beautiful, funny, sad & true

I cooked chicken last night, and beef a few nights ago.

That may not seem like big news, per se, but I was vegetarian for a long time, and some habits die hard, or are difficult to explain to other people.  I made the switch around fifteen years ago, after listening to a radio interview with Howard Lyman, a former rancher who had become an advocate against the egregious practices performed by the meat industry, and who eventually chose the ultimate middle-finger salute to the industry by becoming a vociferous vegetarian.  I found that compelling, as well as poetically hilarious, and decided to follow suit.

I gave up meat for probably seven or eight years, until I started spending lots of time with a woman (it always seems to come down to that, doesn’t it?) who was mostly vegetarian, but would occasionally eat teriyaki chicken or something, which always smelled amazing and renewed cravings that I’d forgotten or buried.  That choice worked for me.  Eating meat every once in a while could be okay, and was probably good for my body, too.  I started to incorporate meat back into my diet again, slowly.  I would sometimes order a burrito with chicken on it, or get curried chicken at a Thai restaurant, maybe one or two meals a week.  Maybe once or twice a year, I’d have a burger.  And not a veggie burger, either, but a BURGER burger.  I didn’t have to tell myself I couldn’t have any of that stuff—nothing makes you want something more than when you tell yourself you can’t have it—I just didn’t want it, and it took a while to develop a taste for it again.S

One of the interesting things about making the switch to a vegetarian diet and then back to an omnivorous one is that there are still habits that I find myself clinging to that are hard to explain, or simply don’t make any sense.  I have a hard time watching someone pull a turkey leg off and eat it, for example.  It kind of grosses me out to watch the tendons pull and everything.  For a long time, I wouldn’t cook meat in my kitchen, I would only order it when I was eating in a restaurant.  I have a couple of formerly vegetarian friends who are the same way, so I don’t feel like a freak, at least not in that respect. Ha ha.

My family members were kind of mystified by all of these changes.  It took years for them to understand my decision to become vegetarian, and once they finally got it, I gave them The Old Switcheroo and started eating meat again.   Many of my friends and family members are excellent cooks (a few are even at the professional level), and I would always try whatever they made, which led to some confusion on their part.  “Hey,” I heard more than once, “I thought you were a vegetarian, but you just ate pulled pork.”  “That’s right,” I would smile mischievously and say, “because you spent a whole day laboring over it and barbecuing it to perfection, and I’m sure it’s the most amazing pulled pork I’ll have in my whole life.  I’m not gonna miss out on that.”

These days, I pretty much eat everything—albeit in moderation—though I do try to get organic, free-range, naturally fed meat instead of chickens who’ve been crammed into tiny cages and force-fed ground chicken beaks and eyes and stuff.  It’s easy to make choices like that living in Portland, since the quality of restaurants here is famously high, and demand creates a good supply.  I’m sure if I lived in pretty much any part of the rest of the country, it would be much more difficult—not to mention expensive—to eat this way.  I should mention that this kind of thing is what the rest of the country finds quaint (if they’re being kind; ‘precious’, if they’re not) about Portland.  There’s a famous scene in the TV show “Portlandia” that takes concern for the welfare of animals (while still ultimately choosing to eat them, it should be noted) to new and funny heights.

I told you all that to tell you that I set a new standard this week, by cooking beef AND chicken in my kitchen.  It felt very strange and funny to be shopping in the meat section again.  As I was preparing dinner (stir-fried beef, green peppers, and green onions over Japanese noodles) I wrote on Twitter, “For the first time in years, I just stir-fried actual beef, in my actual home, to be actually eaten by the actual me.”  For the record, it was delicious.  What I had forgotten, however, is the extraordinary length of time that the smell of beef lingers in the places where it’s been cooked.  I went out the next day to run some errands, and when I got home, the bovine smell was still pretty overwhelming, and it stuck around until yesterday, which was three days after I cooked that meal.  I don’t imagine I’ll be doing that very often.

So there you have it.  I pretty much eat everything, and now I even cook it at home sometimes, too.  But I do still have some quirks to deal with.  Actually, I have rather a lot of quirks, but you’ll have to wait until some not-so-distant point in the future in order to read about them.

These last few weeks sure have gotten away from me, at least as far as writing is concerned.   My time has been consumed with about a million different rehearsals with different groups, to prepare for the shows that are starting to happen now.  I also had a few out-of-town gigs (in addition to local ones) and an exciting recording and mixing project in the works, which hasn’t left much in the way of spare time.

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.

So.

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.

2010 has been very strange.  At the beginning of the year, I was still on blogging hiatus, so it took a while to get back up to speed.  Springtime was crazy, with lots of great musical endeavors and memorable trips.  By the summer, both my life and this blog went into overdrive, when I really started writing again, and found my full stride while sharing a bit too much about my childhood.  Suddenly it was October, which is the month of my birth, but this year was also the month of my stepdad’s death, which has sent everything into a tailspin since then.  A surreal trip to Yakima for the funeral was followed by multiple trips to Seattle, both for gigs and for family functions.

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

d̩ja vu Рwhat 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!

Wow, I just realized that it’s been weeks since I’ve written anything.  It’s been a crazy month, full of trips to Seattle, and gigs, and recording, plus a healthy dose of holiday cheer (um. . .yeah) in addition to all the usual Everyday Life stuff, which hasn’t left me feeling very compelled to write lately.  I’m essentially doing you a favor, by sparing you the minutiae of all of that.

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?”