guitarded

So I've been wanting a baritone guitar for awhile, because I love the sound thanks to Corin Tucker and Ian Mackaye and countless others. I like the possibilities of being an octave lower, of being able to play bassline-like or heavy chords and have the advantages of the higher end too.

And there's someone selling one on Craigslist that looked really nice so I emailed the guy about it and through the course of the correspondence I asked about giving it a try as far as playing goes and he kind of flipped out and said that these were collector's items and if I played it it wouldn't be in mint condition anymore and how if I wanted to "test drive" instruments I'd be better off going somewhere like Guitar Center.

Well, okay then. Last time I checked, the majority of people who own instruments intend to play them, right? I mean, it'd be like buying a car without taking it for a drive to see if it actually runs. I'd want to know that the pickups work, and the neck feels good and the tone is what I want, which is why I don't buy things like this over the Internet. I'm sure that being a female didn't help my case either, because we all know that ladies never play anything except piano, violin, or an acoustic guitar like they're in Lilith Fair.

So I'm a little miffed and also glad that the Red Flag of Douchebaggery has been raised so I know better, and say never mind and omit the "sorry I asked," and got an email back about how he was glad I was being honest about not being a "serious buyer."

Really now. If I wasn't serious, I wouldn't have inquired, right? But yeah, I guess I'm not worthy or not serious, because guitars are meant to be in glass display cases and collected like sports cars and baseball cards instead of played. Who would ever do that? How could I be so dumb?

these shrouded temples

The pallor of grey and mists obscuring cathedral spires and housing projects in the distance. "It's disgusting" she says, just as I say I love this. If it was still daylight upon the end of my shift, I'd be out tromping through the cemetery taking photos of angels through the gauze of condensated rain.

Instead, I feast on leftovers and the communal coffeepot. Such is the glory of the Peonage, especially given that I broke Rules We All Forgot About 4.126 involving accidentally dropping a cussword in class in regards to United States foreign policy. Randal was of course amused, I'm of the school of thought that while salty discourse is more effective in small doses, there's no other way to describe despotic nations that we deal with as either being on the shitlist (Libya, Venezuela) or not (Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia).

Oh well. Either I'm not as worried about how I'm perceived or I was slightly amused to be reprimanded for a slip of the tongue when my classmates are talking about how we should drill everywhere and blow things up but this is where I am totally like my dad, or something. Oh well. If I'm the Jennifer Finch of the class, so be it.

click and clique

Less nervy this time, showing up and plugging in. No worries of doing cover songs for which I have disdain that smacks of unadmitted musical judgment. She has demos on her laptop recorded with a synth, like larva waiting to explode the chrysalis in glory, and my hands stretch into chords, coaxing out reverb-drenched riffs, bending strings, fingers gliding up and down the frets.

I love that it's not just verse-chorus-verse that there are pieces and parts and interludes. Having to keep time and remember how all these go together is a new thing compared with Peter-Hooking basslines to try to make pedestrian suburban punk sound more interesting. Maybe I'm more of a prog-head than I'll admit, but I love that I have the freedom to let out my inner J. Mascis that it's more than three chords. No vocals yet but hopefully those will be forthcoming and something beautiful. I'm more into catharsis than aggression these days, and if this all falls through the ability to string chords together and maybe pair those with some verbiage seems like a less mysterious art now that it's been tried.

We are still shaping, trying to figure out the sonics, turning notes into chords, and I'm scrawling out chord progressions, codes of letters and numbers on pieces of notebook paper, adding minor chords, attempting to flesh out these skeletal ideas into something I hope I can say I love as much as what I've heard others do. I'd love to do something this beautiful.



I saw this band open for Agalloch earlier this year and wasn't expecting something so incredibly beautiful with a name like that, which is probably the point. Really should have bought the album then, but there's a new record coming out, and I fell in love with the cathartic crunch and shimmer of guitars and sinuous basslines and I'll make good I promise this time.

I guess one never knows how these will work out, but the act of stepping out and getting over the nervousness to see what happens has been liberating in itself, and gives me another thing to look forward to after sitting at a desk and pushing papers, ivory tower style, negotiating the tricky terrain of a world of grownups who still jockey for position in the pecking order, whose words and demeanor belie an ultimate dishonesty and embarrassing insecurity.

My circle has always been open to some extent to those with some degree of compassion and a lack of pretension, as I try not to judge others based on tastes or initial appearance, but when someone wants to join the Order of St. Drogo, someone who's denoted other compadres as being "weird"(if you think that about him, than I'm sure you're saying it about me) and seems more interested in gleaning workplace gossip and being in good with the Powers That Be, I'm not inclined to extend the invitation. It's not the economics or the upper echelon with which I take issue, but the lack of trust. Besides, this is the coffee pot of Peonage not the water cooler, no juicy gossip, just the indulgence of lifelong geekery for the stranger side of all things. And, of course, that's just too weird.

More and more I find myself putting up walls, weighing each word so carefully, smiling wide to distract from my narrowed eyes, because I know that if I don't care for someone, it's really hard to hide. I don't know how to truly be dishonest.

And I sit in the halls of power, listening to the conversations of those above, as wording is shifted and the dialogue is not born out of genuine feeling but a constant mental calculation, and I see the masks drop enough to recognize them as such, finding what is underneath so distasteful that the coverings seem like they make sense.

it's all blueprint, it must be easy.

Rumblings of probably not-reckonings heeded, the darkness that comes so early, the quiet street where nobody seems to live, haunted by ghosts of gentrifiers past, of immigrants and regular folks, boarded up buildings.

But I drive through the rain to make art, and my fingernails have taken a beating from scrubbing with all that acetone and pumice and I show the new student the treasure trove of colored powders and jars of jewel-toned glass like raw-hewn gems. The time goes by so quickly and I'm trying to decide between hues of ruby, amethyst, aquamarine, amber. There will be time for all of these and more.

And tonight, music. I am past the feelings of insecurity, of not being cool enough, of not being good enough, even though I'm not as technically proficient as I once was, which tends to happen when one's tastes shift from reading the John Petrucci columns in Guitar World to listening to the squalling guitars of Repeater for the first time. I know more what I'd want to do.

What I wonder is if this is what I want to do.

It's said there's only two types of music: good and bad, and to some extent this is true. But anyone who has any shred of geeky love for tuneage knows that the strands of genre can be split indefinitely. What kind of 'rock' does your band play? Does it jangle, does it plod, does it shred, does it shimmer? Do you want to save the world or smash it or just get laid? Does it matter? Are you pop-punk or old-school punk or crusty punk? Is your metal classic/thrash/black/death/core/whatever?

Does it matter? Do we get along? We don't have to see things the same way, but are we wired to mesh so well that the creative sparks fly? There's been so many times where it hasn't despite our best efforts. When I didn't know what to play, when Ithought your lyrics sucked, when you all wanted to play Bikini Kill, when you were all friends and I was the interloper, when you said I was ok for a girl. , when me and the drummer decided we didn't want to play with them anymore and quit, when you were a drama queen and maybe I was too and we didn't get along as friends let alone as bandmates, those times I waited for practice to end so we could wander in the woods and be existential beneath the stars and trees.

And now my vision is focused, and I still dream of weekend warrioring, of getting off work to make noise like I did so long ago and dreamed. I miss it so much in these times when the art and the writing just don't coalesce. And maybe by now I'm just getting too old.

weekend warriors

I didn't make any money for the station during our annual fundraising thing, due to being on so early and everyone in Cleveland who still listens to terrestrial radio being poor.

Well, you're on really early and it's when a lot of blue collar people go to work," says a professorial looking friend of the DJ after me. "Blue collar people usually don't listen to college radio anyway."

OH REALLY.

It's not like I haven't run across this attitude in other places, and it seems prevalent among the multiply college degreed that make up the fields of academia and technocracy. The people who listen to Springsteen and Billy Bragg and talk about solidarity "working people" when it's a convenient talking point involving unions that they're not even in, yet condescend and disparage those whose hands are cracked and dirty at the end of a ten-hour day as ignorant of the finer things in life because they don't sit around all day reading blogs at work. "Well they probably listen to Nickelback and drink beer and watch football and don't read books."

Well how the hell do you know? And so what if other people do? No one's making you conform to that. And I wonder if they have any friends outside of their profession or income demographic or political affiliation, honestly, because when things are painted with this broad of a generalized brush of cultural snobbery, my Inner Parmastani kid gets mad because it's so condescending and at least in my experience (which admittedly might be both biased and also lucky), not totally true.

And it's funny, because a good amount of my callers are warehouse workers and third shifters who want to hear King Sunny Ade or really liked that Siouxsie and the Banshees song or would have loved to have a pair of those tickets to see that band but they work second shift and can't go. I think of people like my dad and his friends, my friends who are also peons who can talk as smart as any PhD scholar who just never had the opportunities or ambition or the convenient accidents of birth.

There is so much more nuance than credit is given, so many brilliant minds without the letters after their names who don't even give themselves credit for their brilliance because they like what they like and have nothing to prove. The poets whose brilliance will blush unseen in desk drawers or shared by a handful of others, the musicians whose gifts never leave the living room, the artists whose canvases are stacked in a corner and given away to friends, the infinite basement rockers with day jobs and sometimes kids who get their catharsis out on the weekends and after dinner.

But I hold my peace, because I haven't had my morning coffee, I don't know this person and will probably never see them again, and there are some battles just not worth fighting. This is our noise too.

girls go to mars

Once upon a time, I wanted so badly to be in a band. Via my dental work at Case by a rockabilly-loving resident, I was hooked up with his prof's daughter who played the drums. They lived in a very nice house in Berea with a room off to the side full of amazing guitar gear and a four-track recorder.

We attempted all sorts of sounds and projects, and at that time I didn't know how to sing (ah the wonders of embracing the alto and learning to transpose to different keys since!) and we had a revolving door of acquaintances with which we played, often with varying results, some lasting longer than others because sometimes they really didn't know how to play and just wanted to say they were in a band or they were in bands with other people or whatever.

After the short-lived punk band in which I played bass and we quit before playing a show that wouldn't have happened anyway, there was a brief all-girl project that resulted in a cassette tape with some Bikini Kill covers and our attempt at sounding like a Kim Gordon-fronted Sonic Youth track. For all the feminist rhetoric of my bandmates, that soon also went down in flames as I really don't like Bikini Kill and wanted to play something with more than four chords, and one of the other girls started dating some guy because most of the uber-feminist-I-don't-need-a-man girls usually end up doing. For those of us who prefer the company of the male species but always seem to end up being the platonic homie, this is frustrating in its irony but that's a whole other post.

I have not played these tapes for anyone for obvious reasons. After that, my drummer friend got sick of all this and went off to an Ivy League college and out of all my former bandmates, I'm still in touch with only one, incidentally the one who took the band breakup the hardest.

Ten years later, I'm driving back to Berea and getting utterly lost. I've been itching to play music in a more noise-making capacity for awhile now, so thanks to the strange connections made over fiber optic cables and a shred of musical commonality, I'm plugging my guitar in, tweaking the tone knobs on the amplifier and my distortion pedal as we try to find some common ground between my absurd college radio eclecticism and ultimate corporate rock tendencies that mesh well with the 90's rocking of the rhythm section and I wonder what the singer who's a few years younger than us and got the whole thing started thinks since none of us are really metalheads or at least that's not the style we play or it's not always that kind of metal.

We settle on the Cure and on Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' because it's something everyone knows, and while my fingers are used to strumming from doing church music and bluegrass, I find that all those years of noodling on my dad's Gretsch in the basement haven't been for naught, as my fingers loosen and I have the back of bass and drums and rhythm guitar courtesy of the girl who just arrived.

I'm tremolo-picking on the upper frets and noodling through pentatonics, bending strings and sustaining notes with the whammy bar and letting the tremolo from my ancient amp reverberate like crush with eyeliner. While the others take a break, me and the bassist mess around with songs that we grew up hearing on the radio but turning them into something more feminine and melancholic and find that our voices harmonize well.

I wonder what this may or may not coalesce into, because there are so many dynamics and so many unknowns and so many ways in which tastes converge and also don't. I don't understand the love of Kittie when there are infinitely better and more interesting women making music. I still don't know how one gets through 20+ years in American subcultural life without ever hearing a song by Nirvana or Alice in Chains, or maybe I'm just more irrelevant than I first thought. It's highly possible.

I'm pondering the infinite strands of subculture and taste beneath the all-encompassing tag or rock and or roll. I have the certain sounds I like, and the things I play, and while I can break out of that, it's still where I ultimately come back to. I want to play songs that would move me if it wasn't me.

I love melodic vocals and strange harmonies, glorious layers of distortion, sinuous basslines and insistent drums. I love guitars that shimmer, crunch, and cry. I'm feeling old and past the point of wanting to make it good, and for now, I will play well with others, and see what comes.

All I know is that I still want to be Kristin Hersh when I grow up.

holding sand

Did you get any good pictures?
I got one.
Yeah, none of mine came out because of those drunk guys...

Not even the absurdity and general jerkitude of aging bros (how these dudes got married is beyond me) getting wasted to alternative-ish rock played by veterans of the NY straight-edge scene while yelling out requests for Quicksand and the Gorilla Biscuits that were understandably ignored could get in the way of reliving my years of gauged ears and still-existent teen angst straddling the world of radio rock and the first dives into the underground.

Everyone else seemed to be about my age, the longhaired Quicksand fans excepted. The drunks were annoying and we were relieved when they went back to the bar because we could watch the band without them in front of us, but I was in good company with my long-time female companion in rockingness Kristy and the guy standing next to me with whom I exchanged grins and eye-rolls and later numbers when a mutual affinity for exploring rocky parts of the Cuyahoga Valley and the dulcet sounds of Kyuss was discovered.



I like my weird tuneage, but my standby has always been loud guitars and the perfect alchemy of anthemic melody, cathartic angst and dissonance. There's a new record, one that's not bad, but I think most of us were there for the old stuff, cheering as the opening chords to 'Travel by Telephone' rang out, nodding along to the extended jams of 'Everything Has Its Point,' singing every word of 'Undercovers On.' I wonder how many other people hear have had this album soundtrack their teenage drama and growing-up angst the way it has for me, the way we hang on every word and chord change, waiting for the crescendo of guitar and drums.



They end with the cover of 'How Soon is Now?' and while I've never been a huge Smiths fan, I've loved this song and this cover especially and I'm damn near euphoric as we belt out "I'm human and I need to be loved" and Walter tells us to go home (and presumably cry and want to die perhaps). It ended the night perfectly and we drive home listening to Faith No More, spaced-out and laughing as the world feels full of possibilities once again.

color and sound

A day off spent in Oberlin, walking paths through the woods with my friend and her daughters and as-yet-unborn son, as we catch up and the kids are picking purple flowers and scarlet leaves. Our progress is slow due to the little feet walking alongside us but we crunch the leaves, inhale that certain autumn smell, stop to listen to the symphonic drones of cicadas, frogs, and birdcalls.

I wander around the square a bit before heading over to the art center to pick up my plates and jewelry pieces, which will then be immersed in nail polish remover to get the toner off. I forgot to reverse the image of this Harry Clarke illustration, but the detail on this came out so beautiful that it almost doesn't matter.



Picked up Christine in Shaker and we went up to Coventry to hang out and wait for the Wild Flag show to start. The last three shows I've been to have been metal bands therefore mostly dudes, but this crowd was low-key and energetic in the right way. The encore seemed a bit rushed and when Carrie said that Cleveland's a big city compared to, say, Omaha, we realized that Omaha actually has more people than we do.



It seriously warms my heart watching other women rock out. I'm not sure why. It just does.

low-res from someone else in the audience last night.



higher res from another show:



Drove home with my ears ringing and wondering how I'd function today but caffeine works its wonders and I've got tonight to crash.

I'm small, like a superball...

As I need the caffeine and want to check email, the coffeeshop up the street is a nice morning refuge, where I can sit in the corner and watch the world go by, thankful that despite the serious drama of the weekend, there are some things to look forward to, art-making and live music (hopefully with pictures to follow), beautiful fall weather outside. Sometimes the only thing one can do is keep on going.

boys go to jupiter and get more stupider

Doing an early morning radio slot means that few listen, and fewer call. Occasionally I've gotten some weird ones, or the ones who want to one-up my musical acumen, or the "hey who is this band/song/singer?" or the ones who want to hear Rammstein or 80's house 12-inch singles or Tenacious D. Sometimes I get creeps too, but I don't give my name out, and I don't take calls over the air so I don't have to deal with too much most of the time.

As it's early in the morning, I don't tend to play anything heavy until I wake up, so it's mostly African grooves, Britpop, and trip-hop, though recently it's been a lot more moody alt-rock more and more. A lot of this includes female vocals just because I like the way they sound, not because I'm Kathleen Hanna 2.0 but more because bands like Echobelly and Throwing Muses and they don't get much play elswhere.

This morning, I gave away tickets to see Wild Flag, who I'm going to next week, and got a call from someone who used my playing of mostly female musicians to rant about the superiority of Manly Men of Manliness and Manly Music over the perceived weakness of the fairer half of the human race, and that our day was coming and someday we would be "put in our place" or something because things were going to change in 2012. I thought he was joking but then I realized that he really was this ridiculous and so I was laughing at him and being half-asleep snarky about how proud I am of him to be asserting what's always been his until he hung up.

I was planning to amp it up a little bit, but figured that it'd be a good time to dedicate some good loud and girlish tuneage to the dude, so hopefully no one's lurking in the parking lot waiting to ambush me next week.

Seriously Youtube? No actual version of 'Golden Ocean?' Ah well, I played this 50 Foot Wave cut too.





And the Bellrays, because if this is the new incarnation of Racist Caller, I might as well mess with him even more.



He didn't call back, but someone else did wanting to know more about one of my favorite Kristin projects so score one for the ladies, right? That's what I thought.

and so it begins again

Like buzzards circling over Hinckley Lake, it's time again for the annual get-off-my-lawnism debate about the current batch of Rock Hall nominees, as if it isn't already more than predictable after how many years of this, post-freedom-rocking boomers. Inevitably, there is a disco act, and in the last five years, a hip-hop act, and some 60's bubblegum pop group that I've never heard of.

Because this city is still stuck somewhere in the vortex of 1975-1987, one would think that the most pressing issue affecting the average Clevelander is not corruption, a craptastic economy, and failing schools, but that their favorite somewhat dorky 70's prog bands aren't liked by people in New York who don't even care that we the relative yokels exist. Still, there seems to be this inherent need within the rustbelt to be validated by the arbiters of some strange standard of cool on either coast, which isn't all that cool anyway, considering that these are people are mostly industry hacks and hangers-on.

While these debates make for slightly less divisive conversation than politics over morning coffee, it's a source of amusement to read the comments on Cleveland.com and visualize all these grown men (I'm assuming they're mostly dudes older than me, sorry male species!) getting angry on the Internet due to the perceived snubbing of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

It's also amusing to me to read comments referring to Metallica as a "Poor Man's Led Zeppelin" and Rush as "a garage band that plays the same cord over and over again," and why is Parliament-Funkadelic in there because they don't rock because obviously they've been listening to Atomic Dog instead of Maggot Brain. Of course there's the terribly stereotypical and borderline comments about hip-hop, allegations of political correctness, the required appearance by the local legion of KISS fans, and people all but threatening to fight each other over the merits of Jethro Tull vs. Donna Summer.

Anyways, I talk tuneage with my fellow peons all the time, and it gets snarky, but it's nothing to come to fisticuffs over.

respite

I haven't been good about posting pictures because I'm a PC person who owns a Mac, but these are from Dike 14 on Saturday, which is an awesome place.







I've been a mess these past few weeks, with everything going on, and the change of seasons, and the feeling of stasis. I went for a good two weeks of eating dinner alone unable to string two words together in conversation, but yesterday was beautiful even if it began feeling utterly overwhelmed and broken. Intangible divinity once again transcended at the moment of my leastness and deepest doubts in ways that are nearly impossible to explain, and it ended up being the first really good day I've had in months.

I meet up with Tangerine for the first time since this summer, and epic plans were altered to instead hang out at the cemetery because it was a beautiful day and it was close by. Lake View is massive and we went down the "nature walk" path and ended up somewhere completely different and somewhat deserted, with my nice camera getting lots of use.



I love this angel so much.



Shadows of leaves on the bronze doors of the tombs.



daddy long legs spiders guarding mildewing silk flowers. This crypt had this weird echo effect which meant we were saying all sorts of absurd things to hear the reverberation.



This one I'd never seen before and was in the middle of the woods.



Japanese maples turning colors, the way these branches bend is beautiful to me.



This was creepy enough from this angle, and then we realized from walking around to the other side that the little boys were naked, which is even creepier. I don't understand. By this time, we'd wandered around a lot and got hungry so we got pizza and gelato and sat at the little cafe tables on Murray Hill conversating until it started to rain and we both needed to get home anyway.

I got home later than I thought I would, and while buying earplugs at the drugstore for the show tonight, got a call from Muk, who was down at Edgewater and wanted to hang out. I didn't want to bother with opening acts for the show, so I joined him on the pier as we watched the waves break on the rocks and talked about everything until the park ranger started coming around and I had live music to go see.



Got to Peabody's about five minutes before Katatonia got onstage, got my much needed catharsis of moody rock and Swedish accents, the only sour note being the drunk blonde metalhead Snooki type who tried to start a pit and kept slamming into me ostensibly because I was about the same size and didn't have anyone with me. I'm too old for the mosh thing and didn't want to get into a chickfight when there's good music to get introspective to so I got out of her way after she grabbed my shirt by the bra straps and started pulling me, and found more chill people on the side (kids with their confused parents) to stand by.

Still, it was a good show, they played a long set and I was able to lose myself in sweet sounds and indulge my inner techie geek by checking out the chords, deciphering tunings and time signatures because I spent my teens reading guitar magazines instead of Seventeen. Most of the crowd except for the girls were chill. Seriously, ladies, you're doing us females who dig the heavy sounds a disfavor.

No pictures, as I had the little point and shoot and forgot to replace the memory card. Thankfully Randal's more organized than me and has the visuals.

antisocialite

A cup of black tea scented mango and an almost-finished paper, the comfortable introverted companionship, the acquaintance made of Kandinsky in the name of attempting to making academic absurdity bearable. I can't help but try even with the work hard now/slack later ethos that's characterized my entire academic life. I barely have the ambition to be an artist or a writer, let alone pursue degrees and that kind of trajectory. Instead, I mess around, feed my brain, hang out with the souls I enjoy when I get the chance to.

The thought of sitting in a classroom of unbearableness after a long week led to a long-deferred and much-needed lunch hour excursion of food consumption, hanging out at the cemetery, and exploring the old Chinatown and due to my lack of photographic posting, I've decided to tag along with Randal's 30 day challenge thing. So here's the self-portrait, face obscured by signage and reflection to protect the guilty.



It's good for one's soul to be out in the fall air, walking and feeling momentarily free. We were made to walk and stand, not sit crouched at desks and sedentary. Hopefully I'll get to hang out under the bridge downtown but that doesn't look like it's in the plans tonight as I finish what I can before the place closes, thankful for weekends and the precious crystalline interludes of revelation like the first time I heard this album and it blew my mind.

driving music

Things that sound absolutely amazing when one is driving home at night through empty streets past a glittering skyline, the perfect soundtrack to equal parts euphoria and resignation. I miss my late night Cleveland drives so much.

melvins mondays

Despite my frustration with certain aspects of being Peonage, I do like that I can now do my work with the accompaniment of such Batcave-friendly sounds like King Buzzo and friends. And I got to go through files relating to shady city politics and mobsters. And with coffee. Not too bad.

retroactive

The summer of 2002, graduating from high school, hanging out in the garage with my fellow Parmastani power chord enthusiasts, playing ping pong or drinking pop on the old couch with the first and that time only record by Rival Schools that finally came in from the public library on perpetual rotation in the boombox. The older hardcore kids at the community college still swore by the Gorilla Biscuits and Quicksand as superior Schreifels projects, but this has that extra something resembling sentimental value, a time when the future seemed much more open-ended.

I bought this at the Record Exchange with my library page paycheck, me and my sister used to crank this up when the parents weren't home, took it to college with me, put tracks on countless mix CDs and rediscovered it last year when going through all the drama.





So now there's a new album which I guess has been out for a couple months now but I just heard about it because I just assumed that those reunion shows were one-offs. It isn't quite what the first record was but maybe it'll grow on me.





Having never had a hipster card, I'll be the first to admit that my starting point for all things musical was 90's alternative rock, so I'm a sucker for hooky songs with loud guitars and when they come through Cleveland I am so there.

mention something, mention anything

A cup of coffee sans snark of family members or fellow peons, errands run, doing the Typical White Person in Gentrified Area Activity of drinking fragrant and rich caffeine in a classy local establishment after buying homemade bread and a cucumber at the farmer's market, wondering if sarcasm is an adequate counterweight to the inevitable caricature as I notice quite a few Priuses with stickers that read "I Heart Yoga." My old station wagon had a Fugazi sticker and such, but somebody stole the FU part of it off while it was resting in the Rapid station parking lot.

The garden is yielding more squash and herbs than one skinny girl can consume, next year I'll make room for more peppers and the like, the sun has returned, and these afternoons of basking have elicited yet more wrinkles in the mirror this morning. I don't fear gray streaks and crows feet like some women, but to watch the process engrave in my skin is strange.

The rain and sun are welcome, though the storm plus unshut windows put in jeopardy my admittedly hodgepodge stereo equipment yesterday (what's up first world problems!) and attempts to beat the storm were late on my part, standing under the Towering Slab watching the lightning strike across the street as streams of water flowed down the streets, shedding shoes to move drenched and barefoot down sidewalks and across streets thankfully not getting hit by errant drivers under the shelter of the fellow peon's umbrella and a plastic bag, driving through the streets of Clevelandia exultant in the cleansing power of water and lightning and rocking out to the dulcet sounds of Faith No More, enjoying the traffic jam because of the pyrotechnics of the sky, sculpting clay, sharing dinner with good people, reading until sleep comes, the sense of anticipation is beautiful.

let us go then you and I...

The days are not nearly so sublime as the nights, when the heat dies down and the stars glimmer. An afternoon spent in the shade of trees by the lake scooping up salsa and getting philosophical with those who share the same credo but different perspectives as kids and puppies tumbled in the grass.

I like having these conversations with people who aren't my age, who come at the issue from different angles, who've been around longer or seen different things, because otherwise it becomes an echo chamber of mutual affirmation. I thrive on these kinds of conversations

The neighborhood was quiet, but something's happened because the cops are out, lights flashing, flashlights shining on the house next door, sirens in the distance. I don't know what happened.

One of my friends from my Kent days who also moved back here, came over for general west-siding last night, and we bought pasta and fresh oranges and tomatoes from the West Side Market, spices from the Caribbean market around the corner, and I got a crash course in cooking really well. I picked herbs and zucchini from the garden, sliced vegetables as he concocted homemade meatballs seasoned with mint and coriander, simmered tomato sauce on the stove, concluding that Les Discrets is good tuneage to cook to before heading down to the beach for ice cream and the sunset, sitting on a broken picnic table half buried in the sand.

The park closed, and we wandered over to the Italian festival at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, where Cardboard Benedict was hanging out, little kids were dancing to Michael Jackson, the gambling was in full effect, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely in the basement watching some old Italian men play accordion and mandolin as a trio of singers worked their way through old pop standards. To see them having so much fun and playing well, warmed our little musician souls to see them suddenly so young and lost in songs they loved.

I feel like I'm in a movie, he says as we walk through the old Italian neighborhood after scoping out the carnival scene in the humid glow of Christmas lights still strung on balconies, big band music emanating from open windows, someone's dance party on a top floor, disco ball and Top 40, stray cats looking for love, ending the night with some mix CD-making and laughing at terrible movies until it got late.

I love the ease of familiarity, because when we were all younger, we had lots of random adventures like this, flying kites in thunderstorms, wandering through downtown late with a crew of people we picked up on the way to hang out at the playground at midnight, driving up to Cleveland or Akron to see bands, and I was wishing that some of our mutual friends were there to share the magic of summer nights like this again, thankful that the sense of wonder isn't gone even when other things are lost.

desperate times call for desperate pleasures

I think I have a musical crush on Kristin Hersh. 25 minutes of amazing is what this is.

2 more minutes and then high culture and excellent adventures of something or other with one of the fellow workers and creative partners. I have to take the sun and beauty where I can get it.

a quickening and movement...

I actually made an effort to be social and went down the street to see a band comprised of a former classmate, her husband, and a former church bandmate from my Kent days. While it's not the kind of thing I normally listen to they were really good and to see them in this element, watching the chattering at the bar cease when they started to harmonize and the sound began to build...

How does one catch up on five years with acquaintances? They're mostly married and ask if I'm seeing anyone and why that hasn't worked out. I say no it never did work out (and don't add that I doubt it will) and talk about everything else, refugees and getting arrested, making ceramics and college radio. Everything just changed so completely since those days.

My sister is with me and knows none of these people. She asks if I can take her home and I understand, because she's got her own kind of pain she's struggling through, not wanting anything to do with God and having no good friends to fall back on, standing there as the rest of us talk about geeky musicianship, mosh pits, youth crews, and punk bands whose heyday was before her time. It's been at least five years since my last mosh pit, where I flew backwards into a puddle of PBR and rode home on the Rapid smelling like a distillery.

I'd never heard of David Dondero, the headliner, but everyone else seemed to. (I never did get around to delving into folk-punk, ironic given my musical DNA containing both), but his songs hit me in a strange way, this acoustic guitar and sparse evoking lyrics painting pictures of places I've never been, minor chords, the voice speaking of years I haven't experienced, as I laugh at kiss-off songs about employers and the ache taps into what I've been feeling, makes me want to write what I feel, so now I'm sitting at the 24 hour coffeeshop, deserted due to curfew and everyone my age drinking alcohol instead of tea, starting another novel beginning wondering if I'll ever get to an ending. I always end at three pages, sputtering out into fragments and nothingness.

I just need my brain to slow down sometimes because it never seems to stop. I can't bring myself to drink it away, my prayers are a jumble that I'm glad that God can decipher, and everything will happen the way it does, longing in the meantime for wisdom to go with the knowledge, and love that isn't just being nice to the people who are nice to me or the ones I enjoy, but love for the ones I can't stand.

I try not to be anxious, I try to de-tense, because it's nights like these that become dark nights of the soul by default, walking alone back to my car in the darkness glancing behind me, nearly running red lights because it's red light district hour and I get jumpy when I see so many people in the street on that corner, wishing that I could make everything ok when I see so much hurt around me deeper than my own, trying not to think about back-stabbing wannabe overlords, continual dreams deferred, or my lack of inspiration, knowing that sleep is needed and elusive. I always get like this when I don't sleep.