wot say

For the past couple of months, when i travel out northwards from town, and on some days when the wind is coming from the north, i've been greeted with smoke. It's been coming from a fire burning near Crater Lake. Of course, some days, the whole basin was full of smoke and haze from fires burning in all directions... west (and i was never able to find out which ones those were), south (from Modoc, Shasta-Trinity, Lassen, areas). I don't think we ever caught any smoke from the one near Lakeview, but i can't say that for sure.

So today there was an article in the local paper about the the Bybee complex (the one near Crater Lake). This is the first time i've seen anything about that fire in our local paper. You would think they would have had something about it, considering it's been burning since the middle of July. But, with local papers, who knows. I beg them for work as a proofreader so they can stop embarassing themselves.

blink

woke up on Monday, and just now realized that it's Thursday. I hate it when that happens.

where's the big red nose and huge shoes?

It is, of course, difficult to take George Bush seriously sometimes. But Hugo Chavez... man that guy's a straight up clown. I rate him up there with the crazies running Iran and the more rabid of the Islamic ranters. Are we supposed to take these people seriously? I don't see how a thinking, rational person can sit and listen to them without wondering "What the fuck?". And i think it's beyond politics. I think there's a point where you have to look at some world leader or another and throw a bottle of Prozac in their direction. Everyone pretty much discounts Jerry Falwell and Not-So-Reverend Phelps, y'know, we listen to them and think, "jesus, what a crazy motherfucker", but these other loose nuts, they get defended and have their own cadre of blind, delusional apologists. I don't understand.

getting hard to get around

a couple of weeks ago, one of the people who won one of the four photographs i donated for a fundraiser stopped me in the store and told me she loved the photo and was really stoked to have won it, and that i'm good at it. And then over the weekend, someone whose opinion i really respect, as far as local musicians go, said i was becoming a very good drummer. So Smart Half is joking that she's using an industrial air compressor and making my head huge.

But hey, it sure is nice to get a little compliment once in a while, outta nowhere like that.

oh and now i have some drums in the garage. They aren't mine, but they are set up and i have permission to goof on them. So, y'know, look out Neil Peart! I'm comin to gitcha.

Oh and Mike asked a very good question in the comments. I am formulating an answer for it, but i'm also trying to get my SUAPYG thing together for next week. Both involve thinking minus rambling and both are probably going to be intertwined somehow, and what passes for "philosophical" in my world.

How canoeing is like crack.

When you're on a gorgeous river or creek, and you're just paddling along, and it's a winding sort of path...

You think, "man, i need to take a break to eat this sandwich or rest my arms or take a swig of water" and then you round the bend, and there's another bend... and you think "ok i'll just paddle up and see what's around that bend and then beach it for my sandwich" and you paddle around that bend, and there's another one, with a more killer view, so you have to go around that bend, and eventually, "Wow, i'm pretty far away from the landing, i've been paddling for a few hours now and i'm starving"... but then the creek starts getting more and more shallow, and maybe your finally at the headwaters and can take a break and eat that sandwich, rest your arms.. so you keep going and another hour passes by and finally, you're at the headwaters, and you beach it and get out and eat that sandwich finally, and sit around for another hour or two enjoying it. Pretty soon, the sun is heading down, and you realize you'd paddled for four hours to get where you are... "well, with the current it'll probably take half the time..."

the thing about singers

Of course, next week, there may be a "What's up with the sax players?!" post, but i doubt it.

For the first time EVER i actually got royally pissed off at someone i was on stage with. So pissed off that i wanted to bodily remove him from my presence and possibly beat him senseless with my bass.

This guy played it off that he was a singer. And of course, he was well past three sheets to the wind. So he's up there doing some acapella "midnight special", which really didn't sound too bad. I was asked to come back up (it was near the end of the night) and jam some stuff with him and the other guys up there. He asks to do a Johnny Cash song. Ok. No prob. Folsom Prison Blues, the fallback song for this kind of thing. And that stupid song went on for-fucking-ever, like 10 minutes, because in the middle of it, he starts rambling off, and he's SO LOUD he's all i can hear. Ok i know the song well enough i can deal. After that, we were kind of discussing what to do next, and he's hollering fucking redneck jokes, and he keeps hollering even after we start the next song. Redneck jokes.. you might be a redneck if... and i yelled NO!!!! from the back, and he gave me the stinkeye, so i returned it. I'm just irritated now. So we're playing some other song, and he doesn't know it, so he's just standing there and in between the vocal parts that someone else was singing, he's like making monkey noises or something, and hollering some more, and still i can't hear anyone else over his blathering bonehole. And that went on for too long. So we stop the song finally, he goes "Can you play some hillbilly music?" to the lady who runs the jam, and she's being nice, because she's that way, which is why she runs the jam- she's very good at being politic. She's being nice and says "No hillbilly music" and the drunken sot says, "Why not any hillbilly music?" And i've got fucking steam coming out my ears by now, because i'm not always so nice.. and i can't contain myself anymore, "Because it's a BLUES JAM, you FOOL" comes flying out of my mouth. I get two stinkeyes, one from the dude and one from the lady. Dude turns back around and i look right at her and boot this guy in the ass (not really booting him physically, but making the motion of it and getting real close) and being pretty obvious about "get this guy off the stage, please". So he never got off stage. He just stayed up there and said all this drunkass stupid shit, never sang a song, until another one of the guys took his mike away and started singing another song.

Ok so, you know, if you can maintain, AND carry a tune in a coal car, please come up and share. But something like that, don't be surprised if you find yourself flying over the stage rail with the bass players bootprint on your back. Cos i was pissed the fuck off. Not because he wrecked it for me, but because he made it impossible to hear everyone else on the stage, and so we all sounded like shit from the floor. Once he was gone, damn we all sounded pretty good.

See, it isn't always someone else being an asshole. I have my moments, and i totally will cop to them. I really made an effort last night not to just blow it, too, and i did pretty good.

You get these life lessons sometimes when you play music with other people. You don't learn them sitting in your room jammin to "Diver Down". Surprisingly, i've become a much calmer person since i started playing.

well, awesome

Rude bro is going to go cruisin around the state over the next couple of weeks i guess, and when he gets to Smashland is going to call. Then i guess i'm goin to go get him and we'll do some jammin, and the Smart Half will take him to school on the PS2, and i may be able to drag him to a jam, if he's here on the right days. He made a bunch of money fighting fires and he's on a break. He may not have to go back to it when he gets home, at least til next season. Hopefully next year i'll be able to go visit him, not be so cash-strapped, which i'm getting a weeee bit tired of anyway.

it's beginning to look a lot like christmas?!

Wunderground has a prediction for the possibility of snow showers on Saturday night.

We shall see. But that certainly seems a little early. I'll look a little further into it and see what's what. Maybe someone at the weather bureau was smoking before they went to work. Hey, you know, it happens to the best of us.

now that it's the next day...

Yesterday was the sort of official unveiling of the new format over at Faster Than the World. Turtle and Michele have morphed it into a sort of magazine, with a stable of writers sending in things every week. There will be sex, cars, guitars, horror movies, video games, geek toys, punk in the UK, and of course, my own crap, which happens to be about the joys and nadirs of playing music in micropolises. Maybe they aren't even micropoli, maybe they're still minimicropoli. Yah get drunk and say that. Either minimicropoli or minimicropolises. pfft. So, yes, you should go over and read EVERY DAMN DAY, because there will be something new to ogle every day. I'm up on Wednesday. Which, historically in my house is often an incredibly busy day (after about 1pm).

blue sky

sometimes the sky is the same color, the blinding blue. Trips up the river were deja vu with the water shining a certain way, with a warm day on the way but still the morning coolness. Sometimes i see Steve and i sitting in the tavern together, helping ourselves to the tap and crying. I still have the NY quarter i got as change. My hair is longer now, it's grown back. I don't dread the phone like i did after my mom called. But still the sky is the same blue here as it was on the coast, which was the same blue that was ripped apart by the smoke, and the same blue as the sky in DC and probably the same blue in Pennsylvania.

your issues, not mine

Last night at the jam one of the guitar players was wearing this cool necklace i'd sold him. it's a piece of women's jewelry, but he's the kinda guy that if he sees something he likes, he's gonna buy it and he's gonna wear it. Some guy who probably thought he was funny came up and snickered, "You know that's a woman's necklace, right?" to which my fearless friend replied, "I don't have any masculinity issues so i don't really care. And besides, look at the cute redheaded bass player over there. She's got men's pants on. You gonna go tell HER?". I'm the cute redheaded bass player in question. bwahahaah! This new place we jam is funny. A lot of the patrons are so blatantly self-concious about what they wear and how they look, and they try to be so cooooool about it. So me and the guitar player just have tons of shit to laugh at, and all we do is sit at a table sometimes and check people out.

mysteries

ok i'm kind of looking for a job.

I'd filled out most of my app for lithia on their stupid, retarded, IE compatible only, online only bullshit thing, and then went to finish it and found my work gone. That was a few hours of frustration and telling them things no job should be asking for. Imagine how happy i was.

So then i found another thing that i wouldn't mind for a job. And it's a don't call, come down and fill out an app thing. So i've driven down the damn road its on probably four times now and, frankly, i don't see any trace of the place. It's a big place, with a big recognizable national logo, so you'd think it would be hard to miss. So i looked it up in the phone book, and called, and there's no answer.

The universe thwarts me when i look for work. It's why i stopped doing it for a long time. It gets pointless. I should just be in school.

Storm watch

I often feel like i'm the only person in the state who doesn't really care about Storm Large or Supernova or the Rock Star TV show. Part of it is the immunity to TV hype that i think i built up by not having cable (and thus no TV) for ten years. Another part is, damn, i can go hang out with all my friends (who are all musicians here) and see even more incredible drama than you can catch even on the cheesiest soap opera. I think most of the "reality" shows are lamelamelame anyway. Probably because of the group of friends i've had, both here and on the coast. You live in a smallish place, where the majority of your friends are musicians, and just about any TV show becomes boring.

So anyway, you just don't see much blabbering here about what's on TV, unless it's about some cartoon or something, because my real life is sometimes way more interesting to me than anything on the screen. Well, my real life is often pretty boring, but things pop up, usually every Thursday, that make me howl and giggle.

Am i saying i don't have any kind of ego or that i'm perfect? Hell no, i'm as big a fool as anyone else, and there are times my ego is so bloated i can barely fit through any given door, but it isn't fragile and i'm as prone to popping my own bubbles as i am to popping someone else's.

In about a week, i have a post coming up on FTTW that includes an MP3 of one our jams. You can hear me at my most mediocre on it, you can hear me laughing about how bad i'm playing and how bad someone else is. If you're lucky, you might have caught the MP3 of "200 beers" a few months ago on Wyrd's site. Truly awful it was, but i wrote it, i sang it, i played guitar on it, and i had the balls the put it out for criticism. Wonderfully, the worst i heard was "well that's interesting, Pril".

My own world is just much more interesting than TV. And i noticed once, watching Rockstar, when they did pans of the audience, that every single female was dressed pretty similar. Booooooring.

wonderin

my little bro from ontario (doh that rhymes) was working on a wildland fire crew last time i talked to him. About a month ago. I haven't heard from him since then so i hope he's alright, like still working and not in jail or something dumb like that. There's plenty of work for him right now. Unfortunately.

something wyrd!

So very pleased to announce that the wyrdness on the coast has a blogthing again. Go look! Go say HIGH!

if ever there was a day

that i wished i had a gun but was extremely happy i did not, it was yesterday. Every idiot on the planet was in K. Falls, and they were all driving, and they all had cell phones attached to their heads. Even the cab drivers all seem to need to retake basic driving classes.

Also, a minor rant- It's Labor Day weekend. Banks, you REALLY have GOT to remember to have a full staff.

Ok i'm done. Hope everyone has a good weekend. We're kickin it at home (when smart half isn't working). We'll be drinkin on the porch.