they say that the crude oil is just lapping up on shore, but they’re probably exaggerating. i can see the water from here, and it does look pretty dirty, but i’m probably too accustomed to crystal blue.

and so ha ha we all prop our eyelids open, because most of us were up late last night taking advantage of the free beer, and catching up with coworkers past, who hadn’t been seen in years, possibly, and the big bossmen get up front and discuss the business and tell jokes like cold politicians, and make golf analogies that just don’t work, at all, but they cannot resist them, because the only things in the world that they could possibly ever talk about, can’t understand why anyone in their right proper mind would want to hear about anything else, ever, the only things are the business and golf.

it was all alright. they gave each of us a small pad of paper and a pencil. i guess this would be for taking notes, if we felt like taking notes. i didn’t feel like taking notes, but i drew. i drew with the side of the pencil, angled so its strokes would look more like charcoal. i drawed a picture of a triceratops dinosaur and then a tree with one apple on a branch, or possibly some other roundish fruit, with a meditating man underneath the apple, who was not newton, because the fruit would not be falling anytime soon, because it is suspended in time, locked on lead-stained paper.

and it’s been a series of nice and veryshort reunions for me, too. like how i saw my favorite anal-retentive canadian ever, his name is shawn, and i worked with him, i was his trainee, on the night shifts in north carolina, november/december 2000, and there was dave, my other favorite canadian who’s easier to get along with than shawn, because he’s much less anal-retentive, and there was walter who’s still cuckoo for stripclubs, and for some dumb reason i agreed to have dinner with walter, and he was drunk in the restaurant and dropping f-bombs at the top of his lungs, and this is a fancy restaurant with candles and slacks and thirty-dollar filet mignons, and he wondered why the waitress told him that he’d have to leave if he insisted on swearing. and i smile at these things because i am an observer, and not much of a direct influence on what’s going on. and there was jason and mark, who i’d let down, saying to them at the time “there’s no way. i can’t do this anymore. i’m going to quit. i’m going to quit. there’s no way. can’t do this anymore.” and now i have to explain myself, like “no, yeah, i’m still around. it’s not bad. i’m not that busy. it’s nice. i like the summertime because it’s free.”

i hum with the air-conditioner. we are a two-part harmony. we are probably both bad for the environment, but luckily we are both short-sighted.

i should say something about how i’m a stupid idiot who left his backpack at the main street brewing company on saturday. i mean sunday. i keep thinking “sunday” and writing “saturday”, lately. it’s strange. anyway, i had stopped to drink a lusciousluscious beer, because i hadn’t in a long time, and plus i was sweaty and exhausted from the biking, and it was ninety-eight degrees out. and i sat down at the bar and placed the backpack where the footrest should be, i guess. and i watched the dragracing and skateboarding on the televisions and cooled off and talked to jason the bartender about russian airshow disasters and the impending guilt of the pilots who survived, how they’d probably never be the same, being partially responsible for killing a whole bunch of people by flying a jet into them, and yet surviving themselves.

and when i was sufficiently cooled off, i paid and got up and left and i guess it never occurred to me that i should probably pick up my backpack before i left, in order to take it with me, because it contained important things such as camera and cell phone and journal and tape recorder. everything i own which serve to assist in recording experiences. i value these things.

and on sunday night i am going to sleep and suddenly remember i’ve forgotten my backpack. and the establishment is closed until 11am the next morning, and my flight takes off at 11:45.

but it all turned out alright because i sat in the parking lot for a few minutes the next morning and jason the bartender showed up for his shift, and we both knew that i had left a backpack the day before, and he opened the door and got me my backpack and i raced to the airport and caught the plane because there were no lines.

but in a little while i have to go to this awards banquet, where some people will get handshakes from people who are deemed important by others, because they have gone above and beyond their duties, or else they are lucky, and i think i’m safe in assuming i can just eat my free food and talk to someone fun underneath the presentations for a while, and then get myself back to my room early, because i’m bored with all of this, wanting more to just go home, but maybe just maybe i’ll force myself to explore, and take a walk down the oily oily beach, or so they say.

and then i’ll come back again.

bye, journal.

and i was all set up to play my first real soccer game with actual real other soccer players, for the first time in maybe four years, and then it was al foiled.

foiled by the phone call i was forgetting to fear every day. the one that tells you to go to somewhere else in the country to do this and that. so instead i have to drive to eastern kentucky tonight, and stay there and look over people’s shoulders for a couple days, and then come home again, maybe saturday. check check doublecheck.

i will fall asleep at the wheel. i will peel off the road amidst a slickening downpour. i will crash into a tree on a mountain in the middle of the night. i will call my mom and ask her what i should do next, and she’d calm me down. i will tell her i am tired with cold-like symptoms and that my new fake tooth is annoying.

no. no. i will make coffee before i leave. i will put it in one of my tragically underused travel mugs. i will pour in cream and sugar. i will apply the sippy top. i will lean on caffeine tonight. i will pull over and sleep if i get too tired. i will drive slowly if it downpours. i do not fear west virginia west virginia fears me. there are many things to be afraid of but don’t be afraid of the dark.

this was the first email from mike, adressed to chad and myself:

so you guys probably knew this the whole time
but unfortunately for me i had to find out at work that the
mixman shirt that chad gave me when we were together after the skinnee j’s show…well it’s not real polite.
so i’m at my lab bench and i hear “motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker…endless repeat. well what the hell?
the shirt talks! the shirt has a voice and it’s a dirty voice.
there are no batteries, it’s a mind of it’s own.
thanks for nothing chad. :)
yuck it up sweethearts.

this very nearly made my head blow up. i responded.

that’s insane. that’s impossible. how does that happen? how does that
happen? that’s disturbing it’ll bother me all day.

-tim.

i talked to chad on the phone, because he didn’t want to go to the concert, but his head was also blowing up over mike’s email. we concluded that mike is now on acid or perhaps mescaline.

this was mike’s response this morning.

i’m a funny guy, eh?
i got this shirt from target, with the lucky charms guy on it, ( in part b/c it was a green shirt), well damn it if the shirt didn’t get me in trouble one day too.
all of the sudden “shit, shit, shit…” again repeating endless.
it would be so bad if it repeated “i love you” endless, b/c girls would eat that up. but it’s always cursing.
so y’all beware. any luck in your closets tim?
and chad i know you like target.
this shit is coming down like the stock market.

mike’s silly but not usually deranged.

it’s confusing, amusing, but even a little unnerving.

• dear nora, the photobooth is just outside the entrance to old navy, not ruby tuesdays as your informant has surmised. there was nothing underneath. lousy american photobooths.
• dear front tooth, don’t be scared. i bet you’ll go to heaven.
• dear gordon downie & gang, please rock my world tomorrow. please incite dancing and consider playing “flamenco”. did you guys bring the hammond?
• dear chickennoodlesoup in my stomach, you don’t see any mono down there do you? any idea why i’m so tired all the time, with all these cold symptoms? no? okay. by the way you tasted great.
• dear miles davis, i like “kind of blue” better. i like minimal brass.
• dear amelie, don’t be shy about me taking off your shrinkwrap. sorry. you look even more pale than i remember, by the way.
• dear me.

i don’t gallivant around too much, but last night i was gallivanting. last night was really the first time i’ve ever made friends with people who are represented, substantially or otherwise, in my really big music collection.last night was great because i made friends with a band i like called landing. but a more truthful statement is that i made friends with aaron and adrienne and daron and dick. it felt just like the big group of friends i never had.

i went to see them at somebody’s attic last night, because i like their music a lot. it’s surreal, very pretty, gorgeous even, approaching something between drone and shoegaze and something else. let’s call it “dream-gaze”. and they’re an up and coming act in their genre. they have opened for more popular acts like low and windy & carl. they play the perfect music for falling asleep to, waking up to, spacing out to, but not really for driving to.

but that’s all for the press-releases, exposure lines and 9-5 indie-rawk chitchat madness. this isn’t what my experience with landing was about.

i got to the house with the attic at about nine. aaron and adrienne and dick and daron were the only other people there. we sat on the curb and talked and joked for quite a while before anyone else showed up. and once people did start showing up, and shaking hands and things, everyone seemed to be under the assumption that i was a mysterious fifth band member. we all played along with it, and i became the on-call accordian player. the hub that holds the other four together.

that was funny and then i helped them lug all of their equipment up to the attic, and i helped stick little paper tracklistings into their tour cd-eps. i was quickly becoming the witty and dependable roadie they never even knew they were missing.

we had time to kill so we got into their beaten-up short yellow schoolbus and drove to 7-11 and got ourselves slurpees. i had a code red slurpee, and so did adrienne. daron and dick got green slurpees and aaron didn’t get anything. i don’t know why.

by the time we got back to the ramshackle house with the attic, it was about 11, but the first band still weren’t even close to being ready to play. so we stood around outside and talked and joked a lot more, and kicked around rolling empty beer bottles and broken wine bottles, and there were lots and lots of bottles, and we laughed a lot.

and in between talking about how one might confuse dolphins with unicorns, and their prior experiences with buying multi-sided die at one-eyed jacques, the last time they came through richmond, touring for “the surface of eceon”, and i said with exclamation points “how did i miss that?!? i love that album!”, how ‘the open sea’ is one of my favorite songs of the year, a mind-wiping storm of shoegaze and pedal distortion, awesome awesome, how i didn’t tell them that i led off my march 2002 mix with their song, how i was ignoring the trouble i was having relating the greatness of a song like that, to young people who were just like me, anyway, between talking about stuff like this, they were wondering, they wondered when their next shower would be. so silly. “seriously,” said i, “if you guys want a place to stay, with air conditioning and hot showers and plenty of soft beds and places to sleep, you can crash at my place tonight” and they seemed happy with that, and gracious.

but i’m going to take a break from writing this, and watch this movie on ABC with talking animals, probably “Babe the Pig”, because i’m strangely fascinated with it, and a couple nights ago i watched “Toy Story 2″ on television, and was endlessly entertained with it, and i’m probably developing some penchant for children’s movies that are made to be funny for the parents too. and i’ll continue writing after. thanks.

okay, i’m back.

oh, i forgot to mention something about dick’s conversation with the squatter. the last, lonely charlottesville squatter. he walked up while we were standing there talking. he readily injected himself into our conversation, and immediately began dominating it with slurred or abandoned sentences. he seemed to be drunk or tripping on something. he told dick about how he was the only squatter left in town, that he was lonely, and that his backpack was making him tired too often. he made a special point to tell us about how earlier in the day, there was a woman who showed him her “titties and thong” and invited him to lick her. he fumbled this story pretty badly, it was all very obviously fake, like he was only trying to impress someone. i guess he hoped to impress someone. and so dick worked at appeasing him, saying “wow… umm.. that’s awesome, man..”, to which the squatter responded, “naw i’m still really lonely though.”

a few minutes later, the lonely squatter would find his way up the stairs to the attic, teetering dangerously back and forth, not so cautious of the empty bottles scattered all around, he would remove his backpack and throw it to the floor, he would fall onto a ratty sofa and immediately become unconscious, sleeping through all three bands, still asleep (or maybe dead?) when we would leave the area many hours later.

in the meantime, we were all really hitting it off, the five of us. it was neat, because they all seemed genuinely stimulated by the bits i had to offer to our conversations.

by 1am, the first band was finally playing, and the atmosphere was extremely “DIY/punk”. the first band played some half-hour improvisation, some kind of noise-core, loud and mostly formless, probably what the Dead C sound like, if i bothered to ever pick up one of their albums.

despite the noise, the lonely squatter slept peacefully as dick and i observed him, awestruck. daron said he slept through the last 15 minutes of their set, too. i don’t know how you could.

landing played second, and they were as good as they sound when they lulled me to sleep all those nights. all those depressing nights when i needed something to calm me down to sleep. landing was what i used. i had forgotten this until just now.

the attic was small and crowded with people, and there was a single red lightbulb supplying illuminance to the space, which made for some really neat pictures. i took quite a few.

and so most of the DIY punk kids were impressed, complimenting aaron and adrienne on how soothing the music was, how it made them want to sleep peacefully like the lonely squatter was doing, and they said thanks, and he took the equipment back downstairs, and adrienne sold merchandise out of their big rubbermaid tub full of cds, and i watched over the mess of guitars and amplifiers and keyboard stands in the parking lot, which was filled up with loud and drunk lost youth, rife with horseplay and domestic disturbances next door, and listened to the third band from outside, (they were called “devil music” i think), and i was impressed, and finally aaron pulled up the short yellow bus, and the equipment was loaded, and devil music stopped playing with a crash-landing, and the lost youth left the attic, and the man with the money paid adrienne, and by then it was 4am or so and we were tired.

i said “i sleep in my bed every night someone else can use it” but they refused, so i slept in my bed, and aaron and adrienne got the small bed, and dick got the pull out bed, and daron said he was just fine on the recliner. and everyone slept til early in the afternoon, but i didn’t sleep so well. and i felt like the conscientious parent, because i wrote up detailed directions to get them to winston-salem, because if anyone’s an expert on driving to north carolina it’s me, and they had to be there by 7pm this evening, so we had a quick sandwich at coppola’s and ice cream at bev’s, and finally i pointed them onto the powhite, had them drop me off at the corner so i could walk home, i tried to push money into their hands for the only two merchandise items i lacked from them, but they would not accept any, and so i gave them copies of my june and july mixes, and they thanked me endlessly for everything, and it felt good to be thanked, and they invited me to connecticut, and i guess i need a reason to go to connecticut now, and i said it was nice meeting all of you, and they smiled and waved and drove off in their short yellow bus and i walked home.

they felt like old, old friends. it was a pleasure.

and it’s really weird how they also happen to be the musicians behind these songs that i really truly connect with. that’s neat and hasn’t really ever happened to me before.

here are the landing summer tour dates. you should really go and see them because their music is beautiful and they’re great people: