All posts by Mush

About Mush

I want to be a veterinarian because I love children.

Attending a chichi wine event.

Music,

In which I go out and have a lot of fun. And FAR too much wine!

Saturday afternoon Syl texted me; she and C were in town. Turns out RB had gotten a recording gig and had hired the rest of the band to schlep gear. C worked while Syl and I hung out Saturday night. When C was done, I invited them to crash in the front room to save them sleeping in the studio, which is filthy.

Sunday I made brunch and we had a lovely lazy morning. Syl & C left. I read and took a nap and generally lazed around. Gramma took me to Applebee’s for dinner that afternoon.

Sunday night C & Syl picked me up and gave me a comp ticket for night two of the recording event and we all went downtown to see the Randy Oxford Band.

The hostess tried to get RB to introduce the band. He didn’t feel like it, so I volunteered because I knew he would strip it out of the recording later and do a voice-over. (I hadn’t realized at the time that they were filming too.) I forgot to tell the crowd to turn off their cell phone ringers, and had to read both the venue’s and the band’s names off of a post-it note, but it was fun anyway.

Jazz The band opened with a jazz funk chart, then moved into Motown and blues. I liked them a lot, especially the rhythm section. The bass player was a monster player, with a lovely doo-wop falsetto he broke out on some Marvin Gaye covers. The drummer was solid as a rock; he also sang a medley during the third set.

The band leader, a trombone player, was a solid player and fun to watch but primarily his gift is in coalescing a kick-ass band around himself. Everybody got a chance to solo, and he invited a few local players up to sit in. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope to be invited up myself, but it didn’t happen… a good thing in the long run, ’cause I was shitfaced by halfway through the second set.

I befriended their vocalist, a fierce little black chick named Patty. After the first set (during which she did ‘Dr. Feelgood’: omfg I love that chart!) I explained that the mic she was using needed her to get right up on it or she’d sound thin. “Why didn’t they tell me that?” she asked, tilting her head toward the guys behind the board. “Because they’re men?” I said. She laughed and hugged me. I bugged her in between all her sets, and at the end of the night she gifted me with a heavily sequined blingy shawl she wears around her hips for gigs. “It’s very sparkly, so you don’t have to move that much,” she told me. She’s been singing for 40 years and had a lot of presence. The local folks told me I have way better chops, but chops don’t always matter. She had the gig, not me, and I thought she was wonderful and gracious.

The bass player said, “You’re the chick in that recording R played? Yeah? So when you movin’ to Tacoma?” It’s so nice when a monster player says something like that to a girl, don’t you find?

Later in the evening I met a flaming creature who danced with me and then invited me to a gay bar in the Tri Cities for his birthday in a few weeks.

After the gig, I packed microphones and ran around being a friendly, stupidly drunken spaz. Then C and I went to Shari’s and ate, then went back to the house where Syl was already asleep from when we’d brought her home between sets. I went to bed…

…and stayed in bed pretty much consistently until I had to come to work this morning. Wine hangovers? Suck.

Well, doesn't THIS suck.

Travel, , ,

In which time is not on my side.

When I first decided to go to GBM, I checked kayak.com for flight prices. It was $408 round-trip, including taxes. I didn’t buy because first I had to submit my time off request at work.

At the 6-week pre-travel mark the price for the very same flights went up to $438, and was still there yesterday.

I would have booked my flight yesterday when I got my time-off request approved, but Java had crashed on my machine so I couldn’t navigate the Alaska Airlines site and I was too busy to reboot.

Today I went to book my flight, and in the past 24 hours the very same itinerary has gone up to $602. Crap.

Looks like I’ll be altering my travel dates to March 14-18. Because I ain’t paying no six hundred dollars for airfare.

"A single, absolutely verified theophany"

Reading, ,

In which I respond here because I’m no longer in college.

valisI’m reading one of the late Philip K. Dick‘s final three works: a wild tour of drugs, insanity, and longing called VALIS.

While the characters – so far at least – are so engaging that it’s worth reading, there’s a great deal of vocabulary. Some of it is off-putting, because I already possess a reasonably massive vocabulary, with as solid a relationship with modern English’s predecessors as a product of public schooling can reasonably expect to have, but on some pages there will be three or four – or even more – words I need to look up. Is this communication, or is it masturbation? Who was he writing for? (And will I ever be one of them?)

It doesn’t escape me that the more words one has, the more topics one can think about… I mean to say, can we think about something without having first fashioned words to describe it? I don’t think we can. So: esoteric topics require their own jargon. Fine.

Anyway. Point is, athiests: always pissed off because [1] they can’t force themselves to experience God the same way they can force material things to interact; [2] the existence of suffering in the world upsets them so much that no clear thinking can be done about God or love after the topic of pain is introduced; [3] they require physical, dimensional proof of a force that possesses neither characteristic directly (but only indirectly, as a side-effect); and, [4] if they’re thinky, they tend to go on and on obfuscating and defining and defending and thrashing about and making the entire thing so fucking achingly complicated that no one has the energy to enter into meaningful dialog with them. Which they take to mean they’re right. Continue reading "A single, absolutely verified theophany" →

Happiness is a Warm Mug

Blurbs, ,

In which now my desk is fully tricked out.

I used to have a Mr Coffee Mug-Activated Warmer. It sat on many a desk next to me as I worked for many an employer. It plugged into an electrical outlet and faithfully kept my beverages – and sometimes even my hands – warm.

When I left LISCO I thought I’d thrown it into a box with all my other crap, but when I unpacked that box recently there was no mug warmer. I can’t imagine myself leaving it; I’d had it for so long and it was such a handy little device…

Oh well. Shit happens. I ordered a new one.

USB Mug Warmer

This one plugs into a USB port, is a 4-port USB hub, and has cute little lights on it!

Earning My Stalker Card

Reading, , ,

In which I use my powers for evil good.

You know I’m a whore for the hard sci-fi, right? Totally devour the stuff. By the metric ton. It’s a big part of my free time, the sci-fi is, so I’m gonna talk about it. If you don’t read sci-fi, you can safely skip this whole entry.

I just finished a Greg Bear novel called Psychlone and it utterly sucked, and so did the last new Bear, Quantico, and, I mean, well, damn. Because I used to love Bear. Infinity Concerto was so wonderful I’ve read it thrice (I rarely re-read, plus I don’t even like fantasy). I loved Eon and Darwin’s Radio and Slant, and he just used to write such good sci-fi.

But Psychlone? Ugh. IMO the premise was weak, the characters didn’t even like themselves, and the denouement failed to satisfy. It was a terrible disappointment. It’s well-crafted and expertly written, of course, but it just didn’t work for me. I don’t think the author himself even knew quite what it was he was trying to convey, because I certainly couldn’t tell and I’m deep. (Snort.) A scientific basis for demons? Okay, fine, but please. Just… please. Finish defining your universe before you start breaking it.

So the Bear novel broke my heart and to cheer myself up I broke into the William Barton I’d bought recently and was hoarding. It’s called Acts of Conscience and I’ve devoured half of it in 24 hours… and oh, yeah, yeah, it’s good. I love Barton. Looooove him.

So I went surfing for more information, because I’ve decided I’m going to read the rest of Barton’s backlist. This year. All of it. Because that’s just how I roll when I find a yummy new-to-me author.

Enter the confusion: there were problems, people. Where the hell is the info on this guy? Not highly indexed, that’s for certain: I found a bio on Librarything combining this Barton’s work with the work of two other writers of the same name, a domain name with no content (!!!), and a google hit six pages deep about a SQL programmer who writes sci-fi and may or may not be the author I’m stalking looking for.

How in the hell, I ask you, is a devoted reader supposed to stalk learn about an author what ain’t hardly on the Innartubez whatsoevar? Christ. Man’s been published since the 70’s and there’s hardly a pinch of info on him! His wikipedia entry is comprised of fewer than one hundred words, there appears to be a 14-year hole in his release schedule, and I had to update his Librarything page myself for fuck’s sake!

I ran searches in three different engines, mined the isfdb, read the blurb in the back of the book I’ve got and triangulated the author’s town of residence with the registration on the domain name, and… hah. Gotcha.

And I emailed him.

Which is a big deal for me, ’cause I’m shy about my sci-fi authors. Once I emailed Sarah Zettel, though, and she emailed me back. But as a rule I avoid the boards where the writers hang out, and don’t send fan mail. (No comments from the peanut gallery on my use of the word ‘shy,’ now. The fact that I’d’ve walked up to Miles Davis and asked to borrow a dollar without batting an eyelash simply means that I’m not afraid of musicians. Writers are entirely different. Probably ’cause I ain’t one of them.)

Now ‘scuse me plz while I go read.

On Ageing

Blurbs,

In which I ramble on about getting older.

Work tonight was perfectly paced. Never got behind, never got ahead, just one call or call-back or chat presented itself at a time, all in an orderly fashion. Usually it’s not like that, it’s either banging or totally dead. I guess I liked it; appeals to my Libran sense of… appropriateness, I guess. A place for everything and everything in its place and all that. Orderly.

This morning I walked to catch the bus for work. A man was walking along the sidewalk toward me, on the inside. As we drew abreast, he stopped suddenly with a slap of his feet because there were branches in his path and he didn’t want to swerve into my lane. I smiled vaguely at him, and he shrugged and smiled back, almost coquettishly, and I realized a moment later that I’d seen him as a person, not as an old man. I saw boyishness in his presentation of himself to me, and knew that he’d interacted with me as a peer even though he was probably half again my age, if not more.

Ten years ago, he would have been an old man to me, some inscrutable thing outside of my experience. More an iconic representation of the idea of old-manness than a real human being. But lately I’m looking at the people around me and realizing they all feel like they did when they were twenty, but they’re trapped in bodies that are forty or sixty or eighty. I see the boy the man used to be and the girl the woman used to be now, not just an old person.

I think it started with Gramma. She’s 46 years older than I am, but still giggles like a girl under the right circumstances. She’s told me stories about her life, and I see that her sense of self is much like mine is: she still feels like herself, but then she looks down at her hands and notices they’re the hands of some mysterious old lady. She says things sometimes just like a woman in her prime would, and I have come to realize that one’s sense of self doesn’t seem to change much beyond, say, 30 or so – though our bodies certainly do.

I am now getting permanent wrinkles on my face. My hair is both turning silver and thinning. I even have a varicose vein, of all fucking things. And yet I still feel like… me. Whoever that is.

I suppose I always thought that older people were different than me, that their perceptions of both themselves and the world around them were as different from mine as mine were from my own when I’d been two or three. I think I’m somewhat disappointed, actually, that the evolution of my self seems to have stopped. I expected 40 (well, almost) to feel as different from 20 as 20 did from 10, but it doesn’t. I just feel like me. I have more memories and I’m somewhat quicker on the uptake, but that’s really about it.

Oh, hell, I can’t figure out what I’m trying to relate. I suspect everyone else rather already knew about this – that a person is a person is a person, regardless. I have nothing profound to reveal, other than the fact that I must be realizing my own life’s more or less half over, and that old people no longer seem all that damned old.

Well, that and the shocking realization that 20-year-olds are now, for the most part, total fucking aliens (a feeling I never expected to feel). Honestly, though, I suppose I’m mostly just pissed about the hair thing. And that 20-year-old bodies are TOTALLY wasted on 20-year-olds, holy shit, can I get a witness?

The End of an Era

Damn Roos, ,

In which I wish I was there.

Bghead just texted me to tell me that the Big M has died. I’m at work, so I googled it immediately (while on the phone with a customer laboriously explaining why she probably doesn’t want to install the lastest version of Outlook Express on her 11-year-old Windows 95 box)…

…and holy cow. Maharishi’s dead.

I spent 15 years, give or take, living in Fairfield directly and indirectly because of the Transcendental Meditation movement. Nearly everyone I know in that town was a meditator or sidha, and even if they weren’t they’d been around people who were for so long that they knew all the vocabulary.

It’s indirectly because of TM that I met Amma – and that was the single most profound event of my entire life, bar none.

Because of TM I’ve met people from all over the world, I’ve traveled, I’ve grown from being a weird little white middle class creature to being… well, whatever the hell it is that I am now.

TM fascinated me, drew me, embraced me, infuriated me, and pushed me out. I despised the Movement for a long time after I got off campus, until I realized that all organized religion is that way: only little folks – pencil pushers and bureaucrats – will stay to run institutions once based on real transformative shit, but their idiocy doesn’t necessarily make the seed knowledge any less profound. No doubt all the biggies would have apoplexy if they had to try to navigate their own institutional legacies today. Pretty much everyone agrees that Christ wouldn’t have anything to do with Christianity if He returned.

Anyway.

mmy_large.jpgSo we roos have all been waiting for Maharishi to die for some time now. We’ve none of us been able to answer with any kind of emphasis whether TM – as an organization, not as a technique – was good, bad, or both. (Nearly every meditator – except those who bugged all the way out to TM-ex, that is – will say the technique was good. At the very least, it cured headaches.) And now he has and I’m here in Washington, too far away from what are undoubtedly amazing conversations, tears, knee-jerk reactions, random drunken ramblings, residence courses, policy switchbacks, conference calls in the dome, and confused press releases…

Will the University survive? Will the TM community survive? Will the town – as we know it, at least – survive? How will Movement policy change? Will it get better? Worse? Will people still learn TM? (Most importantly, will the Beach Boys or the remaining Beatles say anything?) (I’m being facetious.) (No, really.) What’ll happen to the Movement’s already wonky monetary structure? Who owns all those TM centers around the world? What will happen to all those multi-million dollar Stapathya-vedic ‘homes’ around Fairfield, once there’s no market for them? Will birds live in them?

Gawd, I really wish I could be in Fairfield this week. I really do. Someone should fly me out so I can get drunk at the Dead Cock and make John Bloch cry. And where the hell is Harold Turner when you need a pink purse?

Overheard in Oregon

Blurbs, ,

In which there’s a bar moment.

Last night RB picked me up after work and took me over to the Oasis. Between the band’s sets, the bass player came and sat next to our table. There was a lit cigarette in the ashtray next to him.

An attractive woman walked up, picked up the cigarette, and took a drag. Three women at her nearby table cheered and clapped. The woman put the cigarette down, exhaled, and walked away.

The bass player turned to us with a slightly stunned look.

“Wow,” I enthused. “You know her?”

“Never seen her in all my life,” he replied.

“Was that your cigarette?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Hmm,” I said.

We all sat in silence for a moment.

“Maybe it means she wants to give you a blow job,” I opined.

“God I hope so!” he said.

It's Saturday, Damn It.

Work, ,

In which I bitch and moan.

It’s Saturday, and I’m at work.

I’m cold. I’m tired. And I’ve already been on the phone for an hour and I’m usually not even out of bed by ten.

My beloved dog made sad eyes at me when I left the house this morning.

Oh, and I feel crappy on top of it. Wanna be in bed with a warm dog and a good book.