beautiful, funny, sad & true

Given the title of this entry, you might think that paranormal forces have been making their presence known to me, but unfortunately that’s not the case.  Sorry for my busy-ness and un-bloggishness lately.  Between DoctorLove being in town and Mom ‘n’ Stepdad staying with me, I’ve had precious little time for anything writing-related.  Suffice it to say that the weekend went well in every respect.

DoctorLove and I met on Thursday and walked around all the little shops on Hawthorne, talking and looking for gifts for her family and for her guy, after which we came back here for dinner.  J came over as well, and I cooked dinner for the three of us. . .tomato and avocado salad, with a main course of those mushrooms cooked in garlic and red wine that are absolutely to die for.  And some good bread on the side.  Nice.  We talked and laughed and caught up.

Mom ‘n’ Stepdad were good.  As you know, my mom occasionally reads my blog, but the visit was really nice.  Once they were settled in, and getting ready for bed and everything, I grabbed my cello and drove over to the party in DoctorLove’s honor.  A handful of the partygoers were musicians, one of whom is an excellent flamenco guitarist, so we had fun playing tricky flamenco songs (tricky for me, anyway!) until a second acoustic guitarist arrived, and then we bashed our way through a bunch of old Metallica songs, which sounded hilarious and incredibly good simultaneously, particularly the song Welcome Home (Sanitarium).  Here are some pictures from the night.  If only there were recordings too.  Le Sigh.

A good time was had by all, and I didn’t go home until around 1:30 a.m.

The next day was spent in pretty much constant motion, from making breakfast, to driving my parents around, to shopping at multiple places, to cleaning up and fixing some broken or leaky or clogged things in my apartment (extra super ultra-mega-thanks to them for that!). . .it was just completely exhausting.  I think I went to bed at 9:30 or something ridiculous like that.

Sunday came bright and early, and my mom had some specific presents she wanted to buy, so we headed to Hawthorne (my second time in three days) and got what we needed.  Came back, ate lunch, and then they hit the road.  I collapsed on my bed for a while, and was supposed to meet RockShowGirl, but I was beat and she was sick, so we talked on the phone instead, and planned to have dinner the next day, which, incidentally, we did.  That was yesterday.

Tonight Breanna and I are starting the recording process for her second CD.  This is very exciting, because I’m actually producing this one, instead of just playing on it like I did on her first one.

I need to get back to work now, but I did want to let you know that I’m alive, and well.  Just super busy, that’s all.  I know, I know. . .the thing about having one’s own blog is that one needs to write in it more than once every five days.  Heh.  Thanks for sticking around.

OneYearAgo

I took today off from work to hang out with CincinnatiFriend, who’s in town this week to defend her dissertation.  As of yesterday, though, I realized that I’m going to have to change her pseudonym to DoctorLove now (her last name means ‘love’ in German), cause she done dissertated that shit, and now she’s all up on her way to officially becoming a doctor.   Frealz, yo.  Much love to DoctorLove!

But in typical BFS&T fashion, that’s not the real story I originally wanted to write about.

The real story is that while I was lying in bed this morning, I sent out a quick message on Twitter saying something to the effect of, ‘Sure is nice to lie in bed and listen to the rain.  I could do that all day.’  My phone rang instantly.  It was barrington, calling to say, “Oh, man, you’re so lucky you get to still be in bed.  I had to get up, get in the car, drive around everywhere, get out of the car, come in to work. . .all in the pouring rain.”

I laughed.  “I love how you listed ‘get in the car’ and ‘get out of the car’ as two different things you had to do today.”  I started to mimic him, gesturing each item in the air with my hand, which he couldn’t see over the phone.  “I had to GET IN the car, I had to START it, I had to put it in GEAR, I had to STEER it, I had to push the ACCELERATOR.  Oh yeah, AND push the BRAKE pedal. . .”

He laughed and continued the riffing.  “Yeah, it was ALL in the RAIN.  I had to turn the WINDSHIELD WIPERS ON. . .”

“Daaaaaang, no way!  Did you have to turn the DEFOGGER on, too?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, man, YOU have a rough life.  At least you don’t have a STICK SHIFT like I do.  I’m gonna have to do that when I go out today, and push in the CLUTCH a million times.  Ugh.”

Ahhh; just another day in the life of two Portlanders.

So now I’m up, and eating BREAKFAST, and doing LAUNDRY, and taking a SHOWER, and then heading OUT to pick up DoctorLOVE, and it should be a REALLY GREAT DAY, despite the fact that I’ll have to push in the CLUTCH and SHIFT GEARS a whole bunch of times.

Incidentally, I have TWO sets of windshield wipers (front and rear!) that I’ll have to turn on, while I’m doing the clutch and the gearshift.  Think about THAT.

First of all, you’ll be glad to know that there’s good news on the car front.  I’ll spare you some of the details, but it boils down to the fact that since the distributor fixed the problem, that means that the timing belt is okay, and that I don’t have to do Part Two of the repair Plan.  Yee haw.  I’m still broke, though, for the time being, but at least I’ll only be broke for a month, instead of clear into the new year.

So that’s good, I guess.

Had a couple of odd experiences at shows this past weekend.  At the Breanna and Justin show, we had our first heckler, of sorts.  He was drunkenly walking from table to table and chatting up the all of the ladies, whether they were with their respective guys or not.  Naturally, this included Breanna as well, which already had him on Justin’s radar screen.  In the middle of our second set, Justin started to play one of his songs, which apparently has a similar chord progression to a classic rock song, because the guy started laughing and singing the classic rock song really loudly.  Justin stopped playing and said, “Do you want to come up here and sing?”

“No, I just blahblah suck blahblah mumble mumble.”

“Y’know what?  I don’t like you very much.”

“I don’t like you either.”  This was a very awkward and tense moment.  No one, including us, had any idea what this guy was likely to do next.

Justin’s honesty and diplomacy kicked in.  “Here’s the thing.  As a musician, you spend your whole life learning how to play the guitar, how to sing, how to write songs.  Then you go and play them for people, and some people really like them.  And that’s great.  Some people don’t like them, and that’s cool too.  Not everybody has to like them.  But if you don’t like it, and you don’t want to be here, then you can go ahead and leave.”

The guy stood up and walked slowly to the front of the stage, looked at Justin angrily for a second, then turned and walked down the stairs and out of the room.  Everyone clapped for Justin, out of a sense of relief and a bit of amazement too, I think.

The rest of the show was stellar after that.  We felt energized and invigorated, and played our best.  Before that, we had some technical problems, and some sound problems, and it was an ‘off’ cello night for me, which I have occasionally.  I even have them sometimes when I play guitar, after all these years.  Incidentally, November 20th (that’s tomorrow) is the anniversary of the day that I got my very first guitar, clear back in 1985.  I’ll let you work out the math on that, and in the meantime, I’ll try to scrounge up a picture.

At the IrishBand show on Saturday, Singer and his girlfriend had an argument. That’s all I’ll say about it, partly because they seem to have worked things out, and partly because both of them are readers of this blog.  All seems to be forgiven, but it did make for an uncomfortable show, and a short one at that.

Singer called me first thing in the morning to ask me if I was still up for our musician friend’s birthday brunch, which I had to confess that I’d forgotten about.  I said yes, I’d love to go, and he and Violinist came and picked me up.  The party was a blast.  We had quiche, and bacon (Singer, a lifelong vegetarian, ate bacon for the first time!), and cheesy potatoes of some sort, and all kinds of muffins and bagels, and fruit, and chai, and the best Bloody Mary I’ve ever had in my entire life.  Violinist even stuck a piece of bacon in his, which looked repulsive, but. . .well, he seemed to enjoy it.  I wished that I had my camera with me, but at least I had my phone, so here’s a picture.

We left around 1:30 and came back to my place to do record some parts (djembe, vocals, and violin) for one of our songs.  Sounds really good so far, but it isn’t quite there yet, so we have some re-recording to do.

In other news, CincinnatiFriend is in town to defend her dissertation.  She’s actually doing that as I’m writing this, and I’m going to go and visit her after I’m done at work.  I’m super excited to see her again.  She moved a year and half ago, and I can’t believe it’s been that long.  I’m taking tomorrow off from work so that we can either go to all of her favorite haunts, or take a little day trip and catch up about everything.

Mom and Stepdad are coming to visit from Yakima on Friday, which should be fun.  They’ll be staying with me, for the first time since I’ve lived here in Portland.  This is the first time that I’ve had the right kind of living space (and the right kind of furniture) to make that possible and enjoyable for all of us.  Wish me luck.  We’re gonna do lots of cooking, and a bit of shopping, and J’s going to get to meet them.  Hopefully CincinnatiFriend and RockShowGirl will get to meet them too.

Should be a great week.  I’ll keep you posted.

As you may or may not already know, my car’s alternator has been dying a slow, pathetic death over the last two or three months.  Unfortunately, my financial situation over the same period of time has been particularly dire, so the car has pretty much been parked since then.  I’ve used it occasionally to drive to work, or to take myself and the cello to a gig, but other than that I’ve been walking a lot and taking the light-rail train, which is good for the planet, good for my health, and good for gas prices.  But that, as I like to say, is neither here nor there.

Yesterday was payday, and I had finally caught up on my bills enough to be able to take the car in.  J picked me up at work and drove me home to pick it up, but when we arrived and I tried to start it, it was too far gone.  The engine light came on, but the battery was too discharged to start the car.  Curses.  So I called a tow truck, got a jump-start (guess what’s on my Christmas list this year!), and drove to the repair shop named after MythicalKingWithGoldenTouch.  I explained the situation and the symptoms, and they said they’d call once they had the diagnosis.

About an hour later, one of the guys called to tell me that he was unable to start the car, and he asked me how I’d gotten it there.  I told him about the jump-start, but that I’d driven it over normally, and that it started like it always does.  He said he’d keep trying.

Another hour passed, and I got a second phone call to tell me that he was still unable to start the car, and that now he’d have to start checking things out, which would cost an hour of labor of shop time.  “Sure,” I said, “do what you need to do.”

By this time I’m on pins and needles, wondering about my poor little car.  The third phone call came about two hours later.  “I need to show you what’s going on, and I should show you in person.  Can you come down and take a look?”  That sounded ominous, but I couldn’t make it until after work, so I told him to give me the abridged version.  “Your distributor looks like it’s falling apart, and you seem to have an oil leak inside, where the spark plugs are.  Also, I’m worried about your timing belt, which might have slipped.”  Crrrrrrrap.  “So now we’re in a situation called ‘open ticket’, where we have to replace things as we go.  I wanted to show you what’s happening before I started all that.”

Ouch.

These things are all completely unrelated to the problem that I brought the car in for, by the way.  It’s as if it somehow knew where it was, and threw itself on the mercy of the mechanic, saying, “Pleeeeease fix me.  I need you so very badly.”

So I went over after work, and talked to the mechanic, who showed me what was happening, and we worked out a two-part plan.  Part One involves replacing the distributor, alternator, valve cover gasket and spark plugs, and changing the oil.  This comes to over nine hundred dollars.  Part Two involves replacing the timing belt and water pump, and checking out that area of the engine to make sure everything’s the way it should be.  That will be next month, and will cost another five hundred dollars.

Ouch.

The good news is that by Christmas, I’ll have a car that runs like a champ for a long time to come, despite my having survived an almost total cashectomy in the process.

Ouch. This month is gonna hurt.

The other night I was supposed to get together with J, but she had a change of plans, so I scrounged around a bit to see what was happening in town. I called RockShowGirl to tell her about the movie Man on Wire, and how amazing it looked.  She was too exhausted to go out, having spent the last few hours running around town and then cleaning her apartment, so I went from being double-booked to being zero-booked.  The time was 7:22, and the movie started at 7:30.  ‘I can still make it to the movie,’ I thought.  ‘I don’t care if anybody else is free, I’m going.’  I grabbed my sweatshirt and my phone, jumped into the car that I’d borrowed from my neighbor for the evening, and raced over to the movie theater.  I can’t even begin to tell you how glad I am that I did.

The movie was amazing, and I recommend it to all of you.  It’s a documentary about the French guy who walked across a tightrope that he hung (secretly and illegally, I might add) between the towers of the World Trade Center.  There have been many pictures taken of that famous act, but this documentary was based on Phillipe Petit’s book.  The story and the individual characters were all fascinating and intriguing.  It’s really one of the better documentaries I’ve seen in a long time, and I watch a lot of them.  Here’s a trailer:

Incidentally, another of my recent favorite documentaries is Helvetica.  Yes, it’s about the font.  No, it’s not the least bit boring.  It’s about art and design and culture and the ways that they are perceived over time.  Go rent it.  I promise you’ll enjoy it.  But don’t take my word for it; Helvetica is sexy.

And since we’re on the subject of documentaries, I just rented and received Theremin; an Electronic Odyssey.  A friend of mine wrote a play about Leon Theremin, and it inspired me to find out more about the supremely interesting inventor.  His most famous invention is the instrument which bears his name:

You play the theremin by holding each of your hands nearer or farther from each of the corresponding wires to control the volume with your left hand and the pitch with your right.  When you touch the lower loop, the volume drops out completely, and when you bring your hand closer to the vertical wire, the higher the pitch rises.  It looks odd, and it’s very tricky to play.  You’d recognize the sound from about a million science fiction movies and quite a few staggeringly popular songs, including the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and the theme from the original series of “Star Trek.”  The most famous person associated with playing the theremin is Clara Rockmore, who was a student and protegé of Leon Theremin himself.  She was the first to play ’serious’ music on a theremin, with astounding results.  Here she is playing her most widely-acclaimed piece, “The Swan” by Camille Saint-Saëns.

She’s so brilliant.  I could watch that all day.

Well, you now have your homework, and you know what to do, and now I have a favor to ask of you in return.  What are some of your favorite documentaries that you’d like to recommend to me?  Please leave a comment and let me know.