Row Meets Roses

Back before the grunge vaccine pushed back the rampant spread of dastardly hair metal, there was Sebastian Bach from Skid Row. He had the hair, oh my, did he have the hair. There are some of you out there who may be wondering what Mr. Bach has been up to of late. I’m guessing it would be the same slender group concerning themselves over the activities of Poison’s Bret Michaels.

Well get ready to stop holding your breath…

“I texted Axl,” Bach recalls. “I go, ‘Hey, dude, when are you gonna come and sing on my record?’ I was just joking. But he never ceases to amaze me. And his response was, ‘When? Where? Where is the studio?’ I was, like, ‘Pinch me, I’m dreaming.’”

And then I was all like, pinch us all S.B., we’re all dreaming.


Can you believe it? In our day and age, we’re lucky enough to see the combined “talents” of two frontmen brought together by a complete disregard for their relevancy. Two men who last tasted fame when Bush the First was ass raping the country. It’s nice to know they text each other.

As for music that matters:


Zeptember song of the day: “Kashmir”

Two Word Blacktop

Gentry Retrorocket

Work riding me like a... like a... too damn tired.

Today I mimed punching a pregnant lady in the belly, popping out her kid, slapping the kid and then pushing the baby back up in there. This is the sort of thing that work can do to a fella, and I want to be extra special clear here; bitch deserved it.

So as I had to contend with the fate of the world as it relates to coffee and coffee flavored beverages all day, you get the two word posting. I'm sorry, although this posting is now becoming slightly more than those two words.

I like the word combo, it rolls off the tongue and brings to mind something classic and classy, with just a touch of 50's camp. It does not however bring to mind the collaboration of Axl Rose and Sebastian Bach, and shouldn't everything?


Zeptember song of the day: "Wearing and Tearing". Not so epic sure, but rocks like all get out.

You Will Find The Road

It’s become pretty gray and misty today, making the industrial part of town I’m in at the moment seem all that more industrial. The soft light seems to pull any brightness from the paint, highlights the cracks and crumbling facades. It’s okay, it feels all right. I’ve heard the train whistle more today than I have before, perhaps carried a little further by the wet haze. It seems to be coming from another time, from some lonely place.

That long, low, heartbreaking whistle reminds me of a dream I may not have even had.

Sitting in an empty house; furnished, but with no sign of anyone around. There’s the muffled noise coming through the walls. Sometimes it’s the sound of machinery, sometimes it could be hysterical laughter that might actually in fact be screaming. But it’s the moments where you can hear nothing that feel the more disturbing, as if the thin walls decided to hold onto what was coming through instead of releasing it on.

The light coming through the dirty windows is fading, turning down to a dull and dark gray. The phone you didn’t realize was there, to the right, begins to ring shrilly. Answering it, you can feel this anticipation, almost a fear. At first there’s no response to your “hello”, just that sort of low impact, white noise hum. When the voice does come, it sets up this echo in your mind and you’re pulled into somewhere else all together.

A new room, a new part of a city, the same city you’ve dreamed about so many times before, but never realized until now was the same city…

I blame this train of thought on David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE. It’s as if it has imbedded surreal little David Lynch seeds in my head and now they’re sprouting. It is the most David Lynch thing I have ever seen. It’s as if David Lynch had made some sort of cloning machine, cloned himself, made a pie with his clone, vaporized said clone pie, put the David Lynch clone fumes in a balloon and breathed deep a number of times, then high on David Lynch, David Lynch made this movie.

I am nowhere near ready to review this in any serious manner, except to say that I LOVE the fact that you just keep falling through these holes in the story with what looks like a track to hang a narrative off of (a bent track to be sure), but then you realize there’s no hope for you, you’re lost and left to your own devices.


Zeptember songs of the day: It’s a two-for-Tuesday everyone! “In The Light” followed by “Carouselambra”

Weekend Update

I took a vacation day on Friday as it was a use it or lose it situation, and I don’t like to lose it. Nor do I like Losin’ It which features a young Tom Cruise.

That’s sort of a lie, I’ve never seen Losin’ It.

Even with the extra day, the weekend felt fairly uneventful. Three more shows down, all of them well received. One of the evenings I got so emotional in my pivotal scene that I sort of lost track of where I was. I sort of shook myself out of it and realized that I do need to be aware enough to listen for my cue line. Oh yeah, and on Saturday night’s show, someone apparently had their iPod going in their purse/man purse, pouring tinny sounding music from the headphones; drum heavy and rockin’ music. This is not at all distracting to the actors on stage by the way.

Sarcasm tastes like chicken.

A friend who I had done my actor’s training with in San Francisco came to town and checked out the show while he was here. On sitting over cocktails afterwards he, unsolicited by the by, offered some coaching on where my characters focus should be. As this is sort of the thing he does, not realizing that he comes off as quite a prick, I sort of let it roll and said, “well, I disagree with you.” He continued to push his point and I had to get a little more forceful with him, pointing out that it was in fact me that had read the script, worked with the director and the playwright, had developed the character into what it was – he did not do these things. I informed him that in lieu of telling him to fuck off, I was going to respectfully disagree with him and restate that he was wrong.

Someone pointed out Saturday night that at midnight it officially became autumn, and the very air itself seemed to take the cue. On walking home there was a definite chill to the air that was not there the night before. It was a chill that had been merely a whisper in a crowded room before, a secret that everyone knew but kept hidden out of a strange politeness. I walked down the city facing side of Capitol Hill, letting the intensity of a new season punch me, pushing my breath out in a phantom plume. It had not occurred to me to wear a coat that night and I was cold, no joke, but it hardly seemed to matter.

Sunday night I spent with Kickers, going further out of my way to make him laugh than was probably necessary; it was enough to walk quickly into view to have him squeal in squinty-eyed hilarity. He got a little cranky towards bedtime, as the best of us will. But he went to sleep without much of a fight, or without yelling “shut up” at me and mumbling unintelligently when I try to take shoes off – as some friends have been known to do. After he was out, I busied myself with some light housekeeping, the TV on so I could at least hear “The Simpsons”.

But I overheard a commercial which was for an internet ready cell phone. “When you were young,” the smarmy voice over actor began. “Did you dream of exploring space? Did you dream of a magic box that could bring you information at the speed of light?”

That’s a pretty leading question I thought. He then went on to tell me that the company shelling out cash for his voice has gone and made my childhood dreams come true – assuming my childhood dreams involved the internet. They did not. If said company had turned me into a carnival ride maker, or made it so I could breath underwater, or let me hang out with the kid from E.T., then that would be something.

And that’s what I got… Except for this:


Zeptember song of the day: “Stairway To Heaven.” You say you’ve heard it too many damn times, and I call bullshit on that. Sure it’s been overplayed, but the vague spookiness still lingers, and the thing boils over into a crashing crescendo before sliding back down to a fading darkness. Doesn’t anybody remember laughter? Hell yes.

Hold Steady

Wanna hear something freaky?

Okay, so while we were in rehearsals for the show, the director was taking notes. This means, for any non-theater types, that the director literally writes down things that we screwed up on, or occasionally things that we did very well. During rehearsals, you could occasionally hear our director scribbling furiously on her yellow legal pad (and she uses both sides of the sheet which for some reason endeared me to her all the more) and I would think to myself – “what did I just fuck up?”

It wasn’t always about me, a lesson I still need to learn sometimes. But one time it was. The director’s boyfriend sat next to her during one of our dress rehearsals and at one point grabbed the pad from her, wrote something quickly and gave it back. When rehearsal was done and we sat around the director to hear what she had to say, she stopped for a moment, a questioning look on her face, and said, “Hector grabbed the pad from me and wrote something…”

Her eyes cleared and she looked up directly at me, a slight smile on her face. “He wrote, ‘hold steady’.”

I was about to ask her what the hell it was Hector was talking about.

“Do you know the band The Hold Steady?” she asked.

“Heard of them, but don’t know anything about them.”

“You look exactly like the lead singer; exactly.”

Sure I do, I thought a bit sarcastically. But the following day Hector brought in a magazine with the band on the cover, and low and behold… There was a striking resemblance. I actually thought it was fairly awesome that there could be a lead singer of a band that looked like me:


On searching online pictures at work the next day, I was beginning to get a little weirded out. The guy looks a lot like me. If I didn’t know better, I would think that ma and pa had sold off a twin sibling for some hot dogs and PBR back in the day. If I didn’t know better, I would think that some of the pictures found were actually me. Such as:


I have the same effing guitar!

I went home and started pulling up pictures for Bif to see, to share the freak funk I was wallowing in. As I sat at the computer, I shit you not, the KEXP DJ took that exact moment to play a track from The Hold Steady. It really freaked Bif out, but I was more dealing with the fact that I could be scoring beers in this guy’s name.

Then “Where Is My Mind?” by the Pixies came up next. It still felt apropos to the moment, but this time I was more inclined to sing along.


Zeptember songs of the day: “The Song Remains The Same” followed up by the bombastic blues of Zep 1’s “How Many More Times”.

The Devil's In His Hole

Sittin' here, stewing in a stew of my own stewing due to some technical difficulties with the posting that I wanted to make. Shaking my fists at the ceiling as that's where I imagine the demons of computer issues live and breath - in a red tinged room with lots of sparking wires and half empty mimosas - I was delivered two indications of what to replace my waylaid posting with.

About a week ago, a co-worker and fellow music fan let me know that there was talk of a Led Zeppelin reunion. The words had barely had time to emerge from his mouth, play in the freedom of the air between our desks and dance lightly on my ears before he sent out a small gang of new words to kill the ones he had just let free. It was just a rumor, Robert Plant confirmed it.

A couple of days after that, Bif starts telling me about a Led Zeppelin reunion. I shoot her down in a smarmy and all-knowing sort of way. “Darling,” please imagine this in a crappy, highly affected British accent. “Tis only a rumor, there is no Led Zeppelin reunion.”

Oh, but there tis: www.ahmettribute.com. She emails me with a self righteousness that is, admittedly, deserved.

Moments later, I read a posting by the caustic and sexy Mercedes that she would like to have tickets to said show. Suddenly I’m feeling that the universe is trying to tell me something, and on looking at the calendar I realize what it is.

We’re 18 days into Zeptember, and I have done nothing to celebrate it.

I apologize for slacking. As there are only a handful of days left, I shall focus on the longer, more epic tracks.

Zeptember song of the day: Opening up with the mighty “Achilles Last Stand”.

Opening Weekend

So we opened up the show Thursday night to a sold out house. The shows this weekend felt pretty good, but as there was press in the audience for a couple of those nights, I will wait for the reviews for my validation.

Thursday night there was nervousness, there were your typical “are we ready for this?” murmurs and there was a standing ovation come the end. Of course, it should be said that the audience was filled with members of the playwright’s family. This doesn’t make it feel any less awesome though when people are fervently applauding what you’ve done. If this happened in my jobby type job, I would probably be more excited about getting my ass out of bed on a daily basis.

It does also feel awesome when someone, very earnestly, calls you “brilliant”. Yeah, it’s a bit much and not a critique that I agree with, but it still feels pretty darn awesome. It feels somewhat less awesome when you overhear that same person call the snack wraps at the cast party “brilliant”. I mean they were okay… I found later that this particular person had once found Jesus in drum circle.

Which is right where I left him.

Friday night began with a very large theater faux pas. Now I’m not one for theater superstitions necessarily, but I do stay away from them just to hedge my bets a bit. The big one that most people, theater folk and otherwise, know is that you’re not to wish a performer “good luck” before a show. I’ve let this slide in the past mostly because of the rudeness factor of instructing some well meaning friend on the ins and outs of theater lore when they’re trying to be nice and show interest in what you’re doing. Another biggy that folks may not know if they’ve never done any theater is that you’re not to say “Macbeth” while in a theater, it’s super bad luck. In a theater situation, it is to be referred to as “the Scottish play”. Well, the actress who likes to speak a lot about her other shows, and auditions, and acting classes she teaches, said ‘Macbeth” while we were backstage.

I heard her do it, but as I said I’m not big into that sort of nonsense, so I let it slide. But she made such a big deal out of realizing that she had done it that I began to wonder if she had said it just so she could have a tizzy backstage. Her curse on the show was apparently limited to her own performance, and the uncontrollable barking of a dog outside the theater in the middle of Act 2.

It may have also held over for Saturday where we arrived in the space only to find that our sound equipment had been town apart by the late night improv group who had performed there Friday night. Ahh, fringe theater. There was a panic as the stage manager and director tried to rewire the sound board and mixer, but I tried to stay out of the fracas. This was also where I had made the decision to use the word “fracas” more often.

But these are all just the crazed backstage shenanigans, I’m happy with the how the show went. It’s a piece that I feel honored to be a part of, and feel proud for the work I have done with it.

Catastrophe-Off

Darren called last night. I hadn’t spoken to him since high school, so after a confused and somewhat suspicious “hello,” I asked how he had gotten my phone number.

“Julien,” he said. “Did you hear about Christine? Man, she finally passed away.”

“Wow,” I said, not remembering for the life of me who Christine was. “What happened?”

“Well she was going through this really heavy Beatles phase.”

“I see. Drug overdose?”

“No, why would you say that?” There was a long and uncomfortable moment of silence from the other end before he went on. “She started to take that song “All You Need Is Love” way too seriously. Starved to death.”

“She starved to death?!?”

“That and a raging case of gonorrhea.”

“She starved to death? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“You obviously didn’t hear about Stephan.”

“Drug overdose?”

“No! Why are you… No, Stephan was hiking with his dominatrix when he was mauled by a bear; California black bear.”

“Yikes.” I looked towards the basement door where I could hear some scratching.

“Oh, he survived that. It was the woozy stumble into the patch of clover that got him. Highly allergic.”

“To clover?”

“Pretty rare, but it happens. Didya hear about Felicia?”

“Struck by lightening while drinking out of the bathroom faucet?” I asked, the scratching at the door became more intense.

“No, drug overdose. She was going through one of those Costco size bottles of Tums every other day. So what have you been up to?”

I was going to give a 'not a lot lately' speech, but the clawing at the door was becoming far too insistent.

“I’m gonna be honest with you Darren, I run a sweat shop of sorts. I abduct homeless runaways, chain them up, force them to listen to a lot of Bon Jovi while they work my basement meth lab. I feed them raccoons that I catch in the park and they sleep in piles of their own waste. Now it looks like I have to go. One of ‘em, I’m guessing the one I call Jelly Bean, has broken loose and is trying to get through the door. I got me a Louisville Slugger with nails in it that’s got Jelly Bean’s name all over it. Nice talking to you.”

Aluminum Cat Tongue

Oh, Domino

Dessert Pizza. Dessert Pizza?

I really don’t need to say much more, but then this would be a very short post. But perhaps this is a minimalist track that I will start to take; two or three words, perhaps incongruous, and then move on.

But not today.

Domino’s has introduced a dessert pizza, and for those of you blessed with being in a situation where you’re not inundated with advertising, or live in a country where people realize on their own that sugary, fat laden food items with no nutritional value are remarkably bad for you, here is a run down: Pastry crust covered with crumbled up Oreos and then drizzled with frosting.

I’m fairly sure that I went into a diabetic coma just typing that…

Now before I naysay too much, there are some questions that beg to be asked. When I was driving hastily made, shitty pizzas around for a gig, would I have taken one of these monstrosities home for me and the roommate to plow into? Yes I would have. Back when I spent more time with Cosmic Charlie, my skeleton playing a saxophone bong, strapped to my lips than eating anything green, and I found out that they would actually deliver one of these things to my stoned ass, would I have called up and ordered one? Hell yes, with a side of ranch.

But seriously, I feel there needs to be a call to rationality in here somewhere. Oreos are already the inoperable brain tumor of the cookie world, two – count ‘em, two – cookies glued together with a money shot of frosting. You know what’s a good idea here? Add some more frosting to the sick mess and toss it onto some pastry. It’s like shotgunning a person in the chest, than ripping out and setting fire to the kidney they had donated to a kind and bookish young fellow two years before just for good measure.

I’m not gonna lay a ton of blame on Domino’s here, they did gainfully employ me and my much abused clutch for a good 6 months. I don’t think they would introduce this particular flavor of Kool Aid to the cult if they weren’t pretty damn sure there would be takers. I’m proud this country and I will sing a song of an over produced country flavor while I ingest my unnecessary medication, hurrying home in my urban assault vehicle to feed my kids a feast of fast food.

Did You Think I'd Crumble?

I spent the bulk of this weekend, which turned out to be gorgeous, locked away in a small theater. It’s all fine and well, but not terribly interesting to anyone not there. And honestly, it’s not that interesting to people who were in fact there. So I shall dust through the debris for interesting nuggets, shining pieces to toss out like pennies from the Empire State building and imbed into your skull.

First off, let me state that this theater is small and cheap and not well set up. There are cats who may wander onto the stage at any moment, a light board that will turn the lights off without any provocation, and a dressing room that is no bigger than a prison cell. When you lock 6 actors, and set furniture, into this room things are likely to get a little touchy – in more than one way. In conditions such as this, it would be the perfect time for a diva trip. Oh, actually no it wouldn’t.

I hate diva bullshit anyway, but when I’m already tired and hot, it becomes more and more difficult for me to just put my attention elsewhere. The group diva had her fit and as a way of explanation stated that she had only had one diva fit that day. “One is way too many,” I said dryly from my seat in the dressing room, what used to be a bench in a van. Seriously, this is fringe theater, which means if you cannot deal with uncomfortable quarters and mini catastrophes around every bend, then you should probably go find yourself another effing gig. And find it far from me.

Okay Billy, take a deep ol’ pull on that recirculated air while you stare out at the clear and sunny morning (with probably just the right amount of chilly bite to it), take a sip of you coffee and think about the happy times. Here goes:

I walked out of the theater during a too quick lunch break with the stage manager. He told me that this section of the neighborhood could use a little rezoning, nice it up a little, what with the warehouses and garages. I told him that I really enjoyed coming out of the door and feeling like I had stumbled on some lost industrial wasteland corner of Los Angeles. He gave me sort of an odd look. I tried to explain that a little bit of urban in the landscape thrilled me in a way that is odd, that I loved the parks and the trees and the nice brick buildings, but the fact that there’s a couple blocks of low slung warehouses with ill hidden power lines jumbling the air in the middle of it… Well it’s like a chocolate chip in a piece of banana bread. I could tell I wasn’t winning him over, nor was I explaining it any better than I have here, so I let it drop.

While waiting on a burrito (fish, not so great – not bad, but…) I heard a mariachi version of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” I said to the stage manager, “Hey, it’s a mariachi version of “I Will Survive”, how about that?” And he then informed me of what type of music it actually was, which I promptly forgot. He was more interested in the technicalities than the magic of hearing this song in Spanish, and with horns. And magic it was my good people. The sound waves manifested themselves into a winged dolphin who did rain down little mini churros on us; little mini churros that promptly disappeared, but left the smell of cinnamon and sugar and a general feeling of a pleasant and dry handshake.

There was a moment Sunday morning, a good 7 and a half seconds, where Kickers put up with laying still. I was about to get him dressed, but lay down instead with him on my chest. He was okay with this, as I said for just a moment, looking at me serenely, his constantly flailing hands resting near my shoulders. As quickly as it had begun, it was over. He shrieked with the anticipation of getting into something else, so I quickly got him dressed and let him run with it. But I’m saving it up, those rare little moments of quiet togetherness. I’m keeping ‘em in a jar decorated with Modge Podged pictures of guitars and various tree leaves.

I got home last night and opened a strategically purchased beer. Black Butte Porter, thank you for asking. I sat and let myself unwind while I listened to Bif’s rundown on her day with Kickers and I felt content; tired and a little itchy from the dried sweat and theater dust, but content and at home.

Show opens on Thursday, it’s a mad rush to race, but I think it’s gonna be a good one

Waiting For The Van To Come

Hundreds of little birds perched on the power lines began a general sense of dread as I walked by. Dark clouds and disembodied laughter didn’t help.

The broken, high windows on the impossibly large, impossibly purple building jumped out in the way that dust will be caught in a shaft of falling autumn light. I wondered, not for the first time, if I wasn’t creating the very air around me.

I felt the tension that I was carrying around like some corpse that I felt an irrational need to drag from place to place; I felt it in my back, in my shoulders, in a place a little harder to lay fingers on. I tried to decide why I was letting this one person’s childish issues sully my waters; I was obviously getting something out of it, purging something, atoning for something, or I would let it drop.

A tape trick played in my ear and rolled around in the muck that was seeping up in my mind. I thought of a person with his affected accent that I imagine he imagined made him sound theatrical and jaunty. It felt like that skeleton smile locked away a plague that could possibly take us all. I could see through his skin, beneath his bones, and could see the disease he held, I could read it like it was large print.

I recognized it in others around me, in the problem child causing me headaches, I recognized it in myself. As they say, it takes one to know one. Sometimes I’m just a carrier for the disease, sometimes I’m absolutely rife with it.

The train whistle announces itself and still manages to sound somewhat forlorn and lonely even in the middle of a city. I can feel dour thoughts being pulled away by the sound like the shedding of skin, the left behind dialogue of a character.

Obey Your Thirst

I walked down the hill and towards the freeway this morning as the light was still a rumbling and pale blue in the East. The city was still draped in shadows, but they were growing softer, seemingly lit from within by a jittering of energy, the shaking of a new day unfolding itself.

I walked by an old brick building being torn down. The building had once had an age faded advertisement for Sprite painted right onto its bricks. Something about that just defines the Seattle that I knew from my youth, brick buildings with ads applied directly to the building materials. That Sprite advertisement always made me grin in a wistful sort of way when I walked past it, it sort of hurt seeing it so violently ripped away. It was as if a bandage were being pulled away complete with the skin beneath.

But as the demolition continued, and you could see actual rooms of the building, old apartments, torn in half and exposed to the morning sky, it actually made my head hurt a little bit. I was seeing rooms that were once filled with people and lives in a way that I should not be seeing them; naked and dying. I imagined some condo developer masturbating furiously over the rubble.

But as I averted my eyes to pass the demolition site, and walked across the northbound lanes of I5, I happened to glance up at the courthouse that sits squarely, that sits like a lesson in geometry, right by the side of the freeway. What had caught my eye, where my eye would tend to skirt past this monument to gray squares, was a high intensity flashlight beam shining in one of the darkened upper windows. The beam swung around a couple of times and then went dark.

I thought of Nixon. Well, honestly I thought of a sniper going for targets on the freeway, because apparently that’s where my mind goes first. When logic jumped in and pointed out that a courthouse would be a tough place for a sniper to set up shop, I moved on to Nixon and Watergate. And for just a moment I got a taste of seventies paranoia.

And it tasted like grainy and oversaturated film stock. It tasted like the works of early Scorsese, of Friedkin and Lumet.

I started to think that I had heard a lot about the ol’ seventies paranoia, and while it was probably justified what with the well documented actions of those in power, it was probably most certainly fueled by the drug of choice at the time. Coke can apparently turn your world all shades of grainy and oversaturated.

Then I started to think about how the drugs in fashion shape the age, about how all the Jerry Springer bullshit out there can probably be traced back to meth in some way. Then I got to thinking about how sad this train of thought was, how those rails weren’t gonna lead anywhere good.

I tried harder to focus on the somewhat dark Puget Sound coming awake, tried to imagine the mystery person with the flashlight making shadow animals.


Song Stuck Inside My Head Right Now: “Non Alignment Pact” by Pere Ubu.

A Line In The Sand

Hey everyone look, it’s September! The weather today even feels all autumnal (I just popped wood using the word autumnal) today; damp and dark, and I don’t know, I’m down with it.

As has been duly noted, I love me some fall, and I am looking forward to a hard chill and woodsy smell to the air, to sweaters and heavy coats, but mostly to the fall cooking. Again it’s time for soups and breads and pies and hearty things that warm the apartment and steam to cold windows.

But before all that, before we get all hyper excited about the things to come, I wanna sit and relish the final dash of summer we had this weekend.

Saturday, we decided to get on out into the world being it was sunny and we had nothing else to do. We went out to Snoqualmie Falls, which was actually quite a bit more awe inspiring than I thought it was going to be. Kickers seemed to be enjoying himself, laughing that laugh that is the heroin/avian bird flu of the laughter world; so contagious and so addicting that it should be listed with any variety of state and federal bureaus. It was the sort of laughter that he just becomes overwhelmed and starts pumping his fists like the newest prize fighting champ. He was strapped to my back for awhile and when he realized that it was me there under him, he squealed with delight and yanked on what remains of my hair. I know it sounds annoying and painful, but it was adorable.

And that’s the end of the “how cute the baby is” section of today’s posting. I’m sorry, but the kid is cute. Lucky too, or I would have sold him for hooch awhile ago…

In another Twin Peaks related weekend visit, we then made our way over to North Bend to have lunch at Twede’s Diner, whose outside was used for the diner shots in the show Twin Peaks. There was no jukebox playing reverb heavy guitar instrumentals, no place lost in time feel, and the waitresses did not look like Madchen Amick or Peggy Lee. There was not a lot to the place for me to recommend eating there aside from the railroad tracks behind it, from which you got a great view of Mt. Si over the buildings. That and the super white trash argument which occurred at the back door between what I assume (hope) was a mother and son – which led to an imagined daily household routine that made me sad enough to drop it like a broken glass baseball.

As the wife and kid napped, I drove the back highways and roads out to where I grew up, enjoying the few places where I could still find roads surrounded by trees, trees standing stately in that tense phase between summer and fall. We cruised aimlessly, enjoying the air and the sun, until it was time to drop the little man off at grandma and grandpa’s.

Bif and I went out for a date night for the first time in awhile. We had ourselves some pretty amazing Thai food and went and saw The Simpsons Movie – which was hugely satisfying. We went for a few drinks afterwards, but I was pretty tired at this point and feeling fairly annoyed by the other people out on the town. I realized that I had passed some invisible age/attitude line that when you’re younger you never think is going to happen, but it does, it does… And then I realized that other bar hoppers have always annoyed me and I got over it.

The rest of the weekend disappeared in a haze of cleaning, baby proofing and rehearsals. I honestly doesn’t feel like there was even an extra day there.

I do feel like another start line has appeared at my feet though, and I’m pumped to run. I would feel refreshed and energized if I wasn’t so damn tired…