A Running Tally of Metaphysical Phenomena

A couple of years ago, when I lived in Richmond, I lived 6.2 miles from work, and in the right direction. I lived downtown-ish, as far as the freeways were concerned, and drove away from that area and out toward the fringes of the city for work. On the way to work, all of the traffic was heading into the city, and on the way back in the afternoon, it was heading back out. I didn’t spend a lot of time commuting, and what time I spent in the car was spent praying that God would help me survive the year and treat my seventh and eighth graders with the grace and respect they often didn’t deserve instead of hiding their left shoes and making fun of them in ways they didn’t understand and dropping desks on them. So I didn’t notice the drive too much.

Other than the 12 minutes either way between home and work, I rarely, rarely got in my car that year. I lived within walking distance of the grocery store, the library, my church, the post office, the best record store ever, the Byrd Theater, Nacho Mama (best margaritas ever), Bev’s (best ice cream ever), my friend Paul’s house, about a million places to eat, and pretty much anything else I ever wanted or needed. I apply a little more liberal definition to the idea of “walking distance” than some people. In the case of my place in Richmond, everything was within about three quarters of a mile. (Twice that, and I’m still up for walking, generally.) Over the course of that year, I came to really, really value the lifestyle change of staying out of the car so much. At the time, I looked at it as a phase that I didn’t want to take for granted, because I was pretty sure it wouldn’t last.

And it didn’t. I hightailed it back to Lynchburg and drove to anywhere I needed to go for the next couple of years. I didn’t hate it, really. Lynchburg’s not that big, gas was more reasonable then, and I was only working 15-20 hours a week for a lot of that time, so it didn’t cut into my life. When we were getting ready to move out here to Washington, though, I started thinking back to Richmond and decided that at the very least, I wanted to walk or bike to work. The rest of the things we do, we could use the car if we needed to, fine, but I was looking forward to simplifying things by cutting down to one car and streamlining the way we live and get around. I sold my car on Craigslist (in less than 48 hours, for the asking price) as soon as I got a job here in Redmond and plotted out my transportation strategy right away.

Kirsten’s dad even gave me his old bike, which is this awesome vintage ten speed from the early 70′s. It obviously needed some fixing up to get it living again, so I took it to REI and weathered the derision and superiority of the bike shop guys who didn’t approve of anything that was old and, more importantly, not expensive. Turns out they wanted 200 dollars to tune it up, and besides that, it was much too tall of a bike. Mike’s a taller guy than I am, and I think it may even be big for him. I walked to and from work every day. Then, after the weather started getting warmer at the end of the winter, I started looking in earnest on Craigslist for a good commuting bike. The same breakneck Craigslist pace that helped me sell my car before I even gave it a proper goodbye kept me from finding a bike, but I was actively looking when Urn offered to give me his old bike as part of his continual effort at clearing out space in his storage unit. He hadn’t ridden it in several years, so it worked out well for both of us.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve gotten used to riding with traffic on city roads, sped up my overall time to work by two or three minutes (not bad for a mile and a half!), beat a Porsche Boxster across the intersection when the light turned green (I realize that a Boxster is to the name of Porsche what vienna sausages are to the name of meat, but still), and accumulated less soreness in my legs day by day. I have a twelve-dollar helmet and a nine-dollar lock, and the places we consider for our new place to live are influenced by how accessible they are by bike: I’ve drawn a ten-mile radius from the destination of my new office building and staked it out as the possible places to live. I have a connection, a kinship with other bike commuters. We wave sometimes. I have set the goal never to buy a second car again unless absolutely, undeniably necessary.

So you can probably understand why I’m so disappointed that my bike got stolen overnight and doesn’t live at my house anymore.

I was frustrated and upset this morning, but I’ve more or less come to terms with it now. Those middle school students took away the chance to have a good day all week for a year of my life (you can talk about a positive attitude, perspective, etc., but you weren’t there; just trust me on this one), and I stayed there and did everything I could do to treat them with grace and patience, because it was the right thing to do. And I blew it a whole bunch of times. Maybe more often than I pulled it off. Now somebody took away my bike, and sure, I wish I had it back, but it’s a bike, and it’s grace and patience again. If I’m going to say that I have things, not own them, and that none of those things own me, I better live it out, right? I’ll get another one when I can, and in the mean time, I should be grateful that it’s an easy walk to and from the place I go five times a week. Who knows, maybe whoever took it will even put it back after the joyride is finished.

I know it sounds like I’m just being a pious jerk. And I don’t really have a good answer for that. I’m not trying to be, and I’m sure that every time I walk back inside on the way out to work because I forgot and put my helmet on again, I’m going to be upset for a little bit. I mean, what if that person just pawned it? What if they stripped it for parts or ghost rode it off a cliff by now? You know what? Not my problem.

All that being said, though, if anyone has a spare commuter-class bike lyin’ around…

There are a few funny little inconsistencies between myself and this blog. For one thing, if the blog looked like the way I actually write, the letters would be tall in the stick parts and really short in the round parts. The sentences would look less like they actually do and      more      like      this,      which      cracks      Kirsten      up      when      she      reads      my      handwriting. Also, I do make every attempt to speak in a grammatically correct manner in real life (which I know is annoying), but I do tend to mumble or trail off at the end of my sentences (psychoanalysts could find a correlation between that and the small round parts of my letters), and there’s not really a strong parallel for that in typ

One thing I haven’t really figured out—and I got to thinking about it after the last post—is why I love to listen to music, love to sing, love to make music, love to discover new music, love to talk about music, love to share music, but hardly ever write about music. I think there are just so many music blogs and sites out there, many of them very, very good, all of them better informed than me, that I don’t really see the point. I consume a lot of music, and I love finding new things, but I know that A) someone else heard it first, blogged about it, weathered the backlash, and moved on, B) while some people respect my opinion on music, which is very flattering and awesome, the vast majority of people don’t read or need my input, and C) someone, somewhere, is totally going to call me out for liking both The Clash and The Pet Shop Boys, and I don’t know that my self esteem could handle that.

I have to back up just a little for this one. I was first introduced to the music of The Police when I was very young. Not really formally, and it didn’t, to be completely honest, spark an instant relationship, but when I was a kid, “Message in a Bottle” and “I Can’t Stand Losing You” were songs that I could have told you I liked, and I knew that they were by The Police. I was little, so I’m sure I was also really into a bunch of other stuff that’s laughable now. If Kidz Bop had been around then, I have to say, with no small amount of shame, that I might have been into it. I don’t know. I was a little kid. Fast forward to high school and I got back into The Police again and remembered liking those songs when I was younger. By the end of high school, I’d started completely devouring their music and any history or information I could learn about them. Then a couple of years ago, maybe three by now, Kirsten and I had a conversation where we discussed all the living-but-not-playing together bands in the world and who we’d most like to see. I said, “The Police!!” right away, but I knew it would never happen.

And then it did. My friend Aaron called me on my lunch break and told me about the Grammy Awards show and the rumors of a tour. I woke up at 4:55 AM four weeks in a row to be the first person to get a presale code from evil, evil Ticketmaster. I attempted to purchase tickets for Tampa, the only presale code I was able to get, at 06:00:02 and found it sold out. I was going to fly to Seattle to see their first US date on my birthday, and it didn’t work out. I made plans with friends from church and my pastor (Jon Dupin likes The Police. Coolest pastor ever.) to drive from Lynchburg, VA to Fenway Park and back in the span of about 30 hours, and then I moved across the country and couldn’t do it.

It did not look promising. For a few days, I even tried to tell myself that they probably weren’t as good anymore anyway, like when Sting made them a wussed up stage show full of Sting right before they broke up in the 80′s. I wasn’t there in their glory days, so who knows, maybe they were even better then, but I read enough and saw enough YouTube to know that they were still very much on point. I had basically given up when Kirsten came through on my birthday. Two tickets! At the Gorge! So we drove up over the mountains on I-90

and into the desert

which Kirsten said reminded her of Ridgecrest, CA (near death valley), where she was born. Eventually, after a lot of plain hills and shrubby desert plants, I-90 crosses over the Columbia River, which is a dramatic piece of scenery that will make you think of wagon trains and pioneers if you’ve ever read a single page about either. A few miles on Silica Rd. and a trek through a big parking lot brings you to The Gorge. In George, WA.

Unfortunately, Kirsten has flown out to VA for Lindsey’s wedding (congratulations Lindz and Derek!! I wish I could be there!), and she has the computer with the pictures of us at the show. So you’ll just have to trust me. You can also do a YouTube search for “Police gorge” and come up with some good results.

Elvis Costello was opening, which I thought was kind of great. He’s British, like The Police, and he started his career very close to the same time. It seems like they both had a similar musical mentality in the context of the late 70′s, and I imagine they have many, many common fans. I didn’t get around to studying Elvis Costello’s career as diligently as I planned on before the show, so I couldn’t sing more than a word or two of any of his songs, I only recognized about half of them, and the half I did recognize, I would have known (or at least recognized) anyway. Self-education failure. He was fantastic, though, and started about five minutes early, which was nice and punctual of him. His keyboard/gadgetry guy played with a theremin through much of the set, and the band was tight and bouncy and perfect. His music, the way he played it, and the summery setting of it all kind of made me wonder how I haven’t been a devoted fan of Elvis Costello for a long time. I doubt he ever plays a set without dropping “Alison” in, but I don’t think he often gets Sting to come out and surprise everybody by singing the second verse in a register that makes him sound an awful lot like Elvis Costello himself. Costello was ace, came on with no fanfare, gave us a great time, and left with just as little fanfare but a lot more applause. Fantastic.

Fastest set change I’ve ever seen for a venue as large as this one, and then “Get Up, Stand Up” came booming up the hill for a couple of minutes, Stewart Copeland came out swinging a mallet over his head and grinning, the gong went crash, the guitar went “na-na-ni naa na-na naa na-ni naa na-ne-ne,” and they were off with “Message in a Bottle.”

You could find the set list, and many more articulate reviews of the show, all over the place, so I’ll spare recounting every little detail. I will specifically point out that neither Andy Summers nor Sting switched instruments through the whole set. I never saw either of them tune up either, but they might just be professional enough to be discreet. ”Walking on the Moon” was next, and then two more hours of demonstration that Sting still has a fantastic voice and a bass that looks like it won a fight with a tornado by inches (I honestly think it might be the same one he played at the band’s beginning), Andy Summers makes the guitar sing and howl and anything else he wants out of it, and Stewart Copeland! Well, he’s pretty much just the coolest guy ever. I imagine that when he was a kid, he was the type that played rhythms on the table with his flatware and on his desk with his pencils and on anything else percussive with anything he could find. It’s easy to imagine because that same giddy, fascinated energy is palpable on almost all of the Police recordings and most of the music videos (which, to be fair, are really pretty terrible). And it was all over his face through the entire show on Saturday. He was tossing drumsticks and mallets around like it was his job, running around and playing an entire orchestral percussion section by himself, and just being awesome.

After running through an encore starting with “Roxanne” (they hadn’t played it yet, so obviously there would be an encore) and running through three other songs, Andy Summers wandered back on to kick off “Next To You” and end the night. It was all worth the wait, though if I’d made it to one of those other shows, I still would have gone to this one, knowing what I’d be missing and all. I’d tell you go see this tour, but—and this is where I gloat a little bit—this is probably the last tour, and it’s sold out for the most part. Still, that’s what Craigslist scalpers were invented for. Do what you can, sell what you must, and go to the show!

If you read this with any regularity, you’ve probably noticed that it’s been a while since I’ve written anything at all. My apologies. I’ve had some technical hiccups over the last little while, and I’ve just now been able to hold my blog’s ears, metaphorically speaking, and help it drink a tall glass of water. (If you don’t cure your hiccups this way, you’re doing it wrong.) The site looks different now, which I’m sure you’ve noticed. I’m really happy. It should load a little faster now, and I think it looks better.

It was easier than I thought it would be to get the blog and writing section up. I got new hosting last night, and today, I found out, much to my relief, that I could install WordPress pretty easily. Things may change appearance for the next little while, but at least I can start putting up blog posts again. You can click either of the subscribe buttons all the way down there if you want, or copy the RSS link and put it into Google Reader.

Anyway, I’m back, and I’ll start posting regularly again soon. Thanks for visiting.

Kent