100 Days in office.

I choose to celebrate our President's first 100 in song because, well, that's how I do things most of the time. Here it is then, care of Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings. It goes a little something like this (hit it) ...

Wordless Wednesday.

Peace in the valley.

I was caught up in the normally mundane last Saturday afternoon, headed out to check my mail. That's when I noticed something happening on the sidewalk. It took me a few seconds to realize what was happening, but then I saw it: blood. Dark and purple and splattered. There was a lot of it. It was on his hands and arms and all over his dog, the one he was carrying in his arms, the subdued Scottish Terrier. The neighbor-man and I made eye contact shortly before he slipped into the back seat of his friend's car and he asked if I'd place his groceries just inside the door of my complex ... and I did. I noticed there were doggie biscuits in one of the bags.

The short story is that the dog across the street, some kind of pitbull/boxer mix by the looks of him, had torn into this dog, less than half his size. I don't know any circumstances beyond that. I don't even now know if he is okay. I just know that the cough of a moment really twisted me up on the inside. Made me ponder some on the fragility of life, dog or no. If you'd seen the man holding his pet, you'd have seen the care and concern that he was wearing on his face as well; it may as well have been his child.

It reminds me of a day not so long ago on the commute home when I saw two ducks in the middle of the freeway. They were far, far away from any kind of pond and obviously very confused by their surroundings. One had been recently hit by a car and was likely dead, I think ... there were feathers still hanging in the air ... and the other had the sense to be waddling slowly away, while still looking back. He seemed to know what he needed to do on the one hand, yet was hesitant about having to do it all the same.

Again, the story lacked any kind of an ending. And still I was haunted by what I had seen. Thinking of it now, I find I still am.

These are the things I recalled today as I sought for and discovered peace repeatedly. Perhaps, when confronted with the experiences that rattle our insides without any kind of preparation, perhaps it's then that we gravitate to the stuff that can't help but calm us. The 3-mile run around Liberty tonight did that for me. Sitting crosslegged on my balcony at dusk, eating a spinach-avocado-cottage cheese salad amidst the city sounds did as well. Going to bed just minutes from now, knowing there's early morning soccer on the flipside of this evening? I predict that'll give me some peace inside my soul, too.

It's a start, you know?

Because you need to laugh as hard as I did.

And because this reminds me so much of someone I used to work with ... so much so, that this hurts a little. In a good way, though. Always in a good way.

Today in mind food.

It's a simple one I picked up on the last gallery stroll downtown, what, last weekend? Something like that. Simple in its beauty, more beautiful in its actually coming to pass:

"Every man takes care that his neighbor does not cheat him. But the day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

For more on this, visit here http://goldenruleproject.org/.

Wordless Wednesday.

The "Let's see if I can explode my face" edition

Music Man.

So I recently decided to review concerts I go to again. It just makes sense. I used to do it all the time ... it was, after all, my only way into shows during my lean years (and there were a lot of lean years). And, well, it was incredibly fun. Trading my words and thoughts for two or three hours of music? Why not? I rarely thought of it as more than that but, recently, I did some re-reading of some past reviews and decided, you know, maybe it was. Maybe there was a skill there that I'd left behind. I dunno. It's sorta part of this whole re-discovery of who I am as a writer (attached to the fact I am penning poems all over again). But maybe that's deeper than I intended to go. I'll go ahead and leave it at that.

The short story is, I'll be reviewing shows for the City Weekly now. I'll throw up links here as they come out. Case in point, should you want to hear about the amazing Brandi Carlile show from last weekend, here's your link ... CLICK. Thank you, drive through.

Record Store Day Recap.

There are so many things I loved about Record Store Day last weekend. So, so many things. It’s weird that a day I totally missed last year felt like it meant so much to me this year. When a bulk of the new generation of music lovers is being raised in a society where they’ve never set foot in a music store, much less paid for most of the music in their library, it feels good to take a step back, discovering all over again why a place like Slowtrain needs to exist. I totally mean that. In no order at all then, here are some things I loved about last Saturday.

1. 10 CDs for five bucks. Seriously? I was thumbing through the $1 a disc boxes and finding a lot of diamonds in the rough when that little informational tidbit made its way to me. Most of the albums I ended up came out in the last year, too. Among them: Wild Sweet Orange’s “We Have Cause To Be Uneasy,” The Dears’ very excellent (and very layered) “Missles,” Mason Proper’s “Olly Oxen Free” and The Love Letter Band’s “This World Be My Church.” That's enough, right? Oh, I ended up with 10, don’t you worry. A pretty solid 10 even.

2. One of that solid 10 was the Mother Love Bone disc from 1992. Sweet Stardog Champion! Man, that took me back to my days of loving grunge and nothing but. The best part about that is, well, I sold my copy in college (as I was wont to do in order to, oh, buy food and pay rent and stuff), as much as I had liked it. Now it has made its way back to me. It was meant to be. Obviously.

3. Feeling myself getting a sunburn as I watched The Devil Whale doing its thing behind the store and realizing, just like that, summer may actually be back to stay this time.

4. Snagging the second to last copy of Wilco’s new tour documentary “Ashes of American Flags,” which contains a link to free downloadable audio of 20 songs from the DVD (something only the RSD copies will actually include).

5. Also picking up the plenty artistic making-of Neon Bible, Arcade Fire’s last album, something they’re calling Mirror Noir. I’m hoping I’ll be okay with the fact I got the regular version instead of the deluxe one. I caught a bit of this over Pitchfork way and think I’m in for a real treat. Music movie night?

6. Wandering across the street between bands and meeting one store owner’s dog, an English Bulldog named Hannah (see photo). She was a drooly mess of a thing, sure, but I fell in love with her. I think the feeling was mutual, too, because she kept dropping her slobbery jowls on my foot as she chewed on her huge stick. The desire to get one of those has not gone away. Not in 8 years’ time.

7. Bringing my bike out and riding all over downtown with my friends, not stopping until we’d found some gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches (three cheeses! sundried tomatoes!) and chocolate pudding. And, if you’ve never been to Gourmandise, having some pretty pleasant conversation and eats on their patio on a sunny day = WIN.

8. Discovering RuRu, who played at some point, was just a local 16-year-old ... and that he had an album on hand for me to add to my pile. Sounds like Bright Eyes with vocals that are smoother on the ears. If you haven’t heard him yet, prepare yourselves: he may become your new favorite thing.

9. Receiving a gifted box of Girl Scout Cookies in the mail, heavy on the chocolate and peanut butter. Bliss.

10. Ending the day with quite possibly the best Brandi Carlile concert I’ve yet seen. Okay, so I’ve seen her just twice, but she completely blew me away. It could not have been better if she had tried to make it so. Kept me on the cloud I’d been on all day before her. Wow, just wow. (See that classy vid I took below)

11. Oh! And free Este pizza. The one slice I got teased more than satisfied but, still. Free. You can’t really go wrong with that.

I wish every day was Rex Manning, er, Record Store Day. I’d be broke after a month but, wow, what a glorious month it would be.

Road runner.

Is it bad that I am finally choosing NOT to run the half marathon happening tomorrow that I already signed up and paid for a few months back? I had some pretty high hopes to train through this nasty Utah weather, too. Even started training pretty regularly until that great mystery illness hit me over the head like a bag of hammers a while ago. Then the rain and the snow and the slush and the cold kept me far away from the park. Now? I'm pretty much untrained and unmotivated. At least I don't feel bad about it. Not that bad.

Okay, maybe a little. But I blame you, Mother Nature.

Rave on.

Follow a girl on her vacation through three different cities and be labeled the worst kinda stalker that exists (and the kind that wins his own personalized restraining orders, no less), but follow a band through three cities in three days while they're on tour and what kind of title do you win? Crazy devoted? There seems to be some kinda double standard there. Nevertheless, I think I might do just that, sometime next month. I can't say for sure that it will happen ... I don't want to say who it is necessarily, lest I jinx myself by doing so ... but I'm all about turning daydreams into realities. When dreamers can live double lives as doers, the world becomes a better place, just like that.

The Tallest Man on Earth.

Man, I love this. Leave it to the Swedes to come in and do the American music better'n we do. And it's not just the song, of course, but the whole miniature movie and the passion behind it and even some o' those words. I can't stand how much I like it. To the person who sent it my way and placed it on my radar, I thank you. You know who you are. I really needed this today, in a major, major way.


Tallest Man on Earth - The Gardener - A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

The Hold Steady Do Utah.

When you catch wind of a band touted as the "best bar band in America," it tends to perk up your ears a little. It makes you want to agree with that critic who determined they were such to begin with. The Hold Steady was an acquired taste for me for a good long time (maybe a year? maybe more?) but, once I decided lead singer Craig Finn was more a cantankerous songwriter/poet than one who bothered with, say, pleasing all the ears that heard him by changing his voice to be more palatable, I had a change of heart. I heard him differently. Ever do that with a singer or band? It's like absolutely hating tuna in your youth and eating entire cans of it for dinner as an adult—your tastes grow naturally as you do. Dislikes can and do morph into likes when you least expect them to.

So, while I can shout along to his choruses ("Excuses and half-truths and fortified wine" is a fun one to say over and over again, for inst), I find myself just listening to his stories the rest of the time. I don't need to sing along—I do need to listen, on the other hand. Closely. Once you get used to his world, one that sounds like he treats the bars all across America as his own personal hotels, you start knowing what to expect. He's a modern day troubadour. Our own singing Charles Bukowski. And, for whatever reason, I find I can attach myself to his songs and feel like I could be thinking and saying some of the same things he's putting across to us. Perhaps that's narcissistic? It's not like he's flaunting himself as a great guy. In fact, he's one of the troubled sorts, lost in remembered kisses and apologizing to God and slipping into the haze of drink sometimes. He's an everyman. He's our everyman.

It helped to come to these kinds of realizations before going to see the band in concert last Saturday. And, well, it's just as I expected it might be. A sold out crowd of the faithful, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a sweaty, drinking, handclapping, shoutalonging mess. Craig smiled and sang and shouted back at us and told us the stories we already knew, but with the extra fervor that we wanted (or, okay, needed) to exist along with them. And, you know what? It was a beautiful thing.

Here's one of the slower moments of the night, perhaps even the slowest. C'mon, though ... even the best bar band in America needs a chance to breathe now and again ...

A needle pulling thread.

Go ahead. Get it out of the way. Call me hokey. But I like this. My mom is the unofficial forwarding queen of the universe and this was pulled from the barrage ... it also happened to be something I really enjoyed. And this comes from a guy who can't really get behind a lot of musicals. If you haven't seen it before, then go ahead and see it now. You can even call me hokey the next time you see me. I'll own up to it even.

Living in the right time.

We are an incredibly spoiled Internet generation. I was talking with a friend over the weekend about how easily we can come about amassing music and finding songs that we're searching for, that the adventure and quest involved in finding a single song has practically become one of the past. I played a song to end my radio show tonight that I looked high and low for for years on end once upon a time, not so long ago; it was the late, great Ray Charles doing "(Night Time Is) The Right Time." I sought it out in libraries and every music store I ever visited, but I was never able to locate it. Never ever. I mean, I didn't even know who sang it or what it was called! I was completely in the dark.

Until, well, I found it ... on a newish collection of his music a number of years ago. I may as well have found that proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow! I was beside myself, I really was. I'd seen it on an episode of The Cosby Show and, for me, it was one of the greatest, happiest moments on television I have ever seen. Rudy (Keisha Knight Pulliam, who I heard just turned 30 years old this week!) was especially good at channeling the wailing singer that played a part of the number. One of the good parts of living in today's day and age (the good helps balance out the bad, o'course) is that I can relive that moment again and again, over and over. I love technology.

Seriously. Go watch THIS. It begs and pleads to be relived.

Wordless Wednesday.

I'm a poem man.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped writing poetry. For me, this was telling, considering I had an on-again, off-again habit of putting pen to pad since my college years. More telling? I wrote just five of them last year. Five! From writing a poem every day in my peak months and weeks to barely getting five out in the course of a year? It made no sense. The fact I was so apathetic about writing them again didn't seem to, either.

The good news, then, is that I have decided to write one each day this month, in honor of it being National Poetry Month. I hope it will allow for a much-deserved kick in my proverbial flanks. It's needed. It'll belabor the point, I suppose, for me to let on that I now believe I don't just write poems, but that I very much feel I am a poet. That helps. I came to that realization when I was reading over pieces from the past couple of years, some that I'd never read again after writing them. There's much to be observed in this world and, well, some of it is best expressed in poetry; I don't know why, exactly ... it just is. 

Here's a semi-polished piece from the vaults to explain what it is I mean. May be a bit image-heavy, but still. Hope you dig. (Oh, and it's best when read out loud, as are most things.)

Why can't my wants be what they were yesterday

when all I wanted to do was learn how to play my harmonica

like a campfire cowboy, grow my beard for months

searching the countryside for the music that ignited my insides?

They've yet to go away, but more keep getting heaped,

piled in with those I'm still living.

The scrubbed-new boy eight rows ahead

of me, the one with orange hair and eyes so unreal

he looks like he's not exactly one of us?

His existence alone makes me want to have one like him,

a little guy, the sort I carry around in a backpack,

refusing to cut his hair so's he can sprout the mini-dreds,

learn the guitar blues by the age of 5.

When joy threatens to blow a hole

clean through my wall in the midnight

I know it's a bunch of the young drinkers

sips between laughs, but

break me off a piece of that, too.

It'd be pretty pleasant to share smiles

with a somebody and Tom Hanks

and his one red shoe. It's high time

I share my bean bag with a regular.

It's time again to begin.

And what of these anchors I keep

placing on my person? Too many times 

I'm attached to the helium balloons

the ones allowing express trips to my past

the vacations I ended for a reason.

Having feet stay on the ground is a 

sound decision. The is where 

my roots are

and must remain

amongst the baseball zucchini

ruby red tomatoes and raspberries.

There's progression here, not so hidden

in the seedlings. I aim to harvest

when the season's right. *

— 8/23/06

They ain't got what we got.

She ruined the plan, the one she didn't know about yet. There was a part of it that she was supposed to stick to—she had the sense to know that much—but Wyoming and its snow got in the way. It slowed everything right down a notch or five. She and her brother wouldn't be around to sing lullabies into our microphones after all. Such was the wrench in the spokes. She could have maybe sensed she was supposed to fall for a DJ who fell for her sounds only weeks before but, if she did, she didn't let on. Made nary a mention of it.

Lucky then, that they still made it in time to open a concert. They had such fun together. The stage was certainly their playground, though, instead of swings and merry-go-rounds, they'd filled it with a trumpet and some keys and plenty of blessed guitars. There were even a bunch of ragged smilers up there as their backdrop, no less. Australia got welcomed pretty warmly by Utah that night. The music was slow enough to fill what needed to be right up.

I love a rainy night.

I had a pretty amazing dream last night, one that I can recall the feeling of more than I can the details that went along with it. Remembering it now, almost 24 hours later even, I am still reeling at the power that came with this one.

The significant part of it, I suppose, was that I was with someone who I was absolutely convinced was my best friend on the planet. I loved to be with her and she appeared to like me enough to allow me to take her everywhere I went. She made me feel warm and secure and completely at peace.

She’s one of these ageless beauties, see? I recall having the feeling that she was and is one of those who could have been either 20 or 40 and still she pulled stares. She was one to look at, yes. Only, well, that wasn’t the whole of it. That was second (or even third) to the feeling generated between the two of us. I looked at her plenty, but felt more, just by being around her.

I awoke not in love, per se, but feeling very loved. And, sure, I slept in later than usual, but wouldn’t you want that kind of magic to continue? Wouldn’t you want your subconscious and conscious to strike a deal and allow you to feel that way forever, whether you ever tied the knot or, hmm, not? Wouldn’t that be some kinda divine?

I’ve only met this woman once, and it was a very brief meeting. We were at one of those blessed outdoor summer concerts. It was so incredibly brief that, when I found her online earlier today and attempted to jog her memory for a spell, it took a lot of jogging to get her to remember it. But that doesn’t even matter.

There was a lot of tripping—no jogging to speak of—when I tried to tell her how beautiful it was. I tried to convey how close I felt to her and, if she were closer, how I wouldn’t think twice about giving her one of those hugs, because it’s how I felt. It’s a feeling that lingers now. If I’d had gone into it much more than that, I would have crossed the friend-to-freak line, so I stopped short of being effusive.

She didn’t get it then, I don’t think. Probably doesn’t now, either. But I get to feel this way about her, no matter what the reality really is. The fact I can even feel such a way, even after something as simple as dream, well, that’s almost enough. The mind is a powerful, powerful thing.

How bout them Jazz?

I know I haven't written in a long time over here, but maybe I've just been preoccupied with life and the pursuit of happiness or something. Yeah, I'll stick with that. I'll be back again, I think, just as soon as I start pondering again or running into new music or, well, you get my point.

I did write about my grandma again, however, over at a different blog ... the one I help keep updated at work. If you'd like to read that, well, you can. It goes a little something like this HIT IT

I'll be back later. I promise.