Tales From The Theater: We're Up and Spring Has Sprung

I'm feeling a little ragged at the moment. There's been a lot of work this week, and then last night we had a preview for the show in its run time at 11. After a run in front of 5 or 6 people, we had notes on things to tighten up and I was on my way home at about 1am. So work has that sort of looking through gauze feeling that comes with this sort of tired. I'm ready to bray out hysterical laughter at any moment, ready to tell someone to "lick it."

Aside from the usual first time in front of a "crowd" nervous dropping of lines crap, we also had an issue with the lights suddenly not working. I have to give it up to this cast, we went through it without blinking an eye, like professionals, only to meet in the green room to commiserate and reassure each other that we weren't in fact having a stroke, the lights just weren't working. We worked the show with style and with class and we got a good amount of laughs even with the cast doubling the audience members.

We open tonight:

If you find yourself in Seattle with not so great plans on a Friday or Saturday at 11, come and check it out. It's an hour and a half of inappropriate soap opera parody. There's a bar in the theater, and you can come watch me actorate all over the audience in a fury of lust and over the top hysterics.

I'm feeling good about the show, the cast is great to work with and Linda the director was giving some high praise last night. Granted, it's her job to prod us along, but when someone tells you that you're awesome, it's a little tough not to feel like King Golden Dick of Awesometown.

And so I leave you all the last post of what seemed like a long March. Warmth is beginning to enter the world up here again. Those premature glamlicous cherry blossoms have shown and are already on their way, showering feathery little kisses with the wind. Everywhere you look there's those delicate green shoots coming from all of that dormant wood and dirt I've been looking at for months now, waiting for some sign. It all just makes you want to fuck, live, taste, kiss, sing, laugh and dance an energetic and completely spastic road ode to this crazy world, an ode to making it back around one more time.

Billy's movie recommendations for your slow weekend rest times - Stranger Than Fiction. Will Ferrell does a wonderfully restrained job, and just when I didn't think it was possible for me to love sweet Maggie Gyllenhaal any more...


Confidential to Gorgeous: Thanks for the “Tell Me Something Good” reminder the other day, I’m listening right now. That is some top shelf shiznit.

Predisposed To Reflection

Grandpa was an alcoholic, but then he found God, which apparently fixed all of his problems. Apparently. Grandpa's use of God always seemed more mechanic, more a grim determination than an act of love, which in turn would shade my own sensibilities regarding spirituality and religion.

I was thinking about this while I was walking to the theater the other day. Grandpa apparently wasn't a cuddly and entertaining drunk. And when this is your basis of normalcy, this becomes your comfort zone, drunken antagonism and chaos. My aunt went and found herself a drinker to marry, cementing not only her fate but the idea that women look for their fathers when they get married. Years down the line, I was meeting up with my cousin from this union for a night of drunken revelry.

"You know he might be an alcoholic, it runs in his blood," my mother advised.

I wanted to tell her that it then, in fact, ran in my blood as well. And on thinking of that, I thought about how I would do things differently from my grandfather if things deteriorated to the point where I simply had to drink. Well, I have a little more flair than my namesake, I'm a little brighter, I would hope that I wouldn't lower myself to plain old abuse of my family.

But I realized, you can't outclass or outthink a genetic predisposition.

This opened a door to thinking about all the things that I'm genetically predisposed to, the things that my genealogical map has laid in my way, and how these stolid markers mix with the chaos of chance that occurs with just living and works to shape who I really am, not just what my blood makes me. Then I thought about the hot sparks thrown with the collision of these dispositions and those sometimes innocuous moments of living. I thought of a galaxy of moments that had changed my life; things as small as tasting sage for the first time, things as large as watching my son enter the world.

I can make myself dizzy sometimes. For a moment I wanted to lay down on a warm lawn somewhere in the dark and look back, look up at that glittering galaxy of life and just have a moment to take it in before it went and got bigger on me.

No Cars Go

This is not a prelude to suicidal activity, don't get all weird on me, but at some point I want to drive a car into a large body of water; preferably from someplace high, or off of a ferry.

First, a couple of things need to be worked out before hand. While there's bound to be some jerking motion when the car hits the water, I don't want to feel pain from it - I don't want this thing to be traumatic. I also don't want this to turn into some harrowing, time running out and car filling with water daring TV escape. I want to sit comfortably in the driver's seat, dry and warm (which I think takes the Honda Civic out of the equation as I doubt that sucker's airtight) while the car sinks slowly to the bottom.

I imagine falling slowly and gracefully while the water gets darker with depth and I eventually have to turn on the headlights. I might also jokingly turn on one of the blinkers, because I'm a conscientious driver and I laugh at my own stupid jokes. I imagine hitting the bottom with a soft thump, a cloud of sediment rising. As the car coming through the environment is bound to scare a lot of the local wildlife away at first, I imagine myself sitting there, seat belted in and waiting for the return, listening to the new Arcade Fire album.

Which I honestly wasn't crazy about to begin with - Neon Bible by Arcade Fire that is. Their first album really sort of stormed my senses and I wasn't immediately taken with the follow up, but the more time I spend with it, the more I want to go back.

So there'd I'd be, waiting on the dark bottom. I'd turn the radio down a bit so as not to have the sound keep the fish away longer than necessary. I would probably occasionally turn on the windshield wipers - again just to entertain myself with stupidity. I imagine doing this in Puget Sound (particularly if I'm driving off a ferry), and as such I expect to see salmon and octopi eventually flitting by. At one point I flash my high beams just in time to see an orca passing in the murky distance, checking out this reckless interloper for a moment before surfacing.

I probably would have thought ahead and brought a snack, some jerky or something, so I'd eat that and look at the fish, finish listening to the Arcade Fire. But eventually it's going to get cold in there at the bottom of the Sound. I mean c'mon, I'm not going to keep the engine running to keep the heater going. What sort of monster do you think I am? When it gets to this point, I calmly strap on my scuba tank, use the secret fold down back seat to get into the trunk and then pop said trunk open and wait for it to quickly fill with water.

I cannot imagine a hero’s return when I surface. I’m guessing Department of Transportation officials and Coast Guard people and the cops brandishing weapons and yelling profanities. Then there’s also the wife asking why I trashed a perfectly good car. Which is where my school of trained salmon comes in…

Mood Music

I'm in a mood. I feel outside forces pressing down and prying angry little fingers in. What's worse is that I can feel myself toying with letting the mood sink; running my tongue over that sore spot in my mouth, not looking out the window for fear that there's no storm.

Well folks, I don't want to be in a shitty mood, I'm fighting against the dying of the light - or some such nonsense. I'm attempting a little self medication, a little musical therapy. I want to share my top 5 musical mood lifters for today.

(There's so, so many - these are just the first five that popped to mind this morning)

1) “For Real” by Okkerville River. When the lead singer actually spits out the word “fine” as if he's in the middle of some sort of passion driven, apoplectic fit of abandon I get giddy.

2) "Talking World War III Blues" by Bob Dylan. Dylan sort of quotes Abraham Lincoln and then busts out with, "I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours. I said that." The balls, the youthful boldness in proclaiming your own quote, the sense of humor with which it's done... Shit, it makes me smile.

3) "Styrofoam Boots/It's Always Nice On Ice" by Modest Mouse. The bass and drums kicking in with a crash at the end makes my heart jump. If I'm walking down the street when this happens it makes me feel full of power, it makes me feel like I'm floating over the ground.

4) Any number of Pixies songs where Kim Deal comes in with a breathy backup. It's like some lascivious angel whispering in your ear, raising the hair on the back of your neck; an angel that got a little too close to the ground, a little dirty, a little roughed up at the hem.

5) “The Weight” by The Band. Levon Helms' growl of "yeah" after the 'Crazy Chester' verse seems like he feels that tickling pull of anticipation in his stomach and just can't wait to dive back into the song, like he's gotta let out that "yeah" no matter what. It makes me clap my hands and want to join in on some down home musical revival - friends and booze and instruments on a porch somewhere.

Sending you all some love out there, have a good Tuesday.

Tales From The Theater: WWPBD

My weekend was eaten up by a foul beast called Tech. It is also referred to in some circles as hell week. Whatever, it's actory nonsense and I can't imagine it being terribly interesting to anyone (even other actors). But as it's all I did this weekend, and what I will be spending my non work time on this week I feel pressed to write about it. Read on at your peril!

A glossary of terms:
10 of 12's - The theater is booked for twelve hours (10am to 10pm) and actors are expected to be there 10 of those 12 hours.
Cue to cue - A start and stop run through the show, stopping and starting at each sound cue. Same to be done again for each lighting cue.

Honestly I could complain about having to go through our 10 of 12's, it's tedious and frustrating and tiring, but when it comes down to it, it's acting. I spent close to 20 hours this weekend doing something that I love, something that I'm constantly surprised people let me do. But because there is a lot of idle waiting around, people are bound to get on other people's nerves. And better yet, people are bound to get effing delirious.

It started unraveling with talk of the abandoned baby polar bear that some animal rights activists argue should not be allowed to live.

Actors began to throw out random polar bear facts: Polar bears hunt men (as do koala bears I pointed out to no one's belief, they just don't do it that well), polar bears cover their noses with their paws when their hunting, polar bears and penguins do not co-exist. It was when I volunteered the information that it was in fact a polar bear that went back in time and killed JFK, well the train derailed.

We talked about great actors who had done amazing portrayals of polar bears in their careers: Kevin Bacon, Lee Marvin and Morgan Freeman to name a few. I mentioned Steven Spielberg's ill advised attempt to make a film about a robot polar bear who goes on a search for his mother. Matt nodded in affirmation, "Yeah I saw that one. It was called P.B."

Gone. I wish I could give you more details on the day, but everything took on that haze of 3 day drug binge; a little headachey and a little surreal. For some reason a bunch of us started doing bad Irish accents which led to Matt singing Captain Quint's "Farewell and ado to you fair Spanish ladies" song from Jaws in said bad Irish accent. In a move that endeared him to me forever, Matt then began Captain Quint's U.S.S. Indianapolis speech, but replacing sharks with polar bears. I finished up with, "300 men went into the water, 15 1/2 came out, polar bears took the rest..."

It was good, we were laughing hard at this point. But when we began pointing out our polar bear attack scars to each other, and I (ala Richard Dreyfuss) pointed to my chest and said, "Mary Ellen Moffet", it was off the charts. We were so delirious that we had to run away from each other and try to cover up our screaming laughter. This was seconds before being called onto stage.

Instead of the normal cue to cue, we were actually going through the entire scene and both of us had eyes bulging from trying not to laugh, both let out snorts of vicious laughter trying way too hard to escape. The director, brave lass that she is, tried to give us notes and I had to let her know that although I had just done it a minute and a half ago, I had no memory whatsoever of the scene she was talking about.

So, lock a group of attention whores with a modicum of improv training into a dark basement for 10 hours and you take your chances. I'm worn out, as I'm sure is the rest of the cast, and while I'm sort of leery of going back in for more tonight after work, I'm also kinda looking forward to it.

I've a got a full week of tech and dress rehearsals. We open Friday, presure's on...

At The Anarchist Collective

Montgomery carefully poured liquid into a pitcher, making sure that Adam was watching with just the right amount of interest and reverence. "And now we add the ingredient which makes this so volatile, the key ingredient, the one thing that will allow for the lasting impression that we're hoping for, what the French call the 'water of life'," Montgomery raised his eyebrows impressively. "Crème de menthe!"

"Um," Adam looked at him questioningly. "I'm basing this on the small amount of French that I've managed to pick up from Pepe le Pew and the flip side of Canadian groceries, but I think that crème de menthe actually means... cream... of mint?"

Montgomery glared at him. "Do you want to make this bomb?"

"Not at all."

"Because, I can walk away, I can forget about the knowledge that I've gathered over the years and let a hack like you take care of it, to endanger us all. Do you want me to do that?"

"No."

Montgomery measured out first one shot glass of the crème de menthe and then a second, pouring them both into the pitcher. He slowly stirred the pitcher, holding his breath. He let the contents settle before picking up the pitcher and slowly pouring the contents into a series of glasses. "You learned things from Pepe le Pew? The capitalist tool?" Montgomery asked.

"Well I learned that he couldn't tell the difference between a female skunk and cat with a well placed but accidental white stripe of paint."

"Okay everyone! Here's my world famous Time Bomb, come and get ‘em. Cheers! Now let's talk about how to stop that Chuck E. Cheese from going in."

2 Years

Billy Cleans His Plate is two years old today. I was hoping to hit the 500 post mark today so we could celebrate two meaningless milestones in one day, but I came a little short. Two years ago, I tossed out a simple little paragraph about that funny little two person, trying to get around you dance. Was I ever that young?

If I could go back and tell anything to the two years ago version of myself, typing away at that temp half desk, well I probably wouldn't for fear of messing up the space-time continuum. But if I got over that, I would tell the two years ago version of myself:
1) When Bif tells you she's pregnant, avoid that long stage of freak out, completely unnecessary.
2) Settle down, yeah, Bif's gonna get pregnant. Seriously it's cool.
3) All right, put your head between your legs and breathe. I'm not kidding, it's going to be rad.

Once I calmed down, I might also let me know that Chris Marker's Sans Soleil is coming out on DVD in a couple of years, as is the long awaited release of El Topo, but then again I wouldn’t want to deprive me of the slight rush I got when I found this out on my own. Oh, and don't wait so long to pick up Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat, you'll thank me (you) for it.

Thanks to all of you once again for providing the illusion that my random thought processes are entertaining.


Confidential to kc!: I've meant to call you back for like 5 days and I'm feeling lame about it, I'm sorry.
Confidential to Panda Girl: Congrats! You're a sexy little minx!

Talk About The Passion

After a Monday night pilgrimage for beer and tots, a few of us wound up at Gorgeous' place to help her get rid of the liquor in her cabinet. I'm always happy to help out a friend. Apparently the mixture of many stouts, cajunized tots, vermouth, gin and little green olives makes me want to tell some stories.

I can get all talky on your ass sometimes. I'm frankly surprised that more people don't tell me to shut the hell up. I was reminded today that I had told Brandon quite a lot about my Sedona trip so many years ago. And I remember quite clearly rambling on in the entryway while I drunkenly put my shoes back on about Van Gogh and Picasso and blindness.

See, we were looking at the Rothko-esque painting that Nikki 2 K's had made for Gorgeous and the space she had chosen to hang it up in. I remember when he first unveiled it for her and looking at it propped up against an crumbling, industrial, concrete building smack in the middle of a neighborhood smack in the middle of being forgotten and being rebuilt, our bellies full of beer and German food. Viewing the painting again, I was taken by the brush strokes and reminded of seeing those soul crushing Van Gogh's up close, and how you could see the frenzy and thickness of paint being used to produce a scene that needed to be recorded right then and there; you could see brilliant madness in those brushstrokes.

I remembered and told the scene of Greta May and myself deep in the Impressionists at the Guggenheim, the eve before a life changing trip to Europe. Chris and Bif were on their own somewhere, but Miss May and I were standing breathless in front of the Van Gogh's, he was a common ground that we collided over when we first met.

As we stood there, trying to take it all in, a blind man was led to a painting by his companion. The companion then did his best to describe the paintings to his blind friend.

I was already in an emotional state, but this made me openly weep. How do you even begin trying to explain Picasso to someone who cannot see it? And the need to have it told, the desire to do so... It not only drove it home again just how lucky I am, but it made me realize that it is my duty to look when there are others cannot, my duty to listen when others cannot, my duty to live and dive into the sheer ecstasy of living.

It was raining when I left Gorgeous' place, much as it had been raining when we left the Guggenheim. While we had run down the streets of New York as a fulfilled and playful foursome, I walked the streets of Seattle by myself, more than slightly drunk, but smiling at the wonder of it all.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: "Perfect Circle" by R.E.M.

Yin And Yang The St. Patty's Day Experience

So it was my big bachelor weekend; no wife, no kid, just me and the cats. I'm here to state that I may be growing up a little bit. Even with no rules, even though it was my weekend to run screaming through the streets with a bulging crotch, starting fires and singing badly, I kept it pretty in control.

I went out with the cast after rehearsal Friday night. I drank a couple of whiskies and was home by 1. I think I could kind of see where things were heading with the loud drunken babble rising and the sad illusion of self importance hiding behind the coats on the coat rack. I realized that I would rather enjoy my empty Saturday than curse my hangover. Plus, being at home, watching A Scanner Darkly and eating some frozen pizza sounded pretty good.

I woke up Saturday afternoon and went immediately to the couch where I flipped between watching movies and napping. I at first felt guilty for wasting a day in this fashion and then realized that I wasn't wasting a god damn thing. Who knew the next time I'd be able to spend a Saturday doing nothing. And so another nap I took. I considered shopping, but didn't. I considered going to the bookstore, but didn't. It wasn't until Saturday evening plans began to take form that I got moving.

I have to say that St. Patrick's Day is sort of amateurs night out. Every dickface from the suburbs crosses bridges to flood the urban bars and drink gallons of beer fortified with vitamin FD&C Green #3. I don't feel a need to put up with the sort of incompetence on display on St. Patrick's Day, and to celebrate the Irish in my blood, I will hunker down in a friendly corner, with others if they are available, and partake of the sacrament.

Saturday night was spent on a Guiness soaked nitrous cloud. Jason, Mandy and I started out at a pizza place packed with revelers in green and a middle aged cover band who only seemed to know songs by The Beatles and Neil Diamond (the occasional Van Morrison tune notwithstanding). Good pizza, nice manager who let us drink beer standing in his entryway and then helped us with a cut on our pitcher price.

We went back to rock M&J's place with some Black and Tans, some Irish Car Bombs, and some Whip It's. King Cracker was in effect, and I could feel the spirits of Mercedes and Hellby floating nearby and laughing. I was on a double balloon rush, listening to a song by The Smashing Pumpkins, when some sort of deep thought in regards to sex and death and drugs came floating up, but I promptly forgot it.

I again slept in Sunday, did some laundry, finally went shopping and to the bookstore. There was no hangover to fight, no party scars to ponder over, and I even attempted to counteract all the pizza devouring by having a salad and blueberry juice for lunch. That's when the whole grown up thing entered my mind.

While I love to get out for a little drunken nihilism, it's getting to a point where it's more a fun idea than a necessity. While I love spending time with my friends and that heady chance of getting into some sort of trouble, I'm also a fan of just sitting still for a minute and trying to catch up with the mad whirl of the world. And while I like to dip into a little irresponsibility from time to time, ultimately I miss Bif and I miss Riley and I'm okay with trading off a few drunken nights to spend an evening on the couch with my lady, to watch that kid smile his smile.

An Infant Stole It From Me, I'm Stealing It Back

I'm going to catch up on some sleep this weekend, but right now I'm special tired. I'm so tired it almost feels like being drunk. My tired eyes misread an internet news fact and for a minute there I was pretty sure that a new leopard species had been found in Bono.

"Wow," I thought. "Is there anything that mad bastard cannot do?" The guy already fronts U2, is single handedly saving the world, had the balls to release an awful version of "Helter Skelter" in a major motion picture, and is apparently harboring a brand new species of large, predatory cat inside of him. I have apparently been a little hard on the guy.

But no, the new leopard was found in Borneo; Bono's still a douche.

Bif took the little man away for a little while, and while I'm sorry that the horrors of the OC are being pushed on him at such an early age, I'm glad that that side of the family is getting a chance to see him. I have to say that for such a little guy, he leaves a big old hole in the place when he's not around.

You would think that with Riley being gone, I would be getting more sleep. Wouldn't you? Well wouldn't you?!? Why does no one ever answer my questions? I am hoping that is the case this weekend.

There's a problem that I have when I'm in a play, or doing rehearsals for one as I am now. Getting onto the stage and playing around fills me with an energy that typically takes 8 kinds of pharmaceuticals, a coffee bean omelet and a heavy electric shock to my anus to procure. I can be dragging throughout the day, but once I hit the theater I'm ready to invade Idaho. This energy tends to stick around for awhile after rehearsals and it often becomes difficult to drop off to sleep.

So taking last night as an example, there's a lot of me wandering the apartment and talking to myself, or to the cats, or to the shambling freaks I spy walking the sidewalks outside my apartment. I don't expect any answers, typically filling in their side of the conversation with an enjoyably comic voice anyway. After awhile, I will eventually look at a clock and say to my imaginary counterpart, "man, I gotta hit the sack." After hitting said sack I will lay wide eyed and tossing until I eventually slow my brain down enough to drop off, or I rub one out. I will then come to work the following morning punchy, delusional, and somewhat abusive on the phone to the poor bastards who push me.

But this weekend, I'm making sleep my bitch. I'm going to eat sleep like it was a pizza, drink it like a pitcher of beer. I'm going to run my fingers through sleeps silky hair and then punch it repeatedly in the face.

St. Ides Of March

After a fairly disastrous senior year in high school, where all my proverbial chickens came home to roost, I was coerced into spending another year under my parent's care and tutelage as I was not deemed trustworthy enough to be out there on my own yet. They were in the midst of moving to Gig Harbor, Washington, which at that time was the LAST effing place I wanted to be. But be there I was.

That last cannot be a real sentence...

After a particularly dark year of the soul, I hopped in my trusted Honda Prelude for the sunnier climes of Orange County. What I found when I arrived there was that my brother in arms, Damon, had fallen in with a pretty disreputable crowd. They were ruffians and layabouts, they stole and drank and did drugs, they made it a point of pride to run afoul of societies nicer corners. What seems fairly ridiculous about the whole thing though is that these were kids that grew up in the same area I had gone to high school in, almost all of them with well educated parents far richer than mine. The scruffiest, scroungiest, laziest one in fact still lived with his parents (they all did) in the same upper most upper class housing development that Tom Cruise once owned a house in.

I began to hang out with them as well, learning things like the art of the perfect bud deal and how to break in to your parent's sail boat. But the most useful thing I took away from them was the drinking of malt liquor.

I had no idea what malt liquor was at that point except for hazy memories of something called Schlitz Malt Liquor which apparently caused a wild bull to come through and trash a bar when you busted one open. But here I was, sitting around a small, man-made lake in a subdivision in Mission Viejo (pick one, for all intents and purposes they are the same), and chugging 1-2 bottles of St. Ides. It tasted like ass, but for about 4 of my hard earned dollars, placed in the untrustworthy hands of the member of the group who had a fake ID, I could get two bottles of this ass tasting beverage.

Getting through a bottle and a half left me effing drunk, left me frunk...

I finally got fed up with the Laguna Hills version of the Crips and stopped hanging out with them. This also stopped my ingesting of Malt Liquor for a few years. In those early San Francisco days when I was so poor I was stealing toilet paper from work, Corado and I would occasionally pick up some Mickey's for a quick and super cheap drunk. Mickey's didn't taste any better than St. Ides, but it seemed marketed more towards frat boys than towards gangsta rappers and the homeless. While I didn't fit into either group, I guess I felt more at home within the Mickey's demographic.

I guess I would typically end this sort of thing with a wistfully nostalgic tag about missing my St. Ides days - but I don't. Thinking back on it actually reminds me of the free floating anxiety I felt when contemplating the sort of societal cancer that Orange County child rearing created, and the awful, rotting sweet taste of that malt liquor.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: "I Am The Resurrection" by The Stone Roses.

Some Of These Days

Some people might say that if Bif and I were meant to be together and I had ended up living in the 1st Avenue house, we would have met anyway further on down the road; probably in San Francisco, maybe at the Tart to Tart on Irving. Some people are funny. Some people seem to think feeding chemical sugar substitutes to kids is a good idea - go ahead Chuckles, spread that shit on your grapefruit.

Some things that I'm not a fan of right now:
1) The amazing amount of sleep I did not get last night.
2) Being hailed on during my walk to work; that shit stings after awhile.
3) The complete lack of bears in the downtown area. I would like to see them wandering around from time to time. Not like Grizzlies or Kodiaks, not bears that effing take your head off, but some personable brown or black bears ambling along Second and James would be cool.

I was living 6 to a house in Mill Valley for a short while with some folks forcing this neo-hippie idea on themselves. I have no problem with hippies, but when you're forcing the lifestyle because it doesn't quite match your innate beliefs, well you're trying too hard. And trying too hard seems to fly in the face of all that being a hippie is, and that sort of makes you like one of those Escher optical illusions - impossibly twisted and makes me feel sort of nauseous when I look too long. But that is not the point at all. The folks in this house used a clear, glycerin based soap that smelled of ruby red grapefruit. I liked the soap, but after a couple of days I realized that something about the tangy smell of that grapefruit reminded me of B.O.

B.O. soap... yup, right next to the tuna flavored tooth paste.

It's gonna be a weird one today y'all...

Where Will They Live (Part 2)

So Alexi and I cruised the town that we would soon call home, listening to Joy Division and savoring the tastes of the Woodstock’s Pizza we had for dinner. We spent that night at the place where Jeanette would be living the next year, this guest house directly behind the landlord's house. I personally think that it was a shed that the guy transfixed with a bathroom and cheap kitchen set up. Janny Sue was sharing it with her professional ice skating sorority sister; her name escapes me, but her over-enthusiastic and fake smile and her tight blond curls made me think of what happens to those child beauty pageant contestants when they get to college age. She seemed like she would crack that happy facade at any time and would be taking out whoever happened to be nearby.

Alexi and I spent that night brazenly breaking the no smoking rule and lamely attempting to hide it by sitting beneath the open window and blowing the smoke out. It was one of those delirious evenings where you spend a number of hours in the dark and laughing so hard that it feels like you've eaten a live bear the next morning. We mainly stuck to four words that entire night, but they consistently made us laugh like special needs kids - "naughty little puss puss".

I think it was riding that giddy line between being a child and pretending to be an adult.

The next day we had breakfast at what used to be a phenomenal breakfast place downtown and went out looking for an apartment. What we had actually found was an adorable house on 1st Avenue. I fell in love with it from the point we walked in the door. The rental agency robot pointed out the "swamp cooler", a term I had never heard before but has been sitting in the active, front portion of my mind ever since. There was also the basement that ran the entire length of the place where, Alexi and I agreed, Damon would be perfectly comfortable shutting out what little light actually made it down there.

We ended up not getting the place because of Damon, which is ironic when you consider that he ended up never coming up there to live anyway. I used to often think that if we had actually lived in that house, would Damon have come and not disappeared off the face of the earth? Would Alexi and Amy Lou have worked things out and stayed engaged? Would we have met Rob and Colin who took their turns at gently shaping who I was to become in those formative years?

The answer is probably not, any of them, but more important than any of that, I probably would not have found my amazing and beautiful Bif.

Wow Joy Division, you cracked open a big messy chapter of my life for my perusal. Thanks for that.

Where Will They Live

Wow, today has been crazy busy. And I barely remember this weekend - and not because of any sort of self abuse. I think that I'm just tired and all the play rehearsal puts me in a weird sort of mind space.

On the way into work I was fed a nice, hot portion of "Day Of The Lords" by Joy Division. I was also nearly hit in the face with the aluminum crutch of a rotund man standing on the sidewalk of Cherry Street, bag of god knows what gathered at his leg. I sort jerked my face away from the worn rubber knobbie at the bottom of the crutch and tried to throw him my "look dude, I'll mess your shit up" look, which admittedly is probably not that strong; few people I think tend to believe that I will mess their shit up. But Old Roundy kept shaking his crutch and bunching his bag. I was about to let fly some choice but derogatory words, soaking his face with my vitriol and saliva, when I realized that he was attempting to hail the bus coming down the street behind me from what was decidedly not a bus stop.

And that's about the time that "Day Of The Lords" came on. Man, the tuberculosis ward aspect of the endless coughing here at work is making me feel a bit put out. Man, I derail myself way too easily.

The Joy Division immediately brought me back to a summer night in Chico, before I lived there, before I started planting the seeds of drama and depression that would be harvested a couple of years later. Alexi and I were driving down Main Street through the quaint downtown area of this college town - quaint meaning it was about 7 or 8 blocks by 3 or 4 blocks, depending on how loose you wanted to play with the "downtown" definition of things.

We were going to move there, Alexi and me. Damon was coming as well and eventually Amy Lou would be joining us. But for now it was just Alexi and I, looking for a place to live and admiring all the brick buildings and the heat and young, beautiful people. The drive north through the hellish section of I5 was taken up with Bauhaus and Bowie and The Cure's Staring At The Sea cassette (with the awesome side two chock full of B sides), but I specifically remember driving down Main Street, fully loving the heat that would soon become a dreaded monster and listening to “Day Of The Lords”.

There was so much excitement flying around the air then. Alexi was breaking away from his parents, both of us were breaking away from the creeping evil of Orange County and we were going to be in an honest to goodness college town. And if coming of age movies had taught us nothing, it was that college towns are where the BIG trials and tribulations would take place. Compared to the cultural wasteland of OC, we were in a town that had coffee shops and a serious lack of chain restaurants, a place where the bookstores readily sold Henry Miller and William Burroughs, a place where the video store carried a much sought after copy of Eraserhead.

And crap, I need to go back to work. My apologies, but I’ll continue this tomorrow.

Radio Days

About the time that I as 11, I remember spending the night at David's house across the street. We stayed up late into the deep hours of the night, talking about the dumb things 11 year old boys talk about (which probably isn't that far removed from what 36 year old boys talk about) and listening to the radio. It was right around the time when I was starting to pay attention to music, and while I don't remember anything that we said to each other, I remember staring at the Venetian blind shadows that the streetlight tossed on the ceiling and listening to that radio.

I remember being so taken by being there in the dark with that music, that KZOK "acid rock" bouncing around the room. I remember being taken by some man, possibly alone in a radio station in the dark hours, playing music for me. I remember thinking that I should always do this - go to sleep with the radio on.

This also brings up pleasant memories of being babysat by a friend of my parents and him putting on Steve Martin and Bill Cosby records for me and my brother to listen to. I sat there and looked at those huge, gatefold record jackets and even laughed at the jokes I didn't quite get.

There are memories of shoddy apartments made that much brighter by being filled with tunes from portable stereos, or composite system speakers, or even those little transistor radios not even big enough to have a tape player. There are memories of college neighbors with their room sounds of acoustic guitars and bongos spilling out to lightly dust ours. There are memories of sitting on the floor and playing cards, the TV purposefully shunned and CD's spinning and so many, "wow that's a great song" being thrown out.

I have no fun and happy memories of sitting around and watching TV.

I guess what I'm hoping is that I can provide Riley with a life filled with music. I'm hoping he can lay wide-eyed in a room at 2 in the morning someday, listening to the choices of a DJ who's still doing the job simply because he loves music.

I Couldn't If I Tried

What I don't like is that I have "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" by Elton John and Kiki Dee stuck in my head. Seriously, I need some sort of exorcism here, it is making me mental. The iPod is currently performing a brain colonic with the likes of Roxy Music and The Modern Lovers.

What happened to Kiki Dee? Which, by the way, is what I plan to name my autobiography. Judging by her name alone, I'm guessing porn. Judging by how old she must be now, I'm guessing amateur porn.

Or it could very well be that Kiki is working here in Seattle. She could be the lady with the puckered mouth who pratically plowed me over in the kitchen to get to the sink and furiously wash hands that appeared to be clean to my eyes. She then proceeded to grab like thirteen paper towels, one at a time, and plucking at them with a vigor that seemed to say, "if I pull with this sort of drastic force I will adjust the space-time continnuum and go back to take Elton's fame". I kept thinking that she was done grabbing towels and kept making these stuttering steps towards the sink thinking that I'd be able to wash out my mug, but she just kept going for more.

My first thought was OCD. Technically, my first though was, "wow crazy bitch, got enough paper towels", and then I went to OCD. And then after thinking about it a little longer - and yeah, I did - I realized that she may have killed someone in her cubicle. She needed to wash away DNA evidence quickly, and she needed a Douglas Fir's worth of paper towels to clean up the pooling blood spreading over her spread sheets, dripping down her Puppies & Kittens calendar.

I thought to myself, "no Kiki, this is not what you want! Do you want to be compared to Britney? Do you want people to think that the pressure of fame had finally gotten to you?"

And my friends, I think this is exactly what Kiki wants.


Song (I'm Forcing To Be) Stuck In My Head Right Now: "Police On My Back" by The Clash.

Ghosts

We took Riley on tour while mom and dad were here this weekend, generally showing the kid off to great grandparents and great aunts.

First stop was Puyallup, home of a large fair in September and apparently now with strip malls that rival entire counties in Southern California. Dad's parents and sister, sister's husband, shuffled around the mobile home and grabbed greedily at the baby. Now luckily, I missed out on the alcoholism and abuse that pervaded this family in the early years, but the backwoods born again-ism that badly filled that raging hole haunted everything it touched. I do not remember any happy family memories from this side. I remember a grandfather sitting so, so passively in a chair, as if trying to hide from his new god, attempting to escape his past sins. I remember a grandmother's language littered with derision and guilt trips, and can only now see what must have unconsciously attracted my father to my mother. I remember an aunt so mollified that she couldn't even smile without seeming embarrassed about it.

I certainly don't hate them or wish them any ill will, they all struggled like the rest of us to varying degrees of success. I just never got that warm, enclosing feeling of acceptance and love that I got elsewhere. These weren't family members, they were shells of strangers that looked vaguely familiar.

Riley was fussy pretty much the entire time we were there. One thing that having the little man has done is made me question a little further my beliefs in the supernatural and what infants can feel and see. I was convinced that he was reacting to all of the negative energy clinging to everything in those small rooms. I mean hell, you could practically hear it. That sucking sound? It's the sound of precious hours of my life being drained away from me.

The visit to the other side of the family was a marked difference. Riley stood to being passed around to various women in the tribe with little or no consternation. You could feel laughter on the air and a desire to stand with each other.

At one point, the little man was getting a little worn out, so I laid him on the floor and sat down with him. He'll usually calm down and start chattering with me. These are moments that I love, staring intently into each others eyes as he has not yet learned to be ashamed of that much truthfulness. Mom came over and he smiled up at his grandmother. My grandmother came over and he looked up at his great grandmother and flashed her one of his coy smiles.

And then, he let loose one of those beautiful, full soul smiles at her where he just becomes enamored of something. Right then and there I became almost certain that he was seeing the spirit of my grandfather hovering around back there, looking down on his great grandson with those steely, mirth filled eyes.

I was afraid to look back over my shoulder, afraid that I wouldn't see him. But I was really glad that they got to meet each other.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: The Weight by The Band.

Watching The Tide Roll Away

For some reason it feels like a Wednesday. Today has that sort of soft around the corners feeling that a Wednesday has. I can nail myself down to knowing that it is not Wednesday by reminding myself that that I'm not carrying around a vague hangover that comes with the Tuesday night bowling. I can only imagine that a version of myself in another dimension, a dimension with some sort of international date line, is sitting in a hotel room and trying intently to figure out if from where he's at, if his friend's birthday is today or tomorrow. I'm just getting the fall out...

Not that I have to deal with this at my job or anything, but if you walk into a glass door, I have absolutely no empathy for you whatsoever. In fact, in most normal circumstances, I would be laughing in a very hysterical and non-socially acceptable way at you. And seriously, if you want to complain to the corporate headquarters that owns the building about the fact that you walked into a glass door - and again, this is certainly nothing that I have to deal with at my job - I have to remind you that you essentially walked into a wall. You should have evolved past the stage where you are walking into solid objects, no matter what the opacity is. And for fuck's sake, shit happens to the best of us; chalk it up to an embarrassing mistake and let it ride.

And again, not that these sort of things happen to me at work, but a coworker and I were discussing the benefits of a new program I'm pondering. For everyone that I have to suppress laughing at because they have say walked into a glass door, or tripped over something large and metal and painted green and that is clearly in front of them on the patio, or burned themselves because they thought it was a great idea to drink a piping hot beverage out of a paper cup while aggressively fighting the morning gridlock, I want to try to slightly convince them to off themselves.

If you have not evolved to a point where you cannot look where you’re going, or keep yourself out of easily avoided dangerous situations, and then to make matters worse you shift the blame away from yourself and threaten a lawsuit, I say you are adding nothing to our gene pool except clumsiness and a bitchy attitude.

I am suggesting we begin a program of hypno-induced keywords, like in the movies when a normal guy gets a telephone call, hears a snippet of music (let's say (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay as performed by Otis Redding) and suddenly becomes a commie spy. Only in this case, you Suzy Spillsalot start screaming about a lawyer and I quietly, and in a nice game show announcer type voice, say the word "Darwin" and you throw yourself from someplace high.

It really benefits everyone when you think about it...

And in closing, here is the saddest thing I have read yet today:
[Scooter] Libby faces up to 30 years in prison, though under federal sentencing guidelines likely will receive far less.

May corruption and lack of responsibility reign supreme.


Confidential to Mike: It was great seeing you again, I'm sorry it was only for like 20 minutes. I hope Kirkland treats you well.

Wild Sage Growing In The Weeds

We're coming up on the 2 year anniversary of this blog pretty quick here and I have written at least 3 posts about seeing The Mountain Goats. Well, thanks to Mo Money Mandy and some grandparent babysitting, we went and saw them again.

I'm not going to go into a huge MG love fest again, there's only so many ways that I can describe how much I love what this man does, and honestly words end up failing me miserably. If you need some reminders and want to read some gushing and drooling words about previous shows, please see here, or even here.

Friday night’s show was a bit of an odd venue. It was a fairly swanky dinner theater situation. We sat in curving and high backed booths, eating tasty but overpriced pan-Asian concoctions and drinking ourselves silly. To be sitting at a table with wine glasses while this feller, who can throw out more fire than a backwoods southern Baptist preacher, came on stage to do his thing, it didn't feel right.

Which maybe what put me in such a contemplative mood...

At one point, John put down his acoustic and picked up an electric guitar. This doesn't mean anything to you if you haven't seen a dozen or so Mountain Goats shows, but he never plays electric guitar. I began thinking of Bob Dylan moving away from acoustic shows and playing electric, and what a mad mess that became for his hard core fans - people used to come to his shows just to boo him, an audience member famously called him Judas.

I think we who count ourselves as Mountain Goats fans are willing to follow him down whatever paths he wants to lead us down. Bif has stated before that he is one of the only artists who can play a brand new song and she gets just as excited about it as hearing one of her favorites. I think that as long as he puts as much of himself into it as he does with every show I have ever seen, he could do an hour of Jimmy Buffet and Journey covers and I would eat it up with a great big loving spoon.

I have some minor fanboy complaints (more pre-4AD songs), but ultimately I just dig seeing people moved for varying reasons, by different songs. This go 'round, Lion's Teeth had me in tears, and Mandy was sweetly overcome by This Year. Ultimately, minor complaints or no, a Mountain Goats show is going to beat the living hell out of most other shows I see, and do it with a wide smile and fey little swirl of the hand.

It was a good time. Thanks Mandy for falling so wholly in, and for the tickets. Thanks Jason, I feel really bad about the wine thing - I will try to make it up. Thanks John, for again coming through my part of the world and rocking it so consistently.

How Many Gears Are On This Thing?

I was walking to my desk, past one of the ubiquitous meeting rooms with the semi opaque doors. Inside the room I could see a young and handsome man sitting alone at the table. He was wearing a suit, and on the lapel was one of the tell tale, white, computer generated visitor badges. He was probably waiting on an interviewer. He looked up as I passed with this swirling mix of apprehension and anticipation.

At first I sort of felt sorry for him, that nervousness must be making him feel a little light headed, a little sick to his stomach. But then I just got this over-whelming urge to mess with him a little bit.

I wanted to open the door introduce myself as Jonas Shea and firmly shake his hand. I wanted to ask him a series of non-sequiturs:
"What's your power animal?"
"List the top 3 favorite crimes you have committed and why"
"If you could gain the power to fly by betraying your best friend, would you do it? What if you only flew 2 feet off the ground and really slowly?"

But I only flashed him a commiserating smile he probably couldn't see and continued on towards my desk. Man, this coffee tastes good.

Last night I was having a lot of difficulty dropping off to sleep. I tried using a technique I had used in acting training to quiet my mind. I closed my eyes and focused on the little blueish lights that live on the inside of my eyelids. I will usually watch the shapes sort of expand and contract until I can no longer hear all the chatter of my brain.

So last night I'm watching these blue blobs do their thing when said blob becomes an anthropomorphic, purple cartoon thing. It turned into a roundish smiling face with legs. It looked like the sort of thing some marketing genius would use to peddle juice substitute to small children. This thing, I'll call him Anthony (for no real reason whatsoever) appeared in a well appointed loft with a couple of attractive twenty-somethings.

Anthony talked to them in a ridiculously high-pitched voice and these two responded to him as if he weren't a cartoon. They did occasionally look over his body/head and give each other knowing glances that said as soon as Anthony stepped out to get a pack of smokes, they were going to discuss how ridiculous they really thought he was.

I can't remember anything the Ikea hags or Anthony were talking about, but I do remember the young man of the duo saying, "Remember what John Waters told you?"

I opened my eyes at that point trying to remember what it was that John Waters had told me. It took a minute to realize that he hadn't told me anything as I have never met John Waters - despite having a lay over in Baltimore once.

Yup, sleepy time is serious fun time for me lately…


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: Paranoid Android by Radiohead.

The Folks

My folks are here visiting "us". The quotations denote that dad is here for business and mom is smothering Riley like a great big grandma boa constrictor.

Thankfully I missed out on watching my mother go apeshit over the grandchild she has been hounding me for for 12 or so years. It's sort of like watching a seriously obese man take off his clothes and eat a Fudgesicle.

It's nothing like that, but that made me laugh.

Dad picked me up from work and we drove up towards home with a stop for pizza and wine. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, my father and I have had a tumultuous past, but are now able to deal with each other pretty well. He asked the sort of typical, fatherly, we-haven't-talked-in-awhile questions; he asked about my job.

I know he wishes success for me and has those dad glasses on where he cannot see why his son is not running the world, but it's bad enough that I'm not exactly thrilled with my job so that trying to patiently explain that a corporation cannot exactly create a position for me that doesn't exist was ticking against my temper. He also asked if I had been writing, and again I know that he was being supportive, but it annoyed me for some reason. I tried to short circuit the conversation by simply saying, "yeah a little bit", but I wanted to tell him that I am writing different things and on a daily basis, but most of it would shame him to an early grave, probably somewhere in Pennsylvania.

We finally got into a comfortable rhythm over a pitcher of beer while we waited for the pizza. We talked about our individual experiences with the beauty and majesty of Arizona, his with a recent trip to the Grand Canyon, mine on a camping/hiking trip through the area about 12 years ago.

These are the conversations that I want and expect from my friends. I don't want a lot of chit-chatty, taking care of business bullshit, I want to get down to the real us, talk about things that strike passions and make us laugh. I guess a lot of the frustrations with dad comes from having to wait to get to the good stuff.

Seeing that thrill on his face when his grandson smiled at him for the first time, well hell, that's some of the good stuff.