the don project

report.

goals for 2009.

1. be physically active.

moderate success. started skateboarding again. sort of stopped skateboarding again.

2. attend at least 50 shows this year

39 shows is not 50. but i did okay.

3. finish the house

no. i finished a room and have a full house again, though.

4. start a vegetable garden

i don’t care about this.

5. go to europe

yes.

6. meet new friends and new ladies

yes and yes.

7. listen to music constantly

sometimes. in the car, yes. at home, no.

8. play fewer video games

pretty good until after x-mas.

9. volunteer for some charitable organizations

yes.

10. do something musical 30 minutes a day

no. my biggest regret of this list.

11. fix my posture

i worked on it. it’s noticeably better.

So I scored about a 6 out of 11. That’s failing, but not terrible. Thus, we arrive at 2010. Time for a new set of goals.

1. travel to non-seattle, non-family destinations once per month
2. play a show or quit trying to play music altogether and find a new passion
3. continue to work on my posture
4. 50 shows
5. volunteer at least once a month
6. ride the STP
7. say hi to strangers
8. focus less on what I don’t have and more on what I do

Yes, I think this is what I want to focus on. Also, I have a crappy redesign of this site coming up. Maybe.

Oh, hi.

Yes, things have been going well. I’ve been very busy trying to be very busy.

I’ve been seeing this girl, actually. Yes, she’s awesome.

No, don’t worry about that, it’s been two years (and four days), can’t I just forget about it?

Yes, I would like to change the subject.

Yes, I have been playing music from time to time. Not as much as I’d like, but life gets in the way, you know. Actually, I got this toy organ at the thrift store when I was shopping for my moustache party clothes. It sounds pretty rad. Want to hear it?

Okay, here’s a little improv, one-take recording. Let me know what you think.

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Oh, that’s very kind.

Well, let’s talk again soon. Let’s make it a point to.

this is awesome right now. i’m enjoying it. thank you. thank you very much.

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I have this vague idea. I just bought The Appleseed Cast’s “Mare Vitalis” on amazing vinyl. I think I am developing adult ADD. What if all my songs were just snippets of memories? Like pictures, but with a lot fewer words? And lots of arpeggios?

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(Vocals: one take improv, re-did the last two lines, piano: third or fourth try after a while of jamming, recorded on MIDI controller, cleaned up two minor mistakes and extended the transition from the first bit to the twiddly bit)

Plastic Dinosaurs

At the grocery store,
you bought me
a plastic dinosaur.

I never got you
anything as great
as a plastic
triceratops.

I guess that’s why you left.
I guess you left.

I have a lot of memories I’d like to get rid of in preparation for the coming awesomeness. Maybe this is the way. Oh, and awesomeness is just around the bend. I can feel the tracks starting to rumble. I’m putting my pennies down on them and starting to run.

Also, I’m growing a moustache to fight dude’s cancer. Why don’t you jerks donate a dollar or two?

http://us.movember.com/mospace/31893/

Here’s a story I just wrote for my friend Nell, who is visiting her grandmother in the hospital for, most likely, the last time. Like most fiction, it’s half true.

I was walking home from the grocery store the other night. Shuffling through the fall leaves looking even more orange under the unnecessary but incessant sodium lights. The moon was out and the city was ablaze with electricity, but they couldn’t wash out the brightest of the stars no matter how hard they tried. When I looked up at them around my steamy breath, I smiled a little bit. A jetliner cut the sky into two pieces, crawling like a snail across the sky, leaving a water vapor trail behind.

It was a startling thought. A stop-in-my-tracks kind of moment.

On that side of the line is half of everything. On this side, me and the other half. Did I have all the goodness or none of it? Is goodness even equally distributed? And what of the line? Is it randomly placed or part of some grand design?

Undoubtedly my neighbors, had they been awake, would have been startled at the image of a grown man staring open-mouthed at a jet crossing the sky. Luckily, I do all my shopping after they have been sleeping for hours. I like interrupting the shelf-stockers to make them be cashiers. I like how they turn off all the fluorescent lights in the freezers. I like seeing everything more real.

At any rate, this line and it’s potential mesmerized me. I became obsessed with the desire to know what it was like on the other side of it. I had to cross it just like a line drawn in the sand by your enemies. You cross it just to anger them. To see if you can. I set my groceries on my porch and turned perpendicular to the line. I started walking.

Generally south and west I walked, skirting buildings and squinting through streetlights up at the gently curved light grey border. As I walked, it seemed to move with me. Like one of those paintings in old Scooby Doo cartoons where the criminal would peer out and watch the intrepid detectives do their cheaply animated walking. I soon passed beyond familiar territory. On streets I’d seen on maps but never met in person. The line, taunting me, had gotten no closer.

Determined, I kept walking until I reached the ocean. In my city, it’s not as far as it is elsewhere. Every so often, I can smell the tangy salt air from my house, even. There by the ocean, I understood that I could pass no farther. The line of water vapor was starting to do what water vapor does, anyway. I laid down on a park bench and let the cold air completely surround me as I watched the last of the tiny droplets turn from artificial clouds into nothingness.