beautiful, funny, sad & true

Okay, I’m going to give this a try. This subject has been bouncing around in my head for weeks, and I haven’t been sure how to go about writing it all out, but I’m going to do my best.

True friends in this life are very rare. I’m lucky enough to have a few, but there’s one person who is responsible for the biggest changes in my life, and without whom my life would still be the same as it used to be.

When I first moved to Portland, I got a job with the Postal Service, after seeing an ad in the newspaper. It wasn’t the usual back-breaking USPS job, we were told, but a computer-based data entry job. Not very stressful; listened to NPR and audio books all day; I even made a few good friends, some of which I still have to this day. (Hey, JohnReneeMarkRosemary!)

For the first few years I lived here, I didn’t have a car. My apartment was right down the street from where I worked, and I wasn’t playing gigs yet, so I didn’t need one. My rent was low, and my job paid pretty well, so it was time to start thinking about doing more music writing. I got a new computer, a new guitar effects processor, and a couple of keyboard sound modules, and then started dinking around with song ideas. Some were completely realized and polished songs, others were just little snippets of ideas, twenty seconds long.

I started taking the tapes to work with me to play for my friends. Without exception they said, “Enh. . .not really my thing.” I’d say, “Hunh. Well, you know I played all the instruments on there; that’s gotta count for something, right?” They’d say, “Well, that’s kinda cool, I guess.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Whenever I met someone new, I’d let them listen to the tapes if they wanted to, and after lots of similarly lackluster responses, I decided to just stop sharing it. But–credit where credit’s due–there were two people who were the first ones to really listen, and to take my music seriously; Mark and John. Renee and Rosemary did too, a little later on (Renee in particular has come to a lot of my shows, but that’s getting ahead of The Story), but John and Mark were definitely the first, and their confidence and kind words came along at a time when I desperately needed them. Thank you, to all four of you. I’ve never ever forgotten your kindness.
(Incidentally, all four–particularly Renee and John–are regular readers of this blog.)

One other thing you should know about that job. There were about three hundred people who worked there, on about six or eight different shifts. So it was possible to work there for quite a while without getting a chance to really meet someone, if they didn’t work on your same shift. You’d be in the same huge room at the same time, but your paths might never cross.

So, after working there for about four years, I was coming back from a break and made some jokey comment to one of my friends. This woman named Crystin, who I’d seen plenty of times but never met, overheard that and laughed. She told me later that she didn’t remember what it was I said, but that it was genuinely smart and funny, without being crude or sexist, and that’s what made her think I might be a Good Person.

So we finally met and started talking, and she asked what I do outside of work. I said I play guitar and piano, and I dink around and write some little songs. She said she’d like to hear some stuff. She told me she was taking voice lessons and learning the guitar so she could write songs. In return, she gave me a tape of herself singing along in the bathroom to a Heather Nova song. I thought it was good, I told her, but I really wanted to hear stuff that she was writing. She went and listened to my tape, and then came back with tears in her eyes and gave me one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever had in my whole life. “Oh my gawd. That music made me laugh and cry at the same time! Do you think you can make my stuff sound like that?”

From then on, it was full speed ahead. She brought me all kinds of songs, and we’d record them, and I’d play all kinds of instruments on them. She was married–and still is–to a great guy named Aram, and we became just as close. The three of us became inseparable friends, and Crystin and I took any opportunity to share with people this new thing we were creating.

After we’d worked on about fifty songs together, we thought, “Hunh. . .we should probably start a band.” The idea hadn’t occurred to us. So we went to find some female-fronted singer-songwriter bands to check out. The two that we were both blown away and inspired by–ironically enough–were Stephanie Schneiderman and Susie Blue.

Since I’m trying to keep this entry at a reasonable length, I’ll skip the band-related stuff because it’s all out there on the web anyway. Suffice it to say that we started a band, and that provided just the right kind of support that we both needed to get past our fears and insecurities. We still had plenty, of course, but always managed to talk them out. She’s the one who taught me how to really talk them out, by the way.

So. What’s the point of all this?

I dunno; guess I just felt like I needed to say thank you, Crystin and Aram. I wouldn’t be the person I am today, doing the things that I’m doing, without you guys. I learned what it’s like to have people see through my thorns and facades, and still like what they saw. I learned what it’s like to have people see me in a way I couldn’t see myself, because they didn’t have my internal filters saying, “What’s wrong with me?” all the time. I learned what it’s like to have people expect the best from me, and that in turn brought out the best in me. I learned what it felt like to always (okay, ALMOST always!) be given the benefit of the doubt, even when I didn’t feel I deserved it, or when I was frustrated with my life, or when I was depressed and despondent. You saw past all those things, and saw me for what I am.

Like I said; friends like that are extremely rare in this life, and I owe you everything for helping me transform into the person I am now.

THANK YOU, C and A.

Incidentally, if you’d like to listen some of the songs we did together, go check out Crystin’s MySpace page.

After a long day of sleeping, sweating (I stayed home from work with a fever today), dinking around on the computer and washing dishes, I decided to go back to bed and read for a while. I’m still reading Catcher in the Rye. I got to the part where Our Hero sneaks into his parents’ home in the middle of the night–cause he’s home a couple of days early due to being kicked out of school, and he doesn’t want his parents to find out yet–to see his little sister. That scenario reminded me of the line from the play Our Town. You know the one; “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.”

I hadn’t seen that play since I was in junior high, and I wanted to see it again and remember the context of that great line, so I scrounged around a bit and watched the 1940 version of the movie on Google. I didn’t hear that line, but the movie was certainly excellent and moving. The crux of it is that we all sort of zoom through our lives without taking time to even see the people that are closest to us, until it’s too late. And if I’m not mistaken, the ending of the movie was different from that of the play…? I don’t remember the play having a Hollywood happy ending.

After all that, it turned out that the line was not from Our Town after all, but from a poem by Robert Frost called The Death of the Hired Man, which I somehow remember reading in fifth grade–and not really understanding it–but that line certainly stuck with me all this time. It also turns out that I had it slightly wrong. The actual line is this:

And now that I’m in my mid-thirties, and gone through some pretty hard times, I feel like I understand and appreciate it.

Amazing how certain things you read can stick with you. I read the poem when I was just ten years old, but the line is so strong that it called out to my little brain and then waited for me to come around and discover it again. Re-reading Catcher in the Rye has been a bit like that too. Even though I read it as an adult (albeit barely; I think I was eighteen), and I should have been able to relate to it completely, I hadn’t really started to live yet, so it was just as remote as reading Isaac Asimov or something. Now I actually find myself relating to the confusion, the humor, and even the darkness that seems to jump out from every page.

Makes me want to go back and re-read every book I thought I’d read before.

Yesterday at work I felt achy and weird all day. Didn’t feel sick as much as exhausted and spacy. Walked home and decided that a bath was the best idea ever. Someone in my building must have been doing laundry at the same time or something, because the water never really got more than lukewarm. I had already ‘committed’ to the idea of a bath, though, so I took one anyway. When I got out I started shivering like crazy, so I bundled up and went to bed at 6:00 p.m., and I stayed there until about ten minutes ago. It’s now 11:30ish the next morning. The moral of the story is, IF YOU”RE SICK, STAY HOME FROM WORK. This guy I work with has had a fever for the last two weeks, and he refuses to stay home. Thanks, a-hole. Thanks for passing your Ebola on to the rest of us.

I’m supposed to go see Ben Lee tonight with my friend Shelby. Hope I feel up to it. I sure don’t want to miss the show, though. Guess I’ll stay in bed all day and see how I feel when the time comes. I’m feeling much better after spending the last seventeen and a half hours in bed. I’m also hungry, which is a good sign.

I have lots of things I’ve been wanting to write about lately, but they’re pretty huge stories–at least as far as blog entries are concerned–and I haven’t had a chance to whittle them all down into coherent and concise entries. The subjects include:

They’re all fairly interesting (hopefully), and all at least tangentially related. But instead I’m sitting here writing the substitute for all of them, entitled Dang It All, I’m Sick Again.

Thpffft.

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.

What a weekend.

Friday night I had rehearsal with Breanna and the band. BassPlayerChris was really sick, so he left kinda early, but I stayed around for a while to play through songs with Breanna and NewBandMemberJon. It was 11:30 p.m. by the time we finished. As I was loading my instruments into the back of my car, the hatch started to fall, and the corner of it hit me in the side of the head. Not a fun night. I went home and laid down on the sofa with a bag of frozen peas pressed to my temple.

Saturday J and I went out and about during the day, but we were both exhausted and groggy for some reason, so naps were in order. I laid down at 5:30ish, got up once or twice for a little while, but then went back down until 10:30, got up and dinked around on the computer for an hour or so, then went to bed for real and slept in until 10:30 the next day.

Yesterday, I sorta teased J about something I didn’t realize she was sensitive about, so I inadvertently hurt her feelings. Last night we e-mailed back and forth, trying to work it out, but as of this moment it’s still hanging there in the air between us. I’m sure we’ll be fine; we have a great track record of working things out.

There are a couple of other things happening that I’m not going to write about here, but they’ve been bouncing around in my head for the last few days too.

This morning, waking up was brutally hard after being up so late the night before. I didn’t even have time to take a shower, and I still dragged into work ten minutes late. Went to the deli downstairs to get an egg-and-cheese croissant, but it tasted stale and chewy. I ate about two-thirds of it and threw the rest in the garbage, then went to get some apple cider to wash the taste out of my mouth. Apparently my workplace has ‘secretly replaced their usual brand’ of apple cider with a crappy-tasting impostor.

I’m home for lunch now, hoping that the rest of this week improves really quickly.

Tonight is the performers-and-volunteers party for the Voices For Silent Disasters show that starts this weekend. It’s in a nice venue downtown, where we can all meet each other, catch up with friends, and also find out more about the cause and the events. So that should be fun.

In other news, I finally got a toy piano. I’ve been looking for one for years.