Rhythm and Gravy

My new apartment building has turned out to be rather insular. I remember the day I moved in, I said hello to one of my new neighbors and introduced myself. He shook my hand bemusedly and remarked on how little he ever sees any of the other tenants. I haven’t seen that guy since. There’s an unfortunate woman living above me who regularly snores like an asthmatic donkey. I’d love to buy her some breathe right strips or a humidifier, but not if she’s the angry scowling woman I occasionally see in the hall. That woman scares me.

And that’s about it. There are around twenty other people living in the building, and I could get into a bar brawl with any one of them and never know the difference. So much for Fred Roger’s neighborhood.

The one exception is Mark, who lives across the hall from me, and his wife, Annie. My cousin, Brady, was helping me move in when he recognized Mark and called him out. Turns out he’s Ellensburg like us.

Since then, I’ve had the chance to chat with Mark a couple of times. Back in the day, he was with the Screaming Trees, Ellensburg’s claim on the grunge scene. Now, he’s doing the local musician and sideman thing and making a life out of singing and songwriting.

Last weekend, I finally made it out to his show at the Tractor in Ballard. I was blown away. Check out “Let Me Down Easy,” a cut from his new album:

Opening the show was another Ellensburger, Star Anna, much younger and clearly very talented. Catch her tomorrow night at the American Legion. Following her were I Hate The Fucking Eagles, whose I love because of their name (which could only be more awesome if it was “Man Come On I Had A Rough Night And I Hate The Fucking Eagles Man”), and also because they do garage rock covers of Martha Reeves and the Vandelles.

Spend your money on them.

In other news, I now have two SL1200mkII’s. If you know what those are, then you know you’d better watch out ’cause I’m-a go onna tear.

Jason, an old friend from Pittsburgh, got married in York, PA, last weekend, and flew me out to deejay his wedding reception. I’m not one to pass up a free trip to see old friends, so I hopped a plane to Pittsburgh on Friday and drove across PA with good friends Lisa and Rick. It took a whole day of flying and driving, so we barely had time to check in at the hotel, have four Yuenglings (sweet, sweet nectar of America’s Oldest Brewery), iron my DMC*, sleep for four hours, and set up the sound system at the reception hall before the wedding.

The wedding was short, sweet, and very Methodist. It worked — when it was over, the beautiful couple was much more married than before.

Then, as it turns out, I was charged with not only deejaying swing music for a five-hour reception, but emceeing as well. Also, it turns out that I’m extremely insecure about my microphone voice. So there I was, trying to hit “play” while announcing a wedding party and trying to get the phonetics to line up proper. I struggled through it, dances were had, speeches were made, glasses were ding-dinged, and that which had been given by various mamas was shook. The reception was over by 4pm, the bride and groom off to do married couple stuff, and we headed back to Pittsburgh. Rick is a tenor and baritone saxophone playing side man for several bands (including touring with the great, late, great Maynard Ferguson), and so is used to driving his ass all over for various gigs, which allowed me a blessed couple of hours of sleep, crammed into the backseat of a Honda Civic, drooling on my duffel bag.

For those not keeping track, at this point my lower back felt like somebody had implanted a joy buzzer soaked in distilled capsaicin between L5 and S1. But Lisa and Rick dropped me off at Nick and Kate’s place, and Nick and Kate fed me good scotch, took me to the Brillo Box, surrounded me with old friends, and Matt, Gil, Loring, Caroline, Clark, Mark, Jean Marie, and Tamar fed me East End beers and caught me up on their goings-on, and I was reminded that damned if I don’t knows me some awesome people.

Slept like a champ, and caught up with Jenny’s Dave and Dave’s Jenny over breakfast and flew home while Eli and Plax baby-faced their way to a Super Bowl title. Today, a quick 1,000 milligrams of the blue pill erased all memory of back pain, leaving nothing but a pretty sweet weekend trip behind.

* Dead Man’s Clothing, a.k.a. my suit from the thrift store.

My first game at Safeco field, in which the Mariners kick ass over the White Sox 11 to 5.

Love the stadium. Felix Hernandez was a bit slow, but Ichiro delivered on the hype and I was impressed by Andre Beltre and Jose Guillen, whom I hadn’t really known much about before (but then, I’m not much of a baseball fan…).

My sister is a jock. Last weekend, she took second place in the Whiskey Dick triathlon in a time of three hours, twenty minutes.

All of my photos are on Flickr.

After almost two months of apartment hunting, I finally landed a nice place to call home. Seattle turned out to be pretty competitive when it comes to finding good apartments — at least when compared to Pittsburgh. It came down to keeping a close eye on Craigslist and trying to get an application in as soon as possible. I was beaten out of two nice places before this one.

The Sir Lancelot Apartments are in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district. It’s an older building, and came with a free informational brochure on the dangers of lead-based paint. The apartment is a large studio with a separate bedroom, hardwood floors, and just enough character to make me feel like a real human being. Most importantly, it’s just right up the hill from downtown, so I can sleep in another half hour in the morning.

I should be all moved in by the first. Want to help?

Laura’s got me playing blog tag. Seems the game involves posting eight random facts about yourself and then tag eight other bloggers to do the same. I’m cultivating an image of a grouchy cur, so I’m not going to be tagging anyone (the real reason being that Laura is my only blog tag-worthy friend), but if you want to feel tagged, I won’t grump on your fun. In any event, eight wacky facts about myself:

1. The middle finger of my left hand (but not the right) is shorter than the index finger. You know what that means…
2. I sold peanuts at the Ellensburg Rodeo when I was a kid. I had shitkickers and a denim vest.
3. I once completely rebuilt the engine of a 1979 Datsun 510 pickup truck.
4. I’m a sucker for Prince, MJ, and Fountains of Wayne.
5. I shaved my head eighteen months ago and now I’m scared to grow it back.
6. I have jumped out of an airplane 460 times.
7. My favorite fruit is the Jonathan apple.
8. My least favorite form of foliage is the Juniper bush.

I figure that the average person, were she to actually read the above, would have spent upwards of sixty seconds, and for that I apologize and blame Laura, whom I love dearly.

I love Drew Brees. He’s my hero. I worship him so much, I decided that instead of wearing his jersey like your average lame-o fanboy, I’d make a real sacrifice. So I decided to get his shoulder injury!

Sadly, while the shoulder injury is for real, I couldn’t care less about Mr. Brees. I’m sure he’s a great guy, but having a torn labrum is the suck.

Your labrum is a ring of cartilage which rings your shoulder socket and helps keep the ball of your upper arm bone (humerus) in its socket. If the ball pops out, you’ve dislocated your shoulder. I’ve dislocated my right shoulder upwards of thirty times between a frisbee toss gone awry in college and the latest: attempting a throw during a jujutsu practice. I’ve even dislocated it by rolling over on it in my sleep. One of those times, the labrum got separated from the socket bone. The MRI results I saw last week showed about 1.5cm of tear. This last time, I’d popped it out slightly a week earlier, and it was still weak; I should’ve been taking it easy. But that would be contrary to my never-ending quest to wreck myself in stupid ways.

At least this time I’ll have a nice, visible scar to show the ladies (y’all like that sort of thing, right?), unlike my herniated disc or the tailbone injury I got while skiing, where all I got was a pair of purple buttcheeks.

It’ll be outpatient surgery, but I’ll have to go under for it, which I’m not thrilled about. I completely trust Dr. Holland but I just don’t like the general idea of being asleep while I’m being cut on. Recovery will take upwards of six months. Then all you punks better watch it ’cause I’m a-gonna kick your asses. You know what you did.

In the meantime, it sucks not being able to swim and practice jujutsu, which were my major ways of not getting fat before all of this. Now, I’ve pretty much got biking left. I did pick up a nice Italian road rig off of Craigslist a month back. I’m sure I’ll find a dumb way to wreck myself on that, too.

…in which my sister kicks a little ass at the Coeur d’Alene Ironman triathlon.

There aren’t words to describe the inner strength my sister has found in the past year. I can’t remember ever being so proud of someone. Yesterday, Amy capped an incredible journey of perseverance with 140.6 miles in twelve hours, 20 minutes, and 19 seconds. She made it look easy and she smiled the whole way through. At mile 135 we watched a hundred people succumb to walking up the last hill before my sister chugged her way over it. This morning, she said she wasn’t even really sore.

I’ve posted my photos on flickr.

I’m a total sucker for lounge versions of 80s pop hits. And for Bruce Campbell.