beautiful, funny, sad & true

Been way too busy this week to write much. It’s not for lack of subject matter, simply for lack of time being free to compose. But here’s the latest.

Out of town last weekend, three gigs this week (tonight is the third), found a perfect suit, going to Yakima for a wedding this weekend.

Last night’s show was SO much fun, and my favorite group of the night was one that was absolutely jaw-dropping, and that requires me to share them with you, and to write about them at more length. But that won’t be today, unfortunately.

I’ll write more and fill you in when I get back.

OneYearAgo

At some point yesterday, the conversation turned to Dumb or Funny Things We Said When We Were Kids.

You know, the old standards like, ‘I know you are, but what am I?’ or ‘Same to YOU but more OF it.’ And who could forget the time-honored older brother classic, ‘Why are you always hitting yourself?’ As an older brother myself, I have to say that no one tells you about that one. It’s not as if there’s a group of Freemasons who roam the streets looking for young boys, and when they find you, they pull you aside and whisper the joke to you. Nope, it just pops into your head one day–as if by divine intervention–and you realize that you alone have just created the newest, funniest joke in the history of jokes. You’re not hitting him, he’s actually doing it to himself. You’re just trying to figure out why, and ‘glean what afflicts him’, as Tom Stoppard would say.

‘I’m rubber and you’re glue; bounces off me and sticks to you’ was another great one, and then later in the evening, as I was thinking about this conversation, I remembered a childrens’ song that seems to be sung slightly differently in different regions of the country. You’ll know it, so I’m not even going to name it, but I’m interested to know if you know a different version of it.

Growing up in Yakima, Washington, we all used to sing it this way:

Great green globs of greasy, grimy gopher guts

Mutilated monkey meat

Chopped-up baby parakeet

Lukewarm vomit floatin’ down the street

And me without my spoon (but I’ve got a straw!)

I’ve heard it a bunch of different ways, but as I’m writing this, I can’t remember any of the variations. Maybe you can help me remember some?

Then, of course, there was the infamous F.A.G./M.A.G. scenario, which I’ve already written about. I half-expect that one to turn up in a movie.

When you’re a teenager, all bets are off. You never know WHAT is going to come flying out of your mouth at any given time. My favorite example (and I use the word ‘favorite’ loosely) is when I came home one day to find my brother and his friend were playing a video game; I believe it was Baseball on the Sega Genesis. The score was some ridiculously high number to nothing, and to the person who was losing, I laughed and said, “Man, you’re getting your butt fuckin’ slaughtered.” Both my brother and his friend burst out laughing. They still remember that vividly, by the way, and they like to remind me about it to this day, all these twenty-some years later.

How the heck did I end up telling that?

Well, I guess if you liked that one, then you’ll be glad to know that there are plenty more like it. If you didn’t. . .well. . .there are still plenty more like it.

And I really would like to know if you can remember some other variation of Gopher Guts, and if you remember some of those other dumb phrases that we all thought were so brilliant back in the day.

Oh yeah. . .and here’s one more category I ask you to also be thinking about; Changed Acronyms. For example, when my brother and I would see commercials for TCBY–which stood for “The Country’s Best Yogurt” or something equally innocuous–we’d say, “Too Crusty Butt Yogurt,” and laugh like hyenas. And not just once, either, but multiple times.

So yeah. . .just be thinking about those things, if you would, please. Thank you.

And now I’m going to change my laundry loads, take a nap, and then play the cello for a while, to warm up a bit before the show tonight.

This morning, I had a short–but interesting–dream. I always set my clock for 6:45 (too early) every day, and then hit the snooze button three or four times, until it’s 7:20 or so (too late). During one of those snooze sessions is when this dream happened.

* * * * * * *

I’m in my room at my childhood home on 55th Avenue in Yakima. It’s the middle of the night, and I’m in bed. The curtains are open, and the moon is shining brightly into the room. It’s bright enough that I actually think, ‘I bet I could probably read in bed if I wanted to.’ I reach for a book on my bedside table, when suddenly I see a bright orange flash coming from the end of the street. One of the houses at the Summitview end [that’s a street in Yakima] of the street has just exploded into a thirty-foot wall of fire.

A fire truck races by with all its lights flashing, but the engine is silent. I get up and walk to the window to look, when suddenly about eight or ten pieces of flaming debris start to land in our yard, and on our house. The house up the street explodes a second time, with an even larger wall of fire. I run to wake up my mom and my brother, and then I see that in our front yard, there are lots of small fires burning.

I pull on a pair of jeans and quickly try to decide which of my instruments to take out to my car. I decide on the cello, the accordion and my ancient white Guild electric guitar. Interesting that the instruments were all the ones that I have now, and that the car was the red Honda that I have now.

* * * * *

That’s the point at which I woke up, one minute before the next snooze alarm went off.

Also interesting that today is the day I’m going to visit my dad. Hunh. I’m sure that fact and this dream don’t have the merest possibility of a hint at a suggestion of a connection.

Maybe it’s not that at all. Maybe I’m like the main character in the book The Lathe of Heaven, whose dreams change the real world–and he’s the only one who remembers the way things were before he dreamed the changes–and that maybe I’m nocturnally bound and determined to destroy Yakima once and for all, via my dreams.

I’ve been feeling really good lately.

Lots of good musical things happening, including two amazing recording projects and one play production in which I’ll be playing the accordion at least, but probably some other things as well. It promises to be a great time.

Been laying low these last few days, to recuperate from the busy and exhausting weekend. I’ve also been planning the next installment of the 80’s hard rock blog thingy I’m working on, for fun.

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone this week, too. Lots of planning, and talking, and re-connecting, for some reason. It always seems to happen at the same time.

I had a funny thing happen a couple of days ago, which reminded me of something funny that happened twenty years ago. Someone on my street owns a really nice old Mustang. I’m not much of a muscle car guy–I’m more of a ’60’s and ’70’s European guy (the BMW 2002 is my favorite car)–but I always appreciate a nice car that someone has loved and restored.

So. I parked behind this particular Mustang the other night when I got home late, and the street was unusually full of cars. Blame it on my sleepiness from the Daylight Savings Time adjustment, blame it on whatever you want, but when I went to go to work in the morning, I found out the hard way that I had left my car in first instead of in reverse, like I usually do. So I went forward when I expected to go backward, and I sorta almost hit the Mustang. I DIDN’T, but I’m just saying it was close.

That reminded me of a time back in 1989 when my friend Blaine and I were going to a school to do some location scouting for one of our band’s videos. He parked his little white Honda behind a really nice, flashy, purple muscle car. We walked across the street from a grade school, and Blaine noticed that he was parked too far away from the curb or something–I don’t remember the details–but for some reason I ended up going back to move his car. Since the road was at a slight incline, I opened the door, leaned in, released the parking brake, and reached my leg in to engage the clutch, so that the car would roll forward slightly. I did it more by feel than by sight, because most stick-shift cars are the same, but after the car had rolled a few feet, I really should have looked instead of relying on my angle-guessing, because I kept pushing on the clutch pedal instead of the brake pedal. This meant that Blaine’s Honda rolled about ten feet and then banged into the back of the pristine muscle car.

It took about one second for the car’s owner to come storming out of his house. He ran out the front door, across the lawn, and right over to the open driver’s side window and pointed at his car, yelling, “Hey! That’s the ’85 Hot Rod champion!!” There wasn’t any damage to Blaine’s Honda, and the only damage to the ’85 Hot Rod Champion was a tiny little crack in one of its two-inch round tail light covers, luckily. No real harm done, so I just apologized profusely, and told him how beautiful we both thought his car was, and the guy let us go on our merry way.

Oh, and a few years ago, when I had my little green Toyota truck, I rear-ended a Camaro when the driver stopped too suddenly–in in the middle of the block!–near the Lloyd Center mall to let some girls cross the street in front of him. Nice. The crash put a little scratch on his bumper, but really smashed up the front of my truck.

Apparently I have more of a problem with muscle cars than I realized; it seems that my subconscious is out to single-handedly destroy them all.

I’m with BoringFish, and she and I and her long-haired black cat have been traveling from somewhere in eastern Washington state. We drive through Yakima to see my mom and stepdad, but when we arrive at their house, no one’s home.

We walk around to the back yard, and let ourselves into the house through the sliding glass door. I sit on the sofa and play with her cat, while she goes and looks around the rest of the house.

Finally, everyone arrives, and by everyone, I mean everyone. My mom and stepdad, my brother and his wife, and even my dad and stepmom. They all come home and it’s instant chaos. We’re supposed to eat dinner, even though it’s the middle of the afternoon. Everyone is frantically trying to bring in these giant pre-made plates of food. Everything on the plates is muted in color–an unappetizing shade of gray–and it all looks the same. Scrambled eggs, potato cakes, mysterious tuna/chicken/crab mush, and sausage, and everything is covered over in white biscuit gravy. Finally everyone gets their own plate, and we sit down to have dinner together. BoringFish isn’t there. She seems to have left the house for some reason. I call her name, but there’s no response. I ask at the table if anyone’s seen her, but they all are ignoring me, and wrapped up in conversation with each other. I’m the only one who seems to think that it’s weird that this combination of people is sitting here eating together as if it’s completely normal, and I’m also repulsed by the huge plate of weird, grayish food.

Everyone is talking, and devouring their dinner. I sorta pick at mine and ask, “What is this? Tuna? Chicken? Crab?” My dad says, a little too loudly, “It’s Ecktote.” [That’s not really what he said, but it was some sort of food substitute.] I push it around on my plate and take a bite of the eggs instead. Suddenly everyone else is getting up to leave. I ask what’s going on, and everyone answers in different ways at the same time. They’re going to a dinner party–another one!–and again, they’re all going together. I decline, saying that I didn’t know anything about it, and I’m not hungry anyway. My dad glares at me, and says, “Well, all right, but we’ll be back in a little while to go to the next event, and you’d better be ready to go.” Everyone leaves. It’s only been like five minutes since we all sat down; it’s very strange.

I stand there in the hallway, wondering what to make of all this. I walk through the rest of the house to look for BoringFish, but I don’t find her. When I walk into my old bedroom, it’s full of Christmas decorations, with puffy cotton on the ceiling to look like snow, with little white Christmas lights poking out every few inches. I think it’s odd that there’s snow on the ceiling. I also think it’s odd that there are two women in there, dressed in green, wrapping presents and making little trinkets. They’re talking animatedly to each other when I walk in, and my arrival just means that they include me in the non-stop flow of conversation. One of them grabs a can of sticky stuff that they’re using like glue, to wrap the presents. She holds it up to show me, and says, “I got it at Erthler’s.” Another nonsensical, generic name, but this time it’s a store. I kinda laugh and say, “What’s ‘Erthler’s’? I’m from Portland. We don’t have one there.” I walk back out of the room, and as I do, I hit the light switch out of habit.

I poke my head back in and say to the women, “Oops, sorry about that.” and hit the switch to turn the light back on. The Christmas lights start to flicker, and they won’t come back on. I flick the switch on and off, and wiggle it around, and they eventually come back on, so I leave.

Just then, everyone comes bursting in the door. Again, it’s only been a few minutes since they left, but my dad sees me and says, “Okay, are you ready to go?” “No,” I say. “I’m not going.” I’m still wearing the T-shirt, boxers and beanie hat that I’ve been wearing the whole time. He starts to yell at me, saying how he can’t believe that he bought me this ticket and that I’m wasting all this money, not to mention that this dinner is for charity and all the food’s going to go to waste. I say, “I didn’t even know about it until now, and I don’t feel too great. I’m not gonna go.”
He continues yelling, and my stepmom is there too, saying to him, “Well, maybe he didn’t get the message after all? We should hear his side of the story.” I gesture to her and say, exasperatedly, “Thank you. I promise you that this is the first I’ve heard of it.” My dad is silent. I notice that he’s shaved his beard and grown his mustache out long, into a scruffy handlebar style. He also has what I thought was a wart next to his nose, but after I look at it for a second, I see that it’s actually a small screw from some sort of surgery.

I say again that I’m not going, and my stepmom says, “Well, I guess we’ll pay for in calories what we paid for in money” or something weird like that, to fill the awkward silence. They go outside and drive away.

That’s when I woke up, not at all rested. Boy, I wonder what that dream means.

I’m late for work, dang it.