it is as if i am a party collector.
i keep collecting parties and tucking them away under my belt and into my satchel.
people are handing them to me, these shiny, tinkling parties, and i am saving them up for my old age.
today i attended a graduation party for my dear friend taylor paul.
taylor paul has a last name that could be a first name and a first name that could be a last name.
taylor paul is a glowing angel child and provides a truely west coast beachy love presence wherever he walks.
taylor paul is becoming funnier with age, and his new jokes are off the hook. (prooove it....)
i took taylor paul's graduation party (it was a thing of perfect proportions: three pacificos, seventy five degrees, two mesh hammocks, and enough loving californian souls to fill a lecture hall in Phelps) and slid it into my pocket for safe keeping.
you can't let these parties go, i tell you. they will be precious when they are not so plentiful.
the thing about collecting anything is that at some point you will inevitably think to yourself: i have way too many of these things! these goddamn, useless trinkets that i have accumulated over all of these years! these wastes of space!
those who collect coins may empathize: after seven years of collecting they may only have seven dollars worth of coins, which could only buy you ten almonds at the food co-op.
(only wealthy people have jars of nuts in the house.)
party collecting can be a similarly tedious thing.
at the end of the day, when i fish around through my collection, i find mostly hangovers, empty containers, and an enromous accumulation of friends. drawers and drawers full of friends! friends so fast and so forgiving and so fresh that they begin to take over my life! friends and their phone calls! friends and their fellowship! friends and their flaws and their flawless ablity to enchant me into spending hours over small round tables and coffees and long, wet bars and whiskies...
i have made seven perfect friends in the last fourteen days. thats a new perfect friend every two days if you do the math correctly.
i met these seven people on a bus with nine seats that we drove three thousand seven hundred and ninety two miles in together over this period of fourteen days. during these fourteen days we consumed fourty two bagels, three cans of baked beans, two pockets of rolling tobacco, and four firm bricks of tofu. our bus consumed vegetable oil, and i cannot begin to count the number of five gallon jugs that it drank, due to my poor attention span in highschool math class. we had three tents, two romances, six cases of beer, and twelve watts of solar power to sustain our eight cell phones, two laptops, and three video cameras. we got five hours of sleep at night, danced for at least two hours a day, and had two incidents that involved a fire extinguisher. i learned three fabulous new lingo gems***see footnotes below***. collectively, we watched one hundred and three bands play at one bonnarroo music festival. we spent zero of our own dollars (save the occasional gas station sunglasses splurge) and had zero arguments. we were one happy family.
my theory is this: a common sense of purpose is the key to personal connection.
because is that not what drives any of us? the desire to be a part of something? the desire to be aknowledged? the desire for a crew and a posse and an entorage of supporters? and for the individualist american inside of us the sense of personal freedom this supportive collective will allow us to pursue?
the simple fact that each of the eight of us were tied to this one bus, that each of us felt connected to this simple vehicle, provided the commonality required to concoct the perfect friendships: ones of necessity and survival. ones of sharing everything.
ahh, the sharing! the division of physical things that makes my heart soar! the simple sharing of water! the sharing of plates! the sharing of secrets and of hopes! the communal and collective spirit of that bus!
and all of this is just numbers...
in the last three days i have added three parties to my exhorbant collection. (i have yet to stack them on the shelves with the others, for they are still alive and pulsing...)
people all around me are graduating and getting older and acting gleefull about all of it: i have not stopped telling my stories for the last sevety two hours.
but just as the collection begins to weigh on me with its heavy meals and messy cocktails, i realize that all of the parties from my personal collection are simple excuses for commonality; common senses of purpose in order to form and develop personal connections.
when i used to put too much sugar on my cereal my mother would tell me i was using the cereal as a "vehicle" for the sugar.
parties (and the banal reasons to throw them) are vehicles.
i am collecting vehicles.
busses and things.
to put all of these people in and watch them survive together.
***new bus lingo!!! (thanks to the moishe mobile crew for these gems...)
1. Yeti:
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Yeti (disambiguation).
Name: Yeti
AKA: Abominable Snowman
Migoi, Meh-teh et al.
Classification
Grouping: Cryptid
Sub grouping: Hominid
Data
Country: Tibet
Region: Himalayas
Habitat: Mountains
Status: Unconfirmed
The Yeti or Abominable Snowman is an apelike cryptid said to inhabit the Himalaya region of Bhutan, Nepal and Tibet. The names Yeti and Meh-Teh are commonly used by the people indigenous to the region,[1] and are part of their history and mythology.
Most mainstream scientists, explorers and writers consider current evidence of the Yeti's existence to be weak and better explained as hoax, legend or misidentification of known species.[2] Even today, the Yeti remains one of the most famous creatures of cryptozoology. As such, the Yeti can be considered a Himalayan version of the Sasquatch.
This amazing and useful term can be used to describe anything raw, rugged, or smelly, especially effective when speaking of hippies, roadies, or anyone with greasy hair or dirt under their fingernails.
Eg:
Keirsten: "I can't beleive we haven't showered in six days!"
Joe: "I know! We smell like a pack of yeties."
Levi: "Obvies. This bus is like a yeti locker room right now."
Molly: "Such a yetification station."
2. GROUNDSCORE:
The term used to describe something that was found on the ground and then aquired. For example, Matt found a pair of siiick aviators on the ground at bonnaroo. What a groundscore!
3. MER
please email joe madden for the three proper definitions of "MER." this is too complex even for me to get into at this hour of the night...
on a final note, next time its a friday night and you find yourself awkwardly scanning the room for potential hotties in your hometown and you realize you are completely out of place in a bar called margaritaville where there is not ONE brunette and the DJ doesnt know how to transition from song to song, play a little game called "We're the Only Ones in the Bar" and start dancing like youre a party collector in front of your mirror at home.
birds.
out the window yesterday i saw two bluejays hopping on the ground. i have reason to beleive one was a male and the other female, because they seemed to be courting each other. when one would hop towards the other, the other would hop away, and vice versa. there was a steady distance between them because each of them refused to get too close. but you could tell they really loved each other.
i have decided to introduce the term "BLUEJAY" to describe this form of courting, enacted by so many men and women across the globe. for example, one could say:
"I wanted to talk to Max last night but we just BLUEJAYED all night." or...
"Anna and Justin were such BLUEJAYS on friday night! its like, go home together already!" or....
"I played BLUEJAYS with Travis for a year and it backfired when we found out we both really wanted each other."
back in santa cruz, it seems that there are bluejays hopping everywhere. returning to this place is like a fucking conservatory. in a great way. i mean like chirping and fluttering everywhere. so much life and song.
the grass here is green and tall, the roses are blooming yellow on their vines.
last night, cooking in the vast commune kitchen, slicing fresh tomatoes, i thought: there is no place more consistently beautiful than this.
my mother sits at the breakfast table and looks out the window at "her birds" that are now dependent on the seed she provides for them. my father flutters around in his glasses with his coffee and alternates between painting and musing. there is a steady, predictable ebb and flow of this house, a natural pulse.
no one fucks with each other here.
like those jays outside, pecking at each other, fighting for food.
i have decided to introduce the term "BLUEJAY" to describe this form of courting, enacted by so many men and women across the globe. for example, one could say:
"I wanted to talk to Max last night but we just BLUEJAYED all night." or...
"Anna and Justin were such BLUEJAYS on friday night! its like, go home together already!" or....
"I played BLUEJAYS with Travis for a year and it backfired when we found out we both really wanted each other."
back in santa cruz, it seems that there are bluejays hopping everywhere. returning to this place is like a fucking conservatory. in a great way. i mean like chirping and fluttering everywhere. so much life and song.
the grass here is green and tall, the roses are blooming yellow on their vines.
last night, cooking in the vast commune kitchen, slicing fresh tomatoes, i thought: there is no place more consistently beautiful than this.
my mother sits at the breakfast table and looks out the window at "her birds" that are now dependent on the seed she provides for them. my father flutters around in his glasses with his coffee and alternates between painting and musing. there is a steady, predictable ebb and flow of this house, a natural pulse.
no one fucks with each other here.
like those jays outside, pecking at each other, fighting for food.
improv.
improv.
last night i attended a modern dance/modern art/modern music show on the UCSB campus.
modern art in this town is like a white wine drinker: i dont trust it.
on the stage there was a canvas the size of montana, a woman in a black body suit throwing paint and herself around the stage, and there was flute music that sounded like a combination of screams and farts.
and there was improv.
if theres something i cant stand in this life, its IMPROV.
improv is like you tube: people always say it like its normal but its really not. also, its boring when its trying to be exciting.
improv is embarrasing and it makes everybody feel uncomfortable. like everyone is waiting for something to happen and when nothing happens they just shake it off because it was improv so nothing really needed to happen; they were making it up as they went along!
but then, there were parts of the show that were quite moving. when three asians played their violins in perfect harmony, i got goosbumps for real.
today, the blog is short and shallow, because i have to go change the world now. i will be at the park in isla vista with a green veggie oil bus and lots of hippies if you want to stop by and see the headband im wearing.
peace in the middle east.
last night i attended a modern dance/modern art/modern music show on the UCSB campus.
modern art in this town is like a white wine drinker: i dont trust it.
on the stage there was a canvas the size of montana, a woman in a black body suit throwing paint and herself around the stage, and there was flute music that sounded like a combination of screams and farts.
and there was improv.
if theres something i cant stand in this life, its IMPROV.
improv is like you tube: people always say it like its normal but its really not. also, its boring when its trying to be exciting.
improv is embarrasing and it makes everybody feel uncomfortable. like everyone is waiting for something to happen and when nothing happens they just shake it off because it was improv so nothing really needed to happen; they were making it up as they went along!
but then, there were parts of the show that were quite moving. when three asians played their violins in perfect harmony, i got goosbumps for real.
today, the blog is short and shallow, because i have to go change the world now. i will be at the park in isla vista with a green veggie oil bus and lots of hippies if you want to stop by and see the headband im wearing.
peace in the middle east.
college.
i have returned to the town where i attended college; it feels strange because i have no friends left here. the town continues to exist in quite the same way that it used to: surfboards, bikes, suntans, beer drinking, basically lots of outlandish behavior. the casual relationships and dramas and dancing in someone's living room at three in the morning are still cracking off. the sun still sets with those same hot colors that makes you feel like you are living inside of a hotel painting. it is unchanged and unchanging, this hotbed of shenanigans. but there is a hollow, ghostly feeling in the sunshine skies that did not exist before. it is strange how a physical location can be defined almost wholly by the relationships that lived inside of it.
i remember driving from my hometown to my college town.
The highway 101 was a long, two lane breach of easy thoughts. There was first the stretch of leaving home, the lonely and depressing valley of Salinas and Soledad, the hamburger joints lit up on the sides of the road, the grass turned brown and the fields turned over by plows. The way the fields looked from a car window: the furrows were like the creases of a fan. The tractors and the plows abandoned on the edges of the fields. The irrigation systems coiling through the dirt. The workers, small and brown, hunched over those artichokes or berries, breaking themselves. The grey skies burning them. California forgetting them.
When you reached the turning curves of Paso Robles you know you are escaping something. You are leaving the farms and the drive-throughs and the truck stops, you are nearer to the ocean. The ocean calls you from afar. It brushes you with its salt hands and laps at your nerves. When you are in San Louis Obispo you feel the ocean in the trees and the wide streets that run under the freeway. When you hit Pismo Beach you are still surprised by it, big and blue, laying there and nudging the coast. You are always happy at that point of the trip. You have suffered through the bowels of the state and now you can see the sailboats again. Pismo beach sits on the edge of itself, sometimes falls in on itself, and it straddles a hideous highway. But at least it has found the coast, and you have found the ocean, and this is exciting and you can breathe again.
There is something about these coastal towns that makes you feel like you don’t have to be haunted. Growing up in one was a way of under-exposing me to anything depressing. It has made it so now I am very easily visually depressed. Things like abandoned buildings, high fences made of wire, underground train stations, dusty forgotten fields, cheap fluorescent lighting, early morning and late night diners, standardized apartment complexes, floral patterns on walls, beige carpets: they haunt me. Santa Cruz and all its blues left me with a mind that is so visually impressionable that anything outside of beauty makes my soul turn, compresses me. Those towns are alluring (and perhaps the ocean is a part of this) because they have done a good job of creating environments that are void of these things.
My exit off of the 101 was Storke Avenue. Goleta, where the college was, was a little offshoot of Santa Barbara with a population evenly divided between college students and Mexican laborers. I lived on a street called Sabado Tarde, which means Saturday afternoon in Spanish. Life there was a Saturday afternoon. It was always Saturday and it was always the afternoon in that town. There was always an evening glow to the streets, even when the fog came in. That lighting! That dangerously beautiful lighting! How it haloed the place! How we celebrated! And around the corner, in the streets further from the ocean, were the workers and laborers, paying too much for their simple housing (the same transient type of housing that we students inhabited with the white walls and nothing permenant) and watching us celbrate on those Saturday afternoons. We were laughing all the time, not knowing we weren’t the only ones in the neighborhood.
I worked in a restaurant there, an Italian place on upper State Street where the shops thinned out and most businesses were run out of small malls built into the sides of the trafficked street. The restaurant was a tiny and authentic place run by a terrible Italian named Renato who gave samples of procuitto to beautiful women and lured them into bed, despite his marriage to a fat American woman and his small children with Italian names and learning disabilities. All biases about the place aside, the restaurant fascinated me in its dynamic. It was owned by Renato, an Italian. The waitresses were all Americans, usually cute and upbeat and bored, who talked to the regulars and made cappuccinos in small white, authentic Italian cups with saucers. In the back were the workers and the chefs, all Mexican, mostly illegal immigrants. They huddled behind the scenes of the place, mixing and stirring and whistling and getting minimum wage. Our friendships and my interest in teaching them English was looked at with evil sidelined stares from Renato; it seemed he wanted the disconnect between the front and back of the restaurant to stay in tact, if only to keep things orderly and fixed. The whole thing fascinated me. My friends in the back made me shrimp fajitas and huevos rancheros from the ingredients in Renatos Italian kitchen. It was a threesome of cultural clash and connection.
California is full of these divisions. The valleys and the fields separated from the coast, the workers and the earners and the managers and the laborers are all separated. They are everywhere, I guess, these divisions of people, of types of people, of work and of place and of time. But in California they are so hidden, which is what makes them so interesting to me. They dwell in the back rooms of restaurants, in the pits of valleys, in the backs of classrooms, in the neighborhoods that we don’t drive through. In dark houses with the television on, or the Mexican radio station, live these people that we don’t see. We use them but we don’t see them.
There is a change in the air in the different areas of California. You can feel it when the windows are down and you’re passing through new towns on your way south. The redwood salt air of Santa Cruz fades and turns into a dusty, thinner air that seems connected to the soil. The further south you drive on the 101 the warmer the air gets. It is not so wet as the air up north, not so fresh. These changes always have a profound effect on my mindset.
i continue to interact with Santa Barbara as i have done in the past. last night i drank beer for hours and passed out in a bed that was not my own (standard) in an apartment perched dramatically on the cliff above the ocean. woke up at ten and wandered the wide streets in my slip ons and bought organic yogurt from the co-op that had served as a second home to me in years prior. everything was the same. but different. same diff.
a few extra thoughts for my loyal readers:
-hippies are the new hipsters.
-nose RINGS are way better than studs. Nicky Joon, thanks for re-inspiring this thought with your cuteness.
-boys in California do not like me anymore. whats up with that? are these bangs too intense? be honest...
-freebirds has the best nachos in the world.
-spanish is really sexy.
the quote of the day, voiced by madelaine baer after a night of guzzling: "if you cant take a good shit after a night of drinking, why live?"
thanks, maddy.
on a final note, take some time today to think about beats, and how they drop.
i remember driving from my hometown to my college town.
The highway 101 was a long, two lane breach of easy thoughts. There was first the stretch of leaving home, the lonely and depressing valley of Salinas and Soledad, the hamburger joints lit up on the sides of the road, the grass turned brown and the fields turned over by plows. The way the fields looked from a car window: the furrows were like the creases of a fan. The tractors and the plows abandoned on the edges of the fields. The irrigation systems coiling through the dirt. The workers, small and brown, hunched over those artichokes or berries, breaking themselves. The grey skies burning them. California forgetting them.
When you reached the turning curves of Paso Robles you know you are escaping something. You are leaving the farms and the drive-throughs and the truck stops, you are nearer to the ocean. The ocean calls you from afar. It brushes you with its salt hands and laps at your nerves. When you are in San Louis Obispo you feel the ocean in the trees and the wide streets that run under the freeway. When you hit Pismo Beach you are still surprised by it, big and blue, laying there and nudging the coast. You are always happy at that point of the trip. You have suffered through the bowels of the state and now you can see the sailboats again. Pismo beach sits on the edge of itself, sometimes falls in on itself, and it straddles a hideous highway. But at least it has found the coast, and you have found the ocean, and this is exciting and you can breathe again.
There is something about these coastal towns that makes you feel like you don’t have to be haunted. Growing up in one was a way of under-exposing me to anything depressing. It has made it so now I am very easily visually depressed. Things like abandoned buildings, high fences made of wire, underground train stations, dusty forgotten fields, cheap fluorescent lighting, early morning and late night diners, standardized apartment complexes, floral patterns on walls, beige carpets: they haunt me. Santa Cruz and all its blues left me with a mind that is so visually impressionable that anything outside of beauty makes my soul turn, compresses me. Those towns are alluring (and perhaps the ocean is a part of this) because they have done a good job of creating environments that are void of these things.
My exit off of the 101 was Storke Avenue. Goleta, where the college was, was a little offshoot of Santa Barbara with a population evenly divided between college students and Mexican laborers. I lived on a street called Sabado Tarde, which means Saturday afternoon in Spanish. Life there was a Saturday afternoon. It was always Saturday and it was always the afternoon in that town. There was always an evening glow to the streets, even when the fog came in. That lighting! That dangerously beautiful lighting! How it haloed the place! How we celebrated! And around the corner, in the streets further from the ocean, were the workers and laborers, paying too much for their simple housing (the same transient type of housing that we students inhabited with the white walls and nothing permenant) and watching us celbrate on those Saturday afternoons. We were laughing all the time, not knowing we weren’t the only ones in the neighborhood.
I worked in a restaurant there, an Italian place on upper State Street where the shops thinned out and most businesses were run out of small malls built into the sides of the trafficked street. The restaurant was a tiny and authentic place run by a terrible Italian named Renato who gave samples of procuitto to beautiful women and lured them into bed, despite his marriage to a fat American woman and his small children with Italian names and learning disabilities. All biases about the place aside, the restaurant fascinated me in its dynamic. It was owned by Renato, an Italian. The waitresses were all Americans, usually cute and upbeat and bored, who talked to the regulars and made cappuccinos in small white, authentic Italian cups with saucers. In the back were the workers and the chefs, all Mexican, mostly illegal immigrants. They huddled behind the scenes of the place, mixing and stirring and whistling and getting minimum wage. Our friendships and my interest in teaching them English was looked at with evil sidelined stares from Renato; it seemed he wanted the disconnect between the front and back of the restaurant to stay in tact, if only to keep things orderly and fixed. The whole thing fascinated me. My friends in the back made me shrimp fajitas and huevos rancheros from the ingredients in Renatos Italian kitchen. It was a threesome of cultural clash and connection.
California is full of these divisions. The valleys and the fields separated from the coast, the workers and the earners and the managers and the laborers are all separated. They are everywhere, I guess, these divisions of people, of types of people, of work and of place and of time. But in California they are so hidden, which is what makes them so interesting to me. They dwell in the back rooms of restaurants, in the pits of valleys, in the backs of classrooms, in the neighborhoods that we don’t drive through. In dark houses with the television on, or the Mexican radio station, live these people that we don’t see. We use them but we don’t see them.
There is a change in the air in the different areas of California. You can feel it when the windows are down and you’re passing through new towns on your way south. The redwood salt air of Santa Cruz fades and turns into a dusty, thinner air that seems connected to the soil. The further south you drive on the 101 the warmer the air gets. It is not so wet as the air up north, not so fresh. These changes always have a profound effect on my mindset.
i continue to interact with Santa Barbara as i have done in the past. last night i drank beer for hours and passed out in a bed that was not my own (standard) in an apartment perched dramatically on the cliff above the ocean. woke up at ten and wandered the wide streets in my slip ons and bought organic yogurt from the co-op that had served as a second home to me in years prior. everything was the same. but different. same diff.
a few extra thoughts for my loyal readers:
-hippies are the new hipsters.
-nose RINGS are way better than studs. Nicky Joon, thanks for re-inspiring this thought with your cuteness.
-boys in California do not like me anymore. whats up with that? are these bangs too intense? be honest...
-freebirds has the best nachos in the world.
-spanish is really sexy.
the quote of the day, voiced by madelaine baer after a night of guzzling: "if you cant take a good shit after a night of drinking, why live?"
thanks, maddy.
on a final note, take some time today to think about beats, and how they drop.
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