beautiful, funny, sad & true

The night of plays. . .was awesome. Definitely one of the most fun and interesting things I’ve ever been a part of. No pics of the actual play yet, but here’s one of the cast-and-crew ‘after’ party.

The night was so much fun that words actually fail me. I made a new Seattle friend at that party. We’re there in the back left corner (I’m the short one dressed all in black), and I think you can tell by our posture that we’d rather be talking to each other than to the person we were talking with right then.

I washed my car for the first time in ages on Saturday, then today it rained AND I parked under a tree, so it’s already covered with crap again. But even that looks much better than it did before. Hopefully the rainstorms will come again tonight and wash it again for me.

I have a couple more days of down time to enjoy, and a play reading night, and then I’m busy with mixing and gigs and helping friends move and more gigs, and a trip to Yakima for a wedding, and all kinds of other stuff, every day and night for the next two weeks.

I need to learn how to end my blog entries. I’ve learned how to name them, now I just need to learn how to end them, and tie everything together in a nice way. I feel like some of them have been abrupt or left you hanging.

Not this one, though. This one has a neat, tidy little ending, if I do say so myself.

OneYearAgo

Last night, I actually had two dreams that I remember.

The first was a car crash dream, but it was different from the countless others that I’ve had, by virtue of the fact that it involved my car.

* * * * *

I’m in Yakima, and I’m driving on 54th Avenue. I’m stopped at a stop sign, and attempting to turn right onto Lincoln Avenue. Justin B. is riding in the passenger seat, and we notice that there have been quite a few accidents already. There’s one wreck to our left, and three or four groups of totaled cars to our right. We pull out to look past the wreck on our left, when a blue Chevy pickup comes racing past all the wrecks. We see him, and have only enough time to say, in unison, “We’re screwed,” before the truck hits my fender and sends my car spinning to the side of the road. We’re not hurt, but the fender goes sliding up the road, and suddenly my car’s interior is all white and padded with cloth. I get out and walk up the street to retrieve the fender. The back side of it is painted a sort of olive-green abalone color, and as it reflects in the sun, I think, ‘Wow, that’s really pretty. I wonder why they didn’t paint the car that color instead?’

* * * * *

And then here’s the second dream.

* * * * *

I’m on vacation, and I’ve brought a couple of friends with me; EngagedFriendChris (though he’s not engaged in the dream) and a woman he is on his first date with. We are on a tropical island in the Caribbean called Tuva. [No, it’s not the real Tuva, and yes, I know where the real Tuva is, and that it’s not an island.]

Anyway. I’m riding an old bicycle around, and Chris and his woman friend are walking. I’ve been to this island before, so I tell them that we “HAVE to go to the little village that’s just up the road. It’s really beautiful.” We continue on to a place where the road forks, and we can choose between going down the hill toward the water, where the town is, and up the hill toward the forest. The sun is starting to set, so we decide to go to the town. Once we get there, Chris and his friend go off on their own, and I decide to explore the town by bicycle. The town has narrow, cobblestone streets, and there are lots of little shops and restaurants. I ride down an alley, and I’m surprised to find that after a few sharp turns, it comes to an end in a tiny courtyard restaurant. I turn back, so as not to disturb the patrons.

I head back toward the waterfront, and come to a hotel where my family is staying. I don’t go meet them, but instead go down to the large basement room of the hotel, where there are a bunch of other bicycles parked in a rack, and a bunch of little kids down there playing. I leave my bike there, and walk to the other side of the room, to find a few shirts that appear to have been left there. I take them and walk upstairs to the room with my family. We visit for a while, and then I realize that I need to take the shirts back. I go back downstairs and hand the shirts to the man–also an American–who is supervising the children. I go to pick up my bike, but it isn’t where I’d left it. I look everywhere in the room, but it’s nowhere to be found.

* * * * *

Oh yeah, and I just remembered: One Year Ago

At some point yesterday, the conversation turned to Dumb or Funny Things We Said When We Were Kids.

You know, the old standards like, ‘I know you are, but what am I?’ or ‘Same to YOU but more OF it.’ And who could forget the time-honored older brother classic, ‘Why are you always hitting yourself?’ As an older brother myself, I have to say that no one tells you about that one. It’s not as if there’s a group of Freemasons who roam the streets looking for young boys, and when they find you, they pull you aside and whisper the joke to you. Nope, it just pops into your head one day–as if by divine intervention–and you realize that you alone have just created the newest, funniest joke in the history of jokes. You’re not hitting him, he’s actually doing it to himself. You’re just trying to figure out why, and ‘glean what afflicts him’, as Tom Stoppard would say.

‘I’m rubber and you’re glue; bounces off me and sticks to you’ was another great one, and then later in the evening, as I was thinking about this conversation, I remembered a childrens’ song that seems to be sung slightly differently in different regions of the country. You’ll know it, so I’m not even going to name it, but I’m interested to know if you know a different version of it.

Growing up in Yakima, Washington, we all used to sing it this way:

Great green globs of greasy, grimy gopher guts

Mutilated monkey meat

Chopped-up baby parakeet

Lukewarm vomit floatin’ down the street

And me without my spoon (but I’ve got a straw!)

I’ve heard it a bunch of different ways, but as I’m writing this, I can’t remember any of the variations. Maybe you can help me remember some?

Then, of course, there was the infamous F.A.G./M.A.G. scenario, which I’ve already written about. I half-expect that one to turn up in a movie.

When you’re a teenager, all bets are off. You never know WHAT is going to come flying out of your mouth at any given time. My favorite example (and I use the word ‘favorite’ loosely) is when I came home one day to find my brother and his friend were playing a video game; I believe it was Baseball on the Sega Genesis. The score was some ridiculously high number to nothing, and to the person who was losing, I laughed and said, “Man, you’re getting your butt fuckin’ slaughtered.” Both my brother and his friend burst out laughing. They still remember that vividly, by the way, and they like to remind me about it to this day, all these twenty-some years later.

How the heck did I end up telling that?

Well, I guess if you liked that one, then you’ll be glad to know that there are plenty more like it. If you didn’t. . .well. . .there are still plenty more like it.

And I really would like to know if you can remember some other variation of Gopher Guts, and if you remember some of those other dumb phrases that we all thought were so brilliant back in the day.

Oh yeah. . .and here’s one more category I ask you to also be thinking about; Changed Acronyms. For example, when my brother and I would see commercials for TCBY–which stood for “The Country’s Best Yogurt” or something equally innocuous–we’d say, “Too Crusty Butt Yogurt,” and laugh like hyenas. And not just once, either, but multiple times.

So yeah. . .just be thinking about those things, if you would, please. Thank you.

And now I’m going to change my laundry loads, take a nap, and then play the cello for a while, to warm up a bit before the show tonight.

This morning, I had a short–but interesting–dream. I always set my clock for 6:45 (too early) every day, and then hit the snooze button three or four times, until it’s 7:20 or so (too late). During one of those snooze sessions is when this dream happened.

* * * * * * *

I’m in my room at my childhood home on 55th Avenue in Yakima. It’s the middle of the night, and I’m in bed. The curtains are open, and the moon is shining brightly into the room. It’s bright enough that I actually think, ‘I bet I could probably read in bed if I wanted to.’ I reach for a book on my bedside table, when suddenly I see a bright orange flash coming from the end of the street. One of the houses at the Summitview end [that’s a street in Yakima] of the street has just exploded into a thirty-foot wall of fire.

A fire truck races by with all its lights flashing, but the engine is silent. I get up and walk to the window to look, when suddenly about eight or ten pieces of flaming debris start to land in our yard, and on our house. The house up the street explodes a second time, with an even larger wall of fire. I run to wake up my mom and my brother, and then I see that in our front yard, there are lots of small fires burning.

I pull on a pair of jeans and quickly try to decide which of my instruments to take out to my car. I decide on the cello, the accordion and my ancient white Guild electric guitar. Interesting that the instruments were all the ones that I have now, and that the car was the red Honda that I have now.

* * * * *

That’s the point at which I woke up, one minute before the next snooze alarm went off.

Also interesting that today is the day I’m going to visit my dad. Hunh. I’m sure that fact and this dream don’t have the merest possibility of a hint at a suggestion of a connection.

Maybe it’s not that at all. Maybe I’m like the main character in the book The Lathe of Heaven, whose dreams change the real world–and he’s the only one who remembers the way things were before he dreamed the changes–and that maybe I’m nocturnally bound and determined to destroy Yakima once and for all, via my dreams.

I’ve been feeling really good lately.

Lots of good musical things happening, including two amazing recording projects and one play production in which I’ll be playing the accordion at least, but probably some other things as well. It promises to be a great time.

Been laying low these last few days, to recuperate from the busy and exhausting weekend. I’ve also been planning the next installment of the 80’s hard rock blog thingy I’m working on, for fun.

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone this week, too. Lots of planning, and talking, and re-connecting, for some reason. It always seems to happen at the same time.

I had a funny thing happen a couple of days ago, which reminded me of something funny that happened twenty years ago. Someone on my street owns a really nice old Mustang. I’m not much of a muscle car guy–I’m more of a ’60’s and ’70’s European guy (the BMW 2002 is my favorite car)–but I always appreciate a nice car that someone has loved and restored.

So. I parked behind this particular Mustang the other night when I got home late, and the street was unusually full of cars. Blame it on my sleepiness from the Daylight Savings Time adjustment, blame it on whatever you want, but when I went to go to work in the morning, I found out the hard way that I had left my car in first instead of in reverse, like I usually do. So I went forward when I expected to go backward, and I sorta almost hit the Mustang. I DIDN’T, but I’m just saying it was close.

That reminded me of a time back in 1989 when my friend Blaine and I were going to a school to do some location scouting for one of our band’s videos. He parked his little white Honda behind a really nice, flashy, purple muscle car. We walked across the street from a grade school, and Blaine noticed that he was parked too far away from the curb or something–I don’t remember the details–but for some reason I ended up going back to move his car. Since the road was at a slight incline, I opened the door, leaned in, released the parking brake, and reached my leg in to engage the clutch, so that the car would roll forward slightly. I did it more by feel than by sight, because most stick-shift cars are the same, but after the car had rolled a few feet, I really should have looked instead of relying on my angle-guessing, because I kept pushing on the clutch pedal instead of the brake pedal. This meant that Blaine’s Honda rolled about ten feet and then banged into the back of the pristine muscle car.

It took about one second for the car’s owner to come storming out of his house. He ran out the front door, across the lawn, and right over to the open driver’s side window and pointed at his car, yelling, “Hey! That’s the ’85 Hot Rod champion!!” There wasn’t any damage to Blaine’s Honda, and the only damage to the ’85 Hot Rod Champion was a tiny little crack in one of its two-inch round tail light covers, luckily. No real harm done, so I just apologized profusely, and told him how beautiful we both thought his car was, and the guy let us go on our merry way.

Oh, and a few years ago, when I had my little green Toyota truck, I rear-ended a Camaro when the driver stopped too suddenly–in in the middle of the block!–near the Lloyd Center mall to let some girls cross the street in front of him. Nice. The crash put a little scratch on his bumper, but really smashed up the front of my truck.

Apparently I have more of a problem with muscle cars than I realized; it seems that my subconscious is out to single-handedly destroy them all.