanting to write about lately, but they’re pretty huge stories–at least as far as blog entries are concerned–and I haven’t had a chance to whittle them all down into coherent and concise entries. The subjects include:

They’re all fairly interesting (hopefully), and all at least tangentially related. But instead I’m sitting here writing the substitute for all of them, entitled Dang It All, I’m Sick Again.

Thpffft.

What a weekend.

Friday night I had rehearsal with Breanna and the band. BassPlayerChris was really sick, so he left kinda early, but I stayed around for a while to play through songs with Breanna and NewBandMemberJon. It was 11:30 p.m. by the time we finished. As I was loading my instruments into the back of my car, the hatch started to fall, and the corner of it hit me in the side of the head. Not a fun night. I went home and laid down on the sofa with a bag of frozen peas pressed to my temple.

Saturday J and I went out and about during the day, but we were both exhausted and groggy for some reason, so naps were in order. I laid down at 5:30ish, got up once or twice for a little while, but then went back down until 10:30, got up and dinked around on the computer for an hour or so, then went to bed for real and slept in until 10:30 the next day.

Yesterday, I sorta teased J about something I didn’t realize she was sensitive about, so I inadvertently hurt her feelings. Last night we e-mailed back and forth, trying to work it out, but as of this moment it’s still hanging there in the air between us. I’m sure we’ll be fine; we have a great track record of working things out.

There are a couple of other things happening that I’m not going to write about here, but they’ve been bouncing around in my head for the last few days too.

This morning, waking up was brutally hard after being up so late the night before. I didn’t even have time to take a shower, and I still dragged into work ten minutes late. Went to the deli downstairs to get an egg-and-cheese croissant, but it tasted stale and chewy. I ate about two-thirds of it and threw the rest in the garbage, then went to get some apple cider to wash the taste out of my mouth. Apparently my workplace has ‘secretly replaced their usual brand’ of apple cider with a crappy-tasting impostor.

I’m home for lunch now, hoping that the rest of this week improves really quickly.

Tonight is the performers-and-volunteers party for the Voices For Silent Disasters show that starts this weekend. It’s in a nice venue downtown, where we can all meet each other, catch up with friends, and also find out more about the cause and the events. So that should be fun.

In other news, I finally got a toy piano. I’ve been looking for one for years.

As soon as I finished that last entry, I grabbed my bass, jumped in my car, and headed to Sarah Castro’s for rehearsal. Or so I thought.

You see, she lives just off Capitol Highway in Beaverton. For some reason, though, I had it in my head that I needed to go to SUNSET Highway instead. These are very different freeways, in completely opposite parts of town. I was through the tunnel and heading up the hill on the Sunset Highway when I realized, ‘Shit. What am I doing?’ It never really got any better after that.

I instantly thought, ‘Okay, I’ll just turn around at the next exit and come back up the Sunset Highway’ but there must have been a wreck or something in the tunnel, because traffic was at a dead stop for a couple of miles. I decided to go the only other way I knew, which was to take Highway 217 clear around Beaverton and meet up with I-5, where I could come back north and hit Capitol Highway from there. Wrong again.

Turns out that I-5 North doesn’t have an exit for Capitol Highway. Not only that, but that area of town is very confusing, so if you’re not very familiar with the area, it’s hard to tell which exit will get you where you need to go until you get downtown, by which time you’re in the thick of ugly traffic and construction. But I looked over in the direction of I-5 South anyway, only to find that there was an ambulance, a police car, and another two-mile, dead-stop traffic jam.

At that point I called Sarah. “I don’t think I’m gonna make it, unfortunately.” I told her about my 45-minute circle of the metropolitan area, to which she responded, “That’s okay; it happens. No biggie.” I apologized and told her I’d see her for sure on Sunday.

On the way back up I-5 toward my exit, the city lights were particularly bright, and the Willamette River particularly calm, so the lights of downtown were reflecting beautifully. I always have my camera with me, so I thought I would pull over somewhere and take some pictures. The exit I took put me right near the Coliseum, which was fine, but then the road split and wouldn’t let me go straight where I needed to go straight in order to get to the park I had in mind. In fact, the road put me on the Steel Bridge headed over the river and toward downtown. I cursed under my breath and drove over the bridge.

Once I was in downtown, I went around the block and back over the bridge, only to find all the parking spaces full and a bunch of ne’er-do-wells milling around underneath the overpass. I decided to give it a miss.

So the best-laid schemes of mice and men went awry on this sorry excuse for an eve, and I have neither rehearsal nor pictures to show for my fruitless travels.

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e’e.
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

Or something like that.

Yeah, that last one was funny and everything, but now it’s time for a more ‘real’ entry.

I’ve been feeling a little strange all week; a little bit lonely, a little bit sad, and a little bit exhausted from work. I’ve even thought about writing to Kelly again lately, but I still don’t think that’s a good thing for me to do, so I’ve resisted that impulse.

In a way, I’ve been so busy these last few weeks that it sort of kept me from feeling the loss of that relationship, but now that my schedule has eased up a bit, I’ve had more time to feel it, and I’m not gonna lie; it’s been hard lately. Luckily, I have friends I can call to talk about it with, and who understand. But there are still some quiet times when I find myself missing her.

Tonight I went to another play reading with Todd Sabel and his theater group. The play they read was called “Dirty Water”, and I took my accordion and provided improvised background music and sound effects (WATER sound effects, no less. Who knew?). The play was written a couple of years ago by a local playwright named Devon Granmo for his college thesis. Hilarious and strange play, and even though it’s been performed before, it seems like it might actually be a work in progress. The playwright was there at the reading with us, which was really interesting. He stopped the group once or twice during the reading to say, “Oops. . .I forgot to change this part. Start HERE and then go BACK and start at this OTHER section.” He also asked for feedback from the group afterwards. If some pictures float up to the surface–and I have a feeling they will–I’ll be sure to post them here.

Oh yeah. . .there was something else interesting that happened at the reading. There was a woman there who wasn’t at the last reading I was at, who apparently plays the cello. When Todd introduced us, she asked how I found out about the theater group, and I told her Todd invited me to come play at one of them a month ago, and that I played cello the last time. She said, “You play cello? How would you feel about playing with twelve other cellists?” “You mean the Portland Cello Project?” I asked. “I’d LOVE to. I’m friends with Skip and a couple other people, and I’d love to come play.” “Well, they’re looking for new members; you should come down.” “Count me in, DEFINITELY.” The Portland Cello Project, if you haven’t seen them before, is an amazing group. I’ve been wanting to go and play with them for almost a year now, but so far I’ve been too busy with the bands I’m already in. Now that it’s fall and I have a little more free time, I’m going to take that opportunity, for sure. Groups like PCP are the reason I started playing cello in the first place.

The rest of the week has been pretty uneventful, quite frankly. I’ve spent much more time than usual at home, cleaning my apartment (which was long overdue) and trying to relax and deal with the hundreds of different feelings I’ve been feeling lately.

The moral of the story is that I think I could use another hug.