Who’s THIS guy?
Oh wait. . .that’s me, in Yakima, when I was either 21 or 22.
YIKES. Those glasses are huge, and Mullet Number One is clearly visible as well.
Yes, I was screwing around for the camera; that goofy smile is a dead giveaway. I hated having my picture taken at the time.
What a weekend.
The show on Friday night was pretty stellar. It was fun to play with BassPlayerDamian (Stephanie’s previous bass player) and DrummerNed (from Dirty Martini) again. We’ve all played together separately many times, but never all together. Breanna sang backup with us, and Paul Brainard played pedal steel (that twangy-sounding instrument that’s usually associated with country music) and trumpet like a champion. “Enough of Empty” went in a completely different and cool direction with the addition of a trumpet solo. This show was also the debut of my new red Hofner guitar. It sounded great, and I can’t wait to see what it looks like in a picture. After we were done, we pretty much stayed backstage in the green room the entire time, talking and relaxing (Incidentally, ‘relaxing’ may be spelled r-e-l-a-x-i-n-g, but in this case it’s pronounced ‘drinking wine’. We had plenty, and not much food to soak it up. Ohmygawd.) We missed the second band, but we came out and sat up front for the third band, Richmond Fontaine. They were excellent, as usual.
Saturday night was the full-band show with Breanna. It was good, but we haven’t been playing as an electric band for a while, so it never quite felt like we really gelled. We never sounded bad or anything–in fact I’d say we sounded pretty dang good–but it just never quite felt as good as it usually does, which is fine. If you’ve spent any kind of time reading this blog, you’ll know that some gigs are just better than others. Ain’t no thang.
Yesterday afternoon was a recording session for a new song of Breanna’s. I got there really early, brought in my cello and accordion, and then, since it would be a while before I was needed, I ended up going for an hour-long walk around the neighborhood because it was so beautiful outside. When I got home, I had a message on MySpace from a girl I went on a couple of dates with a year and a half ago. “I saw you! Walking on 22nd, talking on your cell phone.” It was very funny, in a small-world kind of way.
I think that the Dread Pirate Exhaustion may have been setting in, though, because with the exception of the show on Friday night, I never really felt ‘present’ for the rest of the weekend. I felt like I was going through the motions, even during the recording session.
By all standards, this should have been a two-thumbs-up weekend, but realistically, I think I’m only gonna be able to give it a thumb and a half, because I felt so exhausted and weird for so much of it.
I don’t have any kind of substantial basis for feeling this way, but I feel like this is going to be a good week.
This morning at work, I said good morning to someone I rarely see or get a chance to talk to, while I was loading paper into my printer. “Busy weekend?” she asked.
“Yeah. I have two big shows, actually.”
“Oh really? What do you. . .do?”
“Musician.”
“That’s a nice little hobby, huh?”
Nice little hobby, yeah. Thanks for reducing it to that.
I had a job a few years ago that I quit from because it almost killed me. I’m not exaggerating. It did kill my spirit; at least for a while. This was also just at the the time when I was getting into recording and music production. So I quit, and two weeks later, on the day that I left, a guy walked up to me and said, “Well. . .good luck with your career or whatever.” The funny thing is, he actually thought that he meant well.
For everyone else who’s reading this, I have two shows and a recording session this weekend. The first is with Stephanie’s band, as part of the Voices For Silent Disasters series that starts tonight. Tomorrow night is a Breanna Paletta full-band show, and then Sunday is an ‘acoustic’ recording session with Breanna. Last I heard I’ll be playing cello, and maybe accordion and xylophone; things like that.
Nice little hobby I’ve got going for myself. Hope it all works out or whatever.
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.
Yesterday I was still feeling the effects of the cold or whatever that I had on the weekend, and my head still felt all spacy, so I called in sick to work and went back to sleep for a few more hours. When I awoke, the weather was so warm and beautiful that I decided that I needed to get out of the house, no matter what. Saturday had been really rainy and beautiful, so I’d stayed in bed most of the day and started reading “Catcher in the Rye.” I threw the book in my bag, went and ate miso soup and a little bit of sushi at Sushiland, then drove to Mt. Tabor to read for a while.
Maija came and met me up there after her yoga class was over, and we sat and talked and walked and talked and swang (swung? swinged?) and talked and then got hungry, so we went to Thanh Thao. It was too stuffy in there, and we still wanted to enjoy the day outside, so we drove over to Laurelhurst Park and talked while we ate by the duck pond. By this time, the sun was starting to go down, so when a particularly ‘glowy’ tree caught our eyes, we went over and took about a million pictures of it. Most of mine were terrible, but here are a couple of okay ones of the tree, and also one of a good-sized spider we saw when we first entered the park.
When the sun went down, it started to get a little chilly, and after three days cooped up in my apartment, I started to feel a little bit run down after all that walking. So we said good night and headed home.
I got home just in time for a phone call from Joan, who was on her way over to bring back the “Jesus Camp” DVD. We ended up watching the whole thing, with the director’s commentary turned on. What a great movie. Joan comes from a conservative Christian family–in Kansas, no less!–so it hit especially close to home for her.
After it was over, Joan went home, while I folded my laundry and started to settle in for the night, when I got a phone call from my friend Madeleine up in Seattle. We talked about relationships and our generation and commitment (or lack thereof) that we’ve experienced in our own lives and our friends’ lives. It was fantastic, and completely invigorating. It was also 11:45 at night by then, so I started to fade out. As soon as I hung up the phone, I saw that there was a text message from Joan saying, “Still up?” so I called her back and we ended up talking for over an hour.
What a long and amazing day it was. Here’s to many more like that.
