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I think I'm going to try migrating this journal over to my LiveJournal page for a while. We'll see if the idea of people commenting on my homebodyish life makes things a little more exciting. Comments? Bring them over there or email me at homebodyishlife@tapemountain.com. See you there! And sorry about the big Tape Mtn. outage.

Big booooooo to the Crystal Ballroom's policy of starting bands absolutely on time. I guess it's the in thing these days in Portland establishments to be strict so the Beaverton crowd can head back to their Beaverton apartments and get up for their sales jobs the next day, but it's a lot cooler, Crystal Ballroom, when you are 100% explicit about it on tickets/advertisements/etc. We waltzed in fashionably late (a half-hour) to see the Clientele (the one band opening for Spoon) and caught about ten seconds of their last song, coincidentally one of my least favorite Clientele songs. Boooo! That works out to about, hmm, 16 bucks for ten seconds, which makes it 96 bucks a minute, which would be $5760 per hour of entertainment per person. I let some unkind words fly about the establishment to my brother and Sarah, to Brian and Jennifer B., and it's all kind of interesting because I don't think any of my current crop of friends has ever seen me throw a temper tantrum--just my old friends/siblings/etc. Fortunately, Joanie was completely understanding and she walked with me back home in a slight rain. We saw police horses in scummy Old Town being photographed by Asian tourists who seemed a little lost, a woman clutching an inflatable killer whale and screaming "Give me back my fucking blanket! Give me back my fucking blankets!" on the Burnside Bridge, saw cars going the wrong way on MLK, gigantic Oz-like dream piles of cardboard moving boxes getting soaked next to the exercise equipment shop. A good walk and it cleansed my mind.

Now we are going to play Boggle, I think.

I am much happier now that I am underemployed again! Oh it's nice not to be a car slave for a little while. My mind is kind of oozing back into my head and I'm able to think about songs and ideas and things that are not related to scheduling or standardized tests. Yes!

Is anyone else as excited about my new house as I am? Well, probably not, because it means that I'm going to be far away from anyone I know, and I guess that's a little bad, but then when do I actually hang out with anyone anyway? Infrequently. 13917 SE Harold St. Check it out. There are chickens across the street, peacocks just hanging out, families in minivans, Yes on 36 signs. It's a little daunting but I think I can hang with everything except the Yes on 36 signs. And the "Power of Pride" bumperstickers. What ever happened to pride being one of the deadly sins? I can definitely hang with having a crapload of space all to ourselves. A garage! It's as though we're living the suburban dream but actually in Portland proper and without the parents, the minivan, the cable TV. We do have the Costco membership. Convenient access to buttes and thrift shops. A weird, weird neighborhood hewn out of some pasture or something. Cattle ghosts. A fireplace. An ice dispenser in the freezer door. Master bathroom and another bathroom besides. Am I ready for this much luxury? I think that after having housemates my entire postgraduate life (and roommates throughout my undergraduate life except for one weird senior year) it is going to be nice. Now that I think about it, my experience in good old Pittenger Hall in '94-5 seems not unlike my current experience--nice bang for the housing-lottery buck but farther from campus than I'd like to be. I would have liked to have had an ice dispenser, a fireplace, and an electric kalimba in my dorm room in 1995, though. Here's to modern life!

Yuma Nora. June 18th. The Nest. Record release party for the great Jewels in the Snake Pit. The amazing Rollerball plays as well. No other bands. How reasonable! I promise to be in rare form.

I'm out of my mind! But it's great.

This weekend consisted of maximum tutorial white-knuckle driving excitement and maximum guitar-throttling excitement. Days in West Linn! Nights in Portland basements! The separate story arcs unfold as follows:

Tutorials: I drive from fancy house in the hills to fancy house in the hills by the river to fancy house in the hills. I imagine the blue trail my car leaves and imagine I'm an egg-shaped hummingbird. I see llamas, goats, gates, guest houses. Fancy lightswitches in one house--in the bathroom!--that I can't quite figure out, so I randomly hit buttons. I feel as if I am on Star Trek as the lights slowly, glamorously, fade up. In West Linn, I walk up to a Memorial Day party. There is goat-cheese pizza on the grill, a cake with an American flag design made out of cream-cheese frosting, blueberries, and raspberries. My student is singing a showtune at the digital piano. Afterwards, we linger and the mother asks what my music sounds like. I say, "it's hard to describe," thinking, of course, of Gang Wizard and Yuma Nora. "Oh, go ahead," she says, "I'm a child of the 60s." "Okay, have you heard Blue Cheer?" I ask. Slight oh-yes nod. My plate is loaded up with flag cake (quite good) and the Metro wends its way down to I-205, then up on I-5, then over the ever-deadly Marquam Bridge and back home.

Music:

• Friday I hurry over to the PSU campus after ending my online shift. I assume the show is going to be in the fantastic South Park blocks and so I lug my new and awe-inspiringly heavy pawnshop Peavey Renown amplifier around the PSU campus. I am quietly swearing under my breath at how out-of-shape I am as I noisily walk past slightly dressed coeds on cellphones on the hottest day of the year. It turns out the show was at the 5th Ave. Cinemas. I show up and Yuma Nora plays. The cinema is clogged up with students attracted by the free beer and pizza (neither of which I get to enjoy--I'm too busy sweating) but several of them clear out once we start playing. Which is fine, of course; I don't expect people to necessarily "get it." My exhausted-to-death mind plays well, and there's an oscilloscope display of Amy's waveforms in the background. Good stuff! Aaron loads ALL of our equipment into the back of the Metro (shocking) and we head back home and I sleep early.
• Saturday, Gang Wizard shows up. I hang out at the party house for about two hours before the rest of the band shows up, just trading comments about caffeinated beer, thoroughly ridiculous stuff, other stuff with people I know to a certain extent. It is weird to see myself in party-talker mode. The other Gang Wizards show up around 10 pm and we play and it RULES--guest drummer Rick Ele is one of the few GW guest drummers to cut the mustard for Apollonian Dance Party Gang Wizard--and people stay and dance, including me and Brian and crazed vocalists Rob and Eva. The room is a pulse of sound and nobody gets hurt except Elisa's violin, which explodes before we even play. Good stuff! GW in rare form! It is weird to be at a house party in 2005 but I enjoy it.
• Sunday, I go over to Rollerball house (Nilla Mansion, across from the Arby's) and jam with them. Amy and Aaron don't show up for some reason but it's all right; Mae and Mini and S. are fine fine musicians and we begin to gel into something soon. Jokes about Zima are frequently made and fine dill-and-arugula salad is enjoyed. I think if you were to tell righteously-sad year-2000 Jake that he would be jamming with idealized noise-lounge-trance heroes Rollerball in 2005, he would probably look up from his desperately-sad room in sad Tualatin, eyes clear and heart kind of crazed, and be excited, and then he would probably go back to writing hits like "Asterism" and continue to be sad and continue on his path to playing disastrous live shows in 2001, and history would do that unfolding thing that it always does and hey here we are on JUNE 1, 2005!

I'm crazy busy and a little stressed-out, but this weekend is going to be fun. Well, not as much fun as it would have been were I actually going to Philadelphia for Anais and Graham's wedding--not nearly as much fun--but at least I will get to play a couple shows. (Details on the show to follow... details on why I'm not going to Philly are available on request. Nothing to do with the lovely couple obviously.)

Event: Yuma Nora and General Studies
starting May 27, 2005 Starts: 6:00pm
The bands Yuma Nora and General Studies will play music, preceding Visuals Film Festival.
Bands play @ 6:00, films to follow.

Free admission!
Free beer!
Free pizza!
Free popcorn!

Weather permitting: South Park Blocks, in front of Smith Memorial Student Union, PSU. Otherwise: 5th Ave Cinemas, 510 SW Hall St. @ PSU

For more information contact PSU Film Committee at 503-725-3551 or film@pdx.edu>

* Sat May 28th: Gang Wizard at HOOD (404 SE 10th, portland)- all ages - w/ hustler white, piedmonster

My folks and I were poring over some satellite maps last week of the town where I grew up, and we all noticed that the Methodist church was no longer there. Not such a big deal, since we went to the Lutheran church in the next town over, but always kind of weird to notice that a part of your mental map has been blown up. Not so weird, in, say, Tualatin, but in a community that has not built a new house since we left in 1986, that's weird. Now I learn (via the always-informative Humboldt Independent) that apparently the Humboldt County Historical Association trucked the church 12 miles away to Humboldt. So now some groups of neurons that were comfortably hanging in the "we represent Hardy" cluster are now doing time in the far-less-frequently-accessed "we represent the Humboldt County Historical Museum, you remember, you went there once and you probably saw some old rusty thresher and a picture of Frank Gotch, a wrestler from the 20s, and even back in your youth you wondered what all the fuss was about this Gotch character" and it's all just an organizational nightmare. Still, it's nice to know that the church is still there.

Two more things brought up by that article: (1) How does one forget about something like a grain elevator blowing up? I guess it happened when I was 7, so I could be forgiven for forgetting stuff like that, but you would think that would be all the town was talking about for years. I think maybe they did, and I must have been paying attention to other things. The internet is of no use: a google search for "Hardy Elevator" only brings up random word strings on a webpage entitled "mature_ sexy_redhead_with_small_tits," and a search for the delicious phrase "bean dust combustion" (it's in the article, people) brings up nothing at all. I think I'm going to refer to my abundant flatulence as "bean dust combustion" from now on just so I can keep this phrase on the tip of my tongue. (2) One more thing about some county in Iowa and then I'll stop. Last week's "Cook of the Week" hit the magic trifecta of: Velveeta! Jell-O! And Cool Whip! Points deducted for referring to Cool Whip as "whipped topping" (and for not mentioning cream of chicken/mushroom/celery soup in any of the recipes) but points added for Spam, plus Velveeta was used in not one but THREE recipes.

Finally, if you're in Portland, pick up a copy of this week's Mercury for a sweet Minmae article. The author, in the course of talking about the slow steady evolution of Minmae from San Diegan misfit to top-tier Portland rock star, mentions a disastrous show by the "terrible solo project" of the then-Minmae drummer, which is to say me, which is to say Celesteville, and Celesteville would like to go on the record that spectacular failure is better than forgettable mediocrity, especially in regards to music, art, literature, history, science, city planning, high-school poetry, Internet journal entries, etc. etc. I'm psyched that my shoe-throwing incidents are still kicking around in someone's memory--much better that than some sort of gauzy inaccurate memory of some band whimpering or generically rollicking. But at the same time I've learned to at least keep my spectacular failures a little briefer. Spectacular failure is great, but excessive spectacular failure (see, e.g. the opening band at the Reed College Yuma Nora show a little while back, or probably the aforementioned Celesteville show, certainly many other Celesteville shows) imposes itself on the listener, goes too far, makes people angry. To the future! To the honing of our failure--our failure like a single point of bright, bright light, infinitely fine and infinitely memorable! To the neurons devoted to maintaining memory of spectacular failure! A single, fine, infinitely terrible, infinitesimally small point of ultimate, perfect failure!

If you enjoy the Celesteville live schtick but don't necessarily enjoy watching the visual nightmare of the awkward hair or the strings of pedals malfunctioning on the floor, and you think the idea of playing over the phone is intriguing, you might want to check out this archive of Nadav Carmel's show on BSR (Brown Student Radio). I set up in the hallway with Language Master and guitar (and, ill-advisedly, crackly questionable synthesizer) and went to it. Fun! Except for the parts where I'm talking too much, go figure. I think I am cutting down the excessive Sting-style explanationification pre-song, however.

I've been driving a lot lately--Saturday I woke up at like 5:45 (unheard of!) to drive down to Silverton for a tutorial at a house in the country (with roosters! okay, the house had roosters, not the tutorial--although I would like to get an assignment from some ridiculous rich person to tutor a rooster), then I got thoroughly lost on Murino Road en route to Portland and was late for another tutorial, and then I headed more-or-less straight to Seattle to play a housewarming party (with the Minor Thirds, featuring Anne of luv(sic) in place of Chris Calvert--as predicted, she filled in admirably), and that was fun, and then I drove back the same night because I had to do a silly online shift Sunday morning at 10, so we drove and drove, grabbed some donuts and coffee in Tacoma, and then, as we predicted, the sugar rush wore off big-time before we hit Longview, so we slept in the back of the Metro, two human beings curled up in a ludicrously small and non-level space, and I thought: this is what the future is going to be like EVERY DAY!

Now I'm listening to the stuff from Nadav's show right after my set and right after a Mountain Goats song and I can't tell if it's some old unreleased Dead C track or if it's Gang Wizard, although I think it's the latter, or maybe it's one of those n+1th waves of Gang Wizard soundalike bands--okay, now we're just getting too ludicrous. I think it is Gang Wizard, although I don't think I was actually there at this recording session. But perhaps I was. I seriously never have any clue about this sort of thing.

A couple things I may now cross off my I-Never list:

• I went to Babiess-Arr-Uss this morning with Joanie to get something for her high-school friend, now a new mother, and it was sufficiently scary. But it wasn't as scary as I thought. Nor was it as boring as I thought. I think frequent exposure to Japanese-style cutesiness (in the form of Animal Crossing, Sanrio, etc etc) has made me ready for footsied outfits with "Puppy! Kitty! Bunny!" or choo-choo trainsies or what-have you on them in typical American fashion.
• However, a truly terrifying thing that I have never done before and that I now have done is cleaning out a catbox. I know it is hard to believe that a thoroughly suave urban 30-something like myself has never taken it upon himself to clean out some loved one's box of cat shit, but put that in your pipe and smoke it: I never had! But now I have and I know what all the fuss is about. So horrible! Cats are horrible, vile creatures and even though I am secretly a little fond of ol' Dander when she cuddles up against my left arm when I'm playing videogames or writing emails, I can't believe just how bad the smell is. And I grew up in a county where there are more hogs than people! Wow.

Dedicated readers of this page will know of the deep sorrow I felt at the closing of the good olde Grand Central Bowl. Well, a new bowling destination has been found (two of them!) and they are in a certain close-in suburb of our dear city. Joanie and I went out to explore each of them in person, and here is the scoop: We went to the K-ll-gg B-wl in M-lw--k-- last night with her coworker Michelle and Michelle's beau Colin and had a fine time. Not only are the lanes oiled in a very player-friendly manner, but games, shoes, and domestic beers are $1.25 each after 7 pm on Monday nights, and after, hmm, 9:00 Tuesday through Thursday. I got my score back up into the 170s on one of the games--not exactly the high scores I got used to during my tenure at GCB, but still pretty great. On Saturday, we went to the M-lw--k-- B-wl at the request of Matty B, who had an inexplicable birthday craving for P--tr-'s Pizza. Yes, we were there, an island of urban nerdiness in a dairy-scented sea of eerily large suburban parents and their prize-ticket-clutching offspring, and we were eating pizza with large out-of-season tomato wheels strewn on top (P--tr-'s unappetizing trademark, although they do also offer oysters--oysters!--as a pizza topping). The surprise is that their pizza is actually surprisingly decent, especially if you forego the tomato slices and just order chopped garlic as a topping. And the greatest thing about these two bowling alleys is that you can pick up a red telephone and have said pizza delivered to your lane. A red telephone! Sure, I miss the erudite cocktail waitresses and wild-eyed lawless boozy Portland splendor of the GCB, and it is eerie to be bowling surrounded entirely by white M-lw--k-- teens (sporting Hooters and "My Boyfriend Is Cuter Than Yours" t-shirts), and the music was pretty bad (no Modern Lovers here), but the price is right and the lanes are not in imminent danger of becoming yuppie lofts. At least I hope not. Anyone want to bowl with us? Email me!

One thing about certain religious bigwigs departing from this vale of tears is that it makes the Catholic radio station here in town interesting. Yesterday I was chopping some onions and listening to the Catholic radio station, which does not exactly have the strongest signal ever, and 84 bells rang in a row, all messed up with weak-FM-signal radio static. It was completely mesmerizing, especially when combined with the oniony-tears feeling. And the announcer said the word "grotto" a lot.

I'm entering into another one of those intense multi-class periods, where whatever semblance of a social life I might have kind of vanishes and is replaced with a lot of "quality" time with high-schoolers and would-be business-school types. Which isn't bad--it's always good to have some extra income--but why must my first SAT class fall on Tuesday, April 5? Gentle reader, please go in my stead to the Hollywood Theater at 7 pm to see Jandek on Corwood and Sandy Bull: No Deposit, No Return Blues. I think the folks at Jackpot (who are putting together this festival) somehow tapped into the cosmic store of bad timing and dangled sweet tantalizing fruit in front of my greedy nose. That's what I get for never patronizing their establishment, I guess.

Things have been pretty good other than that. Lots of goofing off in sweet March. Yuma Nora played a few great shows, I threw up once (not at the show) as part of this strange 24-hour virus I had, I listened to a lot of Bob and Ray (who are still funny despite my crazed adolescent speech-team throat-shredding massacre of "Tippy the Wonder Dog"), I played video games, I did a lot of walking and thinking. I became a believer in the powers of the plastic crumhorn at a "horn jam" at Yuma Nora/Space Hawk/T-Rexxxa House. The folks got rid of their dachshund, which is sad, but at the same time it's nice that Fred's constant neurotic urine behavior is no longer going to affect them.

I'm planning an east coast tour for early June--anyone have any connections? Email me!

Did you know that I listen to my own music a lot? I'm listening to Spirit Duplicator right now, and its relatively hopeful message of spirit and renewal seems appropriate since I found out that I'm not going to have to look for employment in the near future. Always a good thing to stay employed. Interesting how the job problems are/were pretty much exactly the same things that have been plaguing Tape Mountain Customer Service/Fulfillment Dep't: I need to start setting deadlines for myself and sticking with them. I think I am going to make a record called Apology Record and make it available only to people whose Tape Mountain order has been sitting around for more than a month. Which seems like pretty much every Tape Mountain order at this point. But that is going to change! Today I wake up from winter slumber and take a long walk and feel renewed, with sweet springtime feeling in my limbs!

Okay, thanks for putting up with that last paragraph. If you are interested in entertainment, you should consider seeing the following Yuma Nora shows this weekend:

• Friday, March 5: at Nocturnal (with Rollerball [!] and Paint and Copter)
• Saturday, March 6: at Reed College (with Smegma [!])

Animal Crossing is still great. Now Joanie is really into it, possibly more than I am. Back in the old grad-student-housing days I wrote a song called "She Watch Channel F?!" (yes, a reference to a Public Enemy song--I am a nerd) about being in love with a girl who played weird and sort of pointless video games--in this song's case, the super-obscure Fairchild Channel F video console (which, you may want to know, predated the Atari 2600, and which I once owned, and which was pretty much completely terrible). And yes, Animal Crossing is completely nerdy and completely weird and more or less pointless, but what a fun sort of pointless it is! Especially when you have friends to write little letters with, trade wallpaper and carpet and silly items with, etc. etc. etc.

One of those unnaturally sunny days we've been having in which I just want to sit around the house, take rambly walks, and listen to Steve Egan's Solid Squares. So perfect and yet a little numbly melancholy--oh crazy life, some work trouble (paperwork issues, go figure), plus a lot of essays to grade, a pile of Tape Mtn. orders at my side that have to go out. I think I am on the verge of something great, a great cleansing purge, like all the creosote getting swept off the walls of my metaphorical chimney. A lot of songs are on the verge of being written, and while, a few years back, I would have seen that as the outstanding end that all my means were pointing to, I'm not so sure now.

Tonight for dinner (at 11 pm; we missed the Xila show at Berbati's because Joanie was talking on the phone to an old friend with whom she hadn't spoken in 4 years--and I was pretty happy grading ACT essays) I had:

• French onion soup from a box, with two extra giant cloves of garlic pressed in, plus some store-brand oyster crackers
• frozen cranberries
• old weird German beer from the Grocery Outlet that no-one else will touch

I am going to be in Seattle for a record third straight weekend this weekend, training for yet another standardized test. Unfortunately, this means I'll miss a photo shoot for some Yuma Nora cover article in the Portland Tribune--which isn't necessarily so bad because Amy is going to create a cardboard cut-out stand-in for me. Which is not so bad. I think a long-lasting dream is to have a cardboard cut-out of myself out there in the world.

Oh yeah, life summary: My car passed DEQ. Joanie and I drove out to a certain thrift store in Gresham only to realize that there was a DEQ center only about half a mile away. It was a sign. The Metro passed. I hugged Joanie and put on shiny new "07" stickers in the parking lot of a safeway in Gresham. What a moment! Later we got the stomach flu. Yuk! Back to grading essays!

I am now officially obsessed with the unbelievably cute and silly Animal Crossing for the GameCube. What a ridiculous and charming little game! You go around talking to animals, doing little errands for them, earning money ("bells") in order to decorate your little house. And it's strangely compelling--the dialogue is really well-written, and the character design has reached a level of cuteness that has never really been equaled anywhere else--anyway, let's just say I'm kind of hooked. Interestingly, this strange urge to acquire bells so I can finally get that Excitebike machine in my little cabin comes at the same time as a giant essay-grading frenzy for my employer. So at any given moment, I am confronted with the choice: do I want to earn Bells or real money? And what's kind of depressing is that sometimes I would prefer to trade my ample free time for Bells. And let's not even get into the idea of Tape Mtn. and its demands on my time.

Another strange demand on my time lately: My car needs to go through DEQ this week, so I had to take care of that pesky "Service Engine Soon" light on the blue egg. It ended up that I needed a catalytic converter (again!). So now the light is off, but dude at the repair shop said that I still had some "pending codes" in the computer. How do I take care of those? "Oh, drive it for a week and see if the light goes on again." Ugh! This demand on my time--drive my car--conflicts with my desire for actual money (through grading essays), my desire for Bells (through picking up oranges and seashells and delivering cute packages to cute animated animals), and my desire to ride my bike instead of driving my car. What a strange little week.

The other day, I was in Goodwill, in the book aisle. ("Leisure," if I recall correctly. I was reading some "anthology of nonsense verse.") The aisles at this particular Goodwill are short and a little cramped, and there was a small nondescript middle-aged woman right next to me, very intently checking out some book on little dogs. I became very acutely aware of the concept of "personal space" and how much each of us was violating the other's space. Then a mischievous thought popped into my head, devil-on-shoulder style: dude, maybe you should fart like you always do in the book aisles in thrift stores! That would drive her away! But then, right as the devil disappeared with a poof off my shoulder, I heard a distinctly small-sounding froont to my left. Oh my god, she didn't just do what I was maliciously contemplating, did she? Another, even smaller froont sound. She did. I was full of nonsense and collective flatulent unconscious malice thought and I walked quickly, a little dazed, to tell Joanie about it.

A fine if sleep-deprived time was had by all at Smegma Studios this weekend, where Yuma Nora recorded what will hopefully be their/our second album, this time on Not Not Fun record label, whose heart, incidentally, is in exactly the right place, and who actually follows through on their homemade promises in ways that Tape Mtn. never could. Industry! But anyway, the recording session was more-or-less joyous, the Willamette oozed in sunset light through the picture windows, the recording assistant referred to us as "dude" and cracked awkward but still cute jokes, and we made an abecedarium. It was great.

Today Joanie sent me off to Fred Meyer to get some chips and a baguette for her work party, and I decided to take the bike, dust the old thing off for this surprisingly temperate January we're having--and as I rode the thing I felt acutely aware of this thing called a "gut" sitting there between my head and the pedals. How embarrassing! I need to Nishikicize as frequently as I can. Oh, austere vigor of years past, transport me to your high metabolism of yore!

Last night I ate a lot of ice cream before bed and made a few cracks about the oneiric horrors awaiting midnight snackers in Little Nemo in Slumberland: "oh! I shouldn't have eaten those spicy Ethiopian leftovers before bed!" And of course that sort of attitude plus a significant amount of gastric distress added up to a dream in which I was teaching a math class, possibly in high school, possibly in community college. I let out class early, answered one student's question, and then another student, who now that I think about it reminds me of some student whose name I don't really remember, handed me a paper with the following written on it:

STUPID EXPECTORANT DOLT!!
GET A LIFE

I woke up and drank some store-brand pink "stomach relief" liquid and decided to inflict this dream on a small sliver of the world.

Yesterday ruled, though. We'd rolled in at 3 am from a Yuma Nora show the night before, so we slept in until 12:30. Then I casually turned on a certain football game--and Joanie watched it with me! She learned such great things as (1) what an interception is; (2) the basics of time management in this sport; (3) the junior-high-to-high-school rivalry that I and Brian Bieler had over our respective NFC East teams--his the post-"America's Team" Dallas Cowboys and mine the perpetually mediocre Eagles; (4) that the commercials shown during sports programming are aiming at a pretty terrifying demographic. Overall, good stuff. We then took a long long walk down to Hawthorne, up through old neighborhoods, saw new restaurants and frou-frou boutiques flowering, then ate some fine food at the Blue Nile, which is growing on me as a quality Ethiopian restaurant. Hint: if you get away from the dishes in the vegetarian combination, you will be richly rewarded. In particular, the vegetarian ful is great--fava beans rule--and the, hmm, #9? Oh my.

Then I took off for a Yuma Nora set at KPSU, which was fun enough. I showed up, fired up the ring modulator, went to town, waited on comfy couches, talked talked, etc. It was a fun set but I didn't think it was exceptional until I heard the recording in the back of Amy and Aaron's rental car, driving through sleepy Sunday midnight downtown Portland. The silence outside really framed the intense and surprising music well--oh gosh it was something. We all just sat in silence listening to our earlier selves playing this really explosive set, and Amy drove me home via a lengthy, awkward route that I would never take, and I did not complain.

List of observations:

• Thursday's Minor Thirds show at the White Eagle: Great! I didn't get blisters on my fingers, I sweated in moderation, and I played a completely immoderate guitar solo on "Alex P. Keaton, Perched Precariously Atop A Ladder, Suddenly And For No Particular Reason Tried To Remember His First Girlfriend's Middle Name". If you were wondering, "how long can Jake play a guitar solo after he's already reached the squeaky high notes at the top of the fretboard, thus indicating emotional climax or something?" then you should have been there. Because I answered it by playing the accordion at the end.
• Anne Adams, aka Per Se, played before us, and she had better come out with her record soon. I've always quietly admired her weird wordy songs but it wasn't until Thursday that things really hit home. I realized that the last time I'd heard that "My Favorite Things" song of hers, I was sweaty in summer in the attic of Billy Ray's, and that weirded me out and made me realize how fast things go and how I need to play more Celesteville shows.
• Which is true, you know.
• We're off to Seattle for a Yuma Nora show. It should be fun, although I wish I didn't have this overnight shift to do for my online employer.
• Oh well.
• At least I will get an actual weekend day here in the great city of Portland, Oregon, USA.
• This city really is great.
• Especially when it is sunny in January (!) and I walk around downtown after taking the MAX across the river and I'm eating navratan korma at the India Chaat House and totally pretentiously reading the Franz Kafka novel I checked out from the library and you know that I am simultaneously still reading Moominvalley In November but would I be seen with Tove Jansson's masterworks at the India Chaat House?
• Well, duh, of course I would.
• Onward!