beautiful, funny, sad & true

Yesterday was my mom’s birthday, and I called her last night.  We talked for a while, and one of the things she mentioned is that she occasionally checks in on my blog to ‘see how things are going.’  My mom reads my blog, and she’s apparently been doing it for some time now.

Great.

With all those posts I’ve written about Satan and feces and third grade memories, not to mention all the copious amounts of premarital sex weird dreams and my judicious but regular smattering of naughty words, she probably thinks that her real baby son must have somehow been swapped in the hospital for this devil’s spawn.

But the most egregious thing of all (for her, anyway) has to be my non-stop trash-talking about Yakima, which is decidedly well-deserved, but she can’t stomach it.  I have a kinda funny story about that, actually, which involves my niece’s favorite TV show, which we all couldn’t help but watch with her while we were at the beach a few weeks ago.

It’s a national show, which you probably haven’t seen, let alone enjoyed, if you’re over the age of ten.  It’s about PrecociousTeenageGirl, and it’s set in Seattle, where Niece lives.  The grandparents on the show even live in Yakima, where one set of Niece’s grandparents live.  The hijinks ensued in one episode when it looked as if PTG was going to be sent to live with her grandparents.  She didn’t want to go, and she kept making all these lame jokes about Yakima and how bad it is (“oh, the sweet smell of Yakima”, et cetera).  I kept waiting for them to actually take her there, and have some scenes set in the town, which I’m sure they would have filmed in Salinas, California instead, anyway.  It has the exact same feel and look as Yakima, except for the fact that Salinas has the brilliant John Steinbeck rooting for it.  Raymond Carver and I are Yakima’s vox populi spokespeople, and we have nothing good to say about the place.

But that’s neither here nor there.

I found that episode surreal and hilarious.  No wonder it’s Niece’s favorite show; the writers practically frickin’ wrote it for her, and set it in the two places she knows best in the world.  I couldn’t stop cracking up at the irony of the situation, so between my incredulous laughter and the show’s cloying laugh track in response to every generic joke, my mom got angry and had to go upstairs to get away from it all.

I couldn’t tear myself away from the stupid show, and I actually watched the thing in its entirety. You’ll be glad to know that PTG did not, in fact, get sent to live in Yakima, because GenXGuardian (her older brother?) came through in the end to prove that despite his slacker appearance, he really was quite the responsible young gentleman when it came to raising her.  Awww.  Wipe my tears and cue the organist.

I suppose I don’t have a real reason to feel weird about my mom reading all this.  She knows (pretty much) what I’m like, this is all real stuff, and I feel like it’s a good representation of me, slightly-glossed-over warts and all.

But it still does feel weird.  I’m sure you understand.

I feel like I’m wasting my life.

No, I don’t mean that in a melancholy way; I’m not feeling bummed out.  In fact, it’s quite the opposite.  I’ve actually been feeling energized and inspired lately; inspired to change my life again.  I feel that I keep coming up against the same proverbial ceiling that I always come up against eventually, being the ‘side’ person in musical situations.  I need to be either the main writer or one of the main writers in a group.  I need to take more chances.  I need to step up my metaphorical game.  I need to have confidence in the marketability of my skills.  My skills get results, you know?  Someone’s making money off of them, and it ain’t me, and that’s unacceptable.

I need to talk to other people who are out there doing it as freelancers, as professionals, not the nay-sayers, or cautious people who are slaves to security.  Working a dead-end job that sucks up my valuable time is getting really old.  I’m watching my life get frittered away, and I’m the only one who can change that, shake it up, and set things right.  I’ve done it before, and I can do it again.

Luckily, I do have a few friends and acquaintances who are making it work, so I have people I can go to and discuss all of this.  Talking to the right people is crucial right now; talking to the wrong people can be poisonous.

Right now I have some things I need to do, and some business to attend to.  In a good way.

On Sunday afternoon, I participated in Project X, a sort of time capsule event created by a theater group called Hand2Mouth.  I found out about it when I went to see a play last weekend, and I’ve been looking forward to it ever since.

The event was divided up into multiple stations.  There was a main station called ‘ground control’, which was where the lion’s share of the event took place.  For brevity’s sake, I will describe it as a place where you listen to other peoples’ stories in headphones, create your own stories, create a timeline of your own life and of events in the broader scope of human history, and choose how you would like to be remembered by future generations.  There were ample opportunities to speak, write, draw, or add whatever you felt like adding to the project.  There were also opportunities to converse with other random people, and to record those conversations via satellite for posterity.

It was an amazing experience, but it’s also a fairly daunting one.  The event asks a lot of its participants, and you have to be prepared to interact in a pretty demanding way.  I wasn’t prepared for that, quite frankly.  I made it through three of the five stations, in an hour and a half.  The two remaining stations were ones that took a bit of time, so I waited numerous times to get in, but each time I found myself turned away because the stations were occupied.  At a certain point, I decided to give up.  I had been told by my friend to allow about three hours to participate, but since I’d been so busy in the previous few days, I was starting to shut down and become anxious, so I decided to give the last two stations a miss, unfortunately.  This exhibit/performance/time capsule/event will also be conducted in Seattle next weekend, at the Bumbershoot festival, and I think that will be a tremendous experience.  I have a feeling that if I had done it up there, I’d have been much more likely to participate in all of the events, but since it was here in town, I felt my real life responsibilities creeping back in.  What’s more, I felt myself falling instantly in love with one of the women in the group, so I suddenly lost the ability to speak or think in my usual eloquent way.

If you live in the Northwest and are considering seeing the show, I definitely recommend it.  Be prepared to be there for quite a while, and know in advance that some of the stations are better equipped than others to handle more than one or two people at a time.  Perhaps this will change by the time it has its run in Seattle.

I’m very glad to have been a part of this time capsule, and my metaphorical hat goes off to Hand2Mouth for creating such an amazing event.  I hope I’m around in the future to see what becomes of it.

Last week was super busy, so now I finally have a spare moment to sit, and process, and also to get you up to speed.

Wednesday night was the first play-reading group we’ve had since Tossed In tossed in the towel on leading the group. A handful of us have been persistent about keeping the group going, and after about two months, we finally managed to make it happen. We read the script for the movie My Dinner With Andre.

It was an amazing evening. A few of us were die-hard fans of the movie, and knew our favorite parts almost by heart, and a few of us had never seen or heard of the movie, so it made for a particularly interesting discussion. I really should say ‘discussions’, because we stopped many times along the way to switch to different readers, and to discuss the section that we’d just finished reading.

A couple of us had our favorite sections that we really wanted to read. I read Andre’s section about the Little Prince and about how New York is the new model for concentration camps, and Matt read Wally’s introduction, his argument near the end, and his ending monologue. We all discussed different ideas for staging this work as a play, and the various ways we could bring the various scenes to life, while still retaining the feel of a dinner. It was an amazing evening, and a passionate discussion all the way around.

Afterwards, Matt, Lindsay and I went to Squeez for a drink. I really should say ‘another drink’, because we’d already had plenty at the reading. We shared some quesadillas and continued the discussion about the play and about various other things.

Matt was too shy to want his picture taken that night. I tried to surreptitiously snap a picture of him and Lindsay while they were at the bar ordering, but the picture didn’t come out. Not that these did especially well, but the other ones are even worse, I promise you. I love the colors inside Squeez. It’s just a really cool, comfortable place to meet with your friends.

Oh, and for the record, I’m lucky enough to have found a very special copy of the script for MDWA. . .it was autographed in 1982, by both Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, AND it’s inscribed to someone here in Portland. A bunch of years ago, I went looking for the script, and finally found it at HugestBookseller. I decided to wait, however, and felt that another one would turn up, despite the fact that I had already been fruitlessly searching for it for years. No matter, I had a hunch.

The next day I went to Powell’s (even though I’d checked there countless times before) and sure enough, I was rewarded with this:

Talk about synchronicity. . .which fits in perfectly with the themes of the script, too. The autograph picture I left at higher resolution, so you can read what they wrote. I love it.

I first saw the movie when I lived in Yakima, at the age of twenty-four, and was mesmerized by it. I instantly went and tried to find out as much as I could about both of the guys, and all of the references they made to actors, directors, books, plays. . .everything. Jerzy Grotowski, The Master and Maragarita, The Little Prince, I couldn’t wait to understand what they were talking about. For the record, not a single one of my friends shared my enthusiasm for this movie. I raved about it, and even made a few people watch it, but they got bored and gave up after a few minutes. (I think this has something to do with the adage, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.’)

Anyway, it’s one of my all-time favorites, and it also introduced me to the Little Prince, which to this day I re-read every year or two, and I’ve probably had to buy ten or twelve copies of it over the years, because I’ve loaned so many out and never gotten them back. That’s okay, in this instance, because the story is so beautiful that I want everyone to read it, and I hope that they get as much out of it as I have.

And I have my friends Wally and Andre to thank for it.

Okay, so if you’re the kind of person who is bothered by the F-word, or the S-word, or by the mention of Satan, you’ll probably want to stop reading very soon.  Then again, I suppose you did read the title already, so there you go.

Back when l still lived in Yakima, I was in a hard rock band that will remain nameless. On July 4, 1992 (no, of course I didn’t remember that date; I had to look it up on my guitarist friend’s MySpace page, because he actually has a picture from that show), we played a house party, and a heavy metal band (who will also remain nameless) opened for us. They had only been playing together for a short time, so they only had about six songs in their repertoire. That means they played their six songs, then we played for an hour or so, and then they played their six songs again, for the people who arrived late.

Those of us who were there for both sets got a real treat, because they played everything exactly the same, including the between-song banter. My favorite introduction, which I remember so well because I heard it twice, went like this:

“This next song is for all of you who, if you really knew anything about Satan, you’d shit your fucking pants. This song is called. . .’Six-Six-Five and One Fucking Half.’ “

That was the band’s cue to launch into the song’s slow, grinding riff. We had to put our hands over our mouths to stifle our laughter, especially the second time around.

My favorite thing about that band, though, was the fact that the drummer was the only one who had a sense of rhythm. If you counted off, ‘One, two, three, four’, the bass player and two guitarists would all come in at different times around the next ‘one.’ The only way they could manage to play together was visually, if the three guys were staring at the drummer. For example, if he would hit a certain cymbal, the rest of the band knew that it was time to play the main riff. When he hit another cymbal, it was time to do the second riff. It was completely bizarre, and funny, and it took quite a while to realize that that’s what they were doing.

I wonder what those guys are doing now. The only one whose name I can recall is the singer. Something tells me that he’s the only member of that group who’s still involved with music.

And what happened to the group I was in, you may ask? Well, you’ll be glad to know that my guitarist friend is very busy these days, living in Seattle, and is booked clear into the New Year. The singer, I have no idea. I’ve looked him up from time to time, but so far it’s been to no avail. He was always a bit of a technophobe, and a suspicious one at that, so I imagine that he’s kept himself off of the usual online places. The drummer actually lives here in Portland and is married, but when he lived in Yakima, he had a kid with a horrible woman who bled him dry and completely devoured his soul.  I say that about very few people, by the way, but this woman was a leech, and a despicable human being.  Drummer sold his drums, gave her his car (which she and her drug-addicted boyfriend later wrecked), paid for her to live in an apartment, and even paid for her other daughter’s expenses as well. It just went on and on.

And me? Well, I’m doing all of the stuff I’m doing now, with no looking back, except to recount stories such as these, with a shudder and a huge sigh of relief.

OneYearAgo