Happy Halloween!

In the real world, he would win all contests.

In the real world, he would win ALL contests. Even the ones he didn't get around to entering ... for he is my Nephew, and he is amazing. Honorable mention goes to my sister, his mom, who made that extra amazing hat.

TGIF.

The Love Language - Heart to Tell from Merge Records on Vimeo.

Frightened Rabbit in Orlando, 10/24/10.

These eyes and mind and fingers are much too tired for all of this. But they won’t sleep. Confession: this morning, I crawled into bed around 5 this morning. I ended up having more of an extended nap in place of a full night’s sleep. What’s more, it was worth it.

Orlando is a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to its music offerings, after all. When a radio station offers you a spot on their guest list to see Frightened Rabbit later in the night, you don’t think much about it: you go. I refreshed myself on The Winter of Mixed Drinks so many times over (“Living in Colour” is as fast a repeatable favorite as “Old Old Fashioned” was before it) and I got to see joy personified on a stage. I saw men from Scotland give it their absolute all, so thrilled and eager to sweat and sway and perform for an unusually filled club for a Sunday evening. I thought about how the performance was wholly honest and how these guys were even better than they were before. They need to succeed. And they deserved the reception they received. What’s more, if people could have seen Scott’s magnificent mustache as well as I had earlier, the applause would have been that much hungrier, mark my words.

The second act came just two blocks over, where These United States played to far fewer (were there 30? 31 with a bartender?), but it was just as well. I could actually make out most of Jesse’s words on his slower songs (the newish “What Lasts” ought to be the breakout hit for these guys) and focus on the smaller details, like Robbie playing the drums with one stick while playing a mean harmonica with his other hand. Their poetry should have reached farther than it did last night and more ears ought to have heard it, yes, but don’t we always feel that way about the best music? I was simply grateful to be one of those in the right place at the right time. They simply have one of the most steady, polished live shows I know of, really. I suppose it does pay to hardly ever stop touring.

The third act? It just helped celebrate the summer we still have here. No songs needed. I was powerless at this point. These United States were there. A lot of others were, too. Helping support it all was the homemade guacamole and the lone s’more I got to eat and a backyard campfire and water fights atop a roof. There was a partial moon inside the palm trees. There was laughter and easy conversation and new faces and fast friends and a feeling that was so irresistibly warm (and not just because of the weather and soft chairs), that it was easy to stick around. I chose to stretch it out instead of going to bed when I might normally have. It was the right thing to do.

Am I too tired to have written about all of this? I certainly thought I was. Some things just need to be shared when the time’s right to do so.

My home is where the new homeowner almost is.

So someone wants to buy my little 2-bedroom in downtown Salt Lake City. At long last. Eight months after making myself scarce in the pretty, great state and heading for the always sunshining one, having listed and relisted and recarpeted and repainted, after dropping the price over and over again until I hit that magic sweet spot, someone went and decided to take it off my hands. I'm plenty relieved, too. I don't want to jinx it by talking this way before we've closed (that's a few weeks away yet), but I'm a believer and a sometimes optimist. They're getting one of those screaming deals. They'd be foolish to walk away, that's what I think.

I'm incredibly thankful for this finally coming together. I know there have been prayers said on my behalf (thanks, mom) and those who've wished and hoped and passed along the word nearly as much as I have and, well, that makes me happy. Happy and grateful. Happily grateful. Here's my general gushy thanks to you who deserve that and more. And it's touching and tender that a couple sisters and some friends thought that I'd always return there, too, that I was on some kinda extended Florida vacation of sorts. I don't know that where I am specifically feels like home yet, either, but it's better than it was. The longer I'm here, the better it will get, too.

For now, I'll write during my days and find music during my nights and continue to try my hands at poetry and run into wonderful people and run around magnificent lakes and relish in this beautifully humid non-Fall feeling hanging around and all will be well in my world. I just have one less house to occupy my thoughts is all. I close on Nov. 17 so, if you hear a shout of joy in the Salt Lake City night, know my voice is carrying all the way from my panhandle to your desert. Know, too, that I'll see all of you soon. At least, that's the hope. And hopes morph into realities plenty.

Just because it's The National.

Do you really even need another reason than that? I thought not.

Scaredy cat.

Ran nearly five-and-a-half miles through a neighborhood being Halloweenized.
Saw grave stones being casually propped up in a front yard. One read "Be Right Back."
Black kitten half jumped into my path, causing me to mostly jump out of my skin.
Noticed one large black bat near the lake ... maybe it was a bird. Maybe.
Jack-o-lantern sneered in my general direction.
Discovered the hounds of hell are scarier when they don't bark. Became a defensive dodger.
Clouds of gnats, fresh from the graves of the undead, treated me as their windshield.
One would-be jogger came out her door and the shadows at the exact wrong moment. Proceeded to fall out of the rest of my skin that I hadn't before. Left it.
Got chased by ghosts the rest of the way. I think.
Spooky Charlie Parker music ran through my head, thanks to a radio program I heard on the Birdman right before commencing said run. Spooky, I say!
Running this time of year is good for the legs, but so very hard on the ticker.

The Girl on the Bridge.

Okay, I'll probably be thinking of this face all day, thanks to a viewing of The Girl on the Bridge last night. I didn't really get why Johnny Depp was with her before, but I get it now. It makes sense, even though I am now a jealous man. I sorta fell for her (Vanessa Paradis) all the way through the movie. Hopeless. Long live the Frenchies and their French movies, that's what I say. Plus, well, she really should start being in more movies. Get on it, Hollywood. Don't fail me.

Bad cover song o' the day.

Returning the gaze.

The good dog Gus and I

stared into each other’s eyes

as I spoke to him about

when I leave, and that I did

not mean to Cheyenne, he

will need to be Bobbie’s best friend.



After saying that, I looked deeper

and realized my human weakness

to believe I needed to speak in words

to this superior being, to explain

what he already understood in

the silence of our eyes.





K. W. Brewer

Providence, Utah
2/9/06

Coupon'd.

You’ll recall those coupons we made as younger ones, those we crudely made out of kindergarten scissors and construction paper and markers and crayons? They’re the ones where we’d promise BREAKFAST IN BED or WE DO YOUR DISHES or what not, usually to your mom, she being the one who seemed more overworked of your parents. We couldn’t afford the sleeker Hallmark cards, so it’s the do-it-ourselves coupons that we gravitated to, largely out of necessity. We didn’t have the cash to buy the already thought-out Made For Them thoughts, nor the car to drive ourselves to the store, so we gave our time in coupons, ones that almost never got cashed in.

I wonder how self-serving it would seem of me, now that my family is far away and now that brothers and sisters and the like have gone about creating their own, that I make coupons for myself, ones that I could pass out at will. Like, say I needed a hug and knew who gave the best one? They’d get a coupon. Maybe with glitter around the edges. Say I got turned down, after asking out that office temp I got along so splendidly with, due to her string of bad relationships and her possibility of moving away at the end of the month? The coupon would serve as a do over of sorts, a GET OUT OF REJECTION FREE promise, one she couldn’t refuse. She’d sigh dejectedly, then tell me that, yes, she does eat dinner now and again. We’d enjoy one another’s company as a result of my imaginative prowess.

Or, well, maybe I’d have one that’d entice a close friend to fly a couple thousand miles from her state to mine, I’d take the day off from work and we’d maybe visit a beach, share some of those memories we still enjoy revisiting, then finish things up with a rock show, one where we knew all the words to the songs and both adored all they seemed to stand for and communicate. She'd fly home the next morning and that'd be that.

I’m not sure what I’d call it, exactly, but it might say something along the lines of IN NEED OF HAPPINESS, CASH IN or REDEEMABLE FOR UNGUARDED SMILES. You know, something terribly cheesy and truly necessary.

Go, white boy, go white boy, go.

I pretty unabashedly love this. These two little known performers might have a future or something.