Day 348

everyone's coming back to the apartment and i've got a couple seconds to dump a couple things out before concentration slides away. i'll come back before tomorrow's post to edit and put some links in for the organizations and musicians mentioned below.

we rode road bikes today all around seattle. everywhere. our adventure started near the seattle pacific university campus where we met indie musician noah gundersen for lunch. he had a show tonight on campus with david bazan (pedro the lion, headphones, etc) that we'd all be back for.

as is usual, i later split off from the group and locked my borrowed bike in front of a borders. finally an american bookstore. i would like nothing more than to one day have a chill place where i can have my own library of books and music and instruments. anyways, while wandering the sunny streets of the pike place market i ran into a new friend, chris, who i'd met a few hours earlier and who was a friend of parkers. he works for the charity children international and we got to know each other a bit on the street corner of pine and first. chris looks just like one of my baseball teammates from rock valley college except he has piercings of bone particles in his ear. i asked him why he does what he does and why he walks downtown and asks people to sponsor children for twenty dollars a month. he'd already tried to get me and i changed subjects.

his reasons were non spiritual and elementally human: contentment and the feeling of helping. the explanation was cut short by a homeless girl. "man, she would be so beautiful if she could kick her habit and get a shower. i can just see her walking the streets in a sundress and maybe a little bit of make up and enjoying her day instead of sitting and begging on the corner to aid her fix." chris and i walked across the street and he bought her a piece of pizza. after handing it over and him saying that he knows and wants to identify with these 'bum' friends, we saw the girl tearing her pizza in half to share with another bum across the street. a beautiful moment. i saw another homeless man drinking the last sips from a drink he scooped from the garbage. ten feet away from him were the shopping middle class husbands and wives and families. on the other side of this were luxury cars and shiny rims roaring over the downtown cobblestone. and nobody seemed to notice either of the others within their thirty foot radius. all these things connected in my mind and i agreed to sponsor a child and picked a boy in mexico because i'd been there a couple times before.

there was an awesome three piece bluegrass band outside the original starbucks and i leaned against a light pole for fifteen minutes. i was glad i had no backpack and didn't feel like a tourist during my wandering laps through the crowds of families and foreigners and shoppers. pike place market.

i rode along with traffic to meet back up with the other guys and we headed back to campus for the show. we chilled with noah backstage and the group of us took a walk around campus. we didn't even have to worry about seats cause we were all given reserved 4th row seats with him. awesome. before noah went up he asked four of us if we wanted to come on stage for part of the singalong for the last song. yes, that would be sweet.

the room was two hundred plus packed and when we got our cue we ran onto the stage to sing the melody. it was great. then the lights dimmed and david bazan clawed his acoustic guitar and thanked us for coming to see an 'old guy singing old songs.' his tone was milk and honey and the whole room was motionless for every tune. in between songs he'd interact and would answer any questions. at the end he told everyone to ''be sweet to each other if they really believe what the Bible says.''

dick's is a fast food, outdoor burger joint that hasn't changed prices in fifty-five years of business. that's incredible on so many levels and the high school kids in orange uniforms that work on the other side of the glass move so quick that it's almost unsettling to think that they're doing it for me. but the food is good and incredibly cheap and is also tonight's last reason to love seattle.

that's a quick summary. bikes, seattle, coffee, books, musicians, friends, homeless, charities, good people, food, and a somehow privileged life and journey. i'm so happy and so thankful to be alive.

Day 287

here's yesterday night's show at the central. we were opening for our friends, 'the runs'.

the breakdown:
jeremy: guitar
ian:bass
dion: drums
me: keyboard and accordion

photos by jared brandon



















i only played accordion for two of the eight songs. i'll have youtube video links along before too long if you want to see some live performances.

Day 264

i've got some sad news. tim leaves in a couple days. if you happen to remember over two hundred days ago, which by no means to i expect anyone to, tim and i met early during pre-camp but then he'd suddenly left camp a few weeks later to return home to new zealand to start college. 'uni' they call it.

the first days of settling in that camp environment were filled with the normal routines of getting adjusted in those north pacific woods and meeting people and answering the standard 'name and location' questions. you shake hands and try to learn other peoples names too, but mostly you go with the flow. tim kind of intimidated me at first, i think i remember, because he was at the middle of a full dinner table and the conversations and laugher were mostly guided and stoked by his inputs to the group. later, we would later meet in the same fashion as all the rest of the introductions and we started hanging out, both of us long, tall fellows with seemingly similar interests to explore. we had adventures. climbed a mountain. talked about books. people. travel. spirituality. life. man it is surreal to look back at the ancient posts because it feels like a lifetime ago.

when tim got wind of our crew's plans for fernie, he was stoked and hopped on a plane after finishing his semester. the southern hemisphere's summer is the northern's winter, making this season a near perfect fit for summer break. the surf and road trips of the past now paralleled and continued with snowboarding adventures and wanderings around this small town and its coffee shops or even down to the states. as the majority of winter nights lulled everyone else to bed, tim and i would inevitably be the last ones up at our flat with respective books or conversation about books or people or life. and hundreds of cups of tea. i've promised him to one day visit his country as well and can't wait to be able to recreate and build on all we've come to experience during all this.

i hadn't planned on writing a tim tribute until next week, but seeing that i don't know how time will go i've decided now was well worth the opportunity.


also, our band has a show tomorrow night. from the sounds of the buzz around town, it might turn out to be a big crowd. jeremy, a kiwi and bandmate, came over to the house tonight to start work on recording some acoustic cuts of guitar/accordion songs and to practice up on a couple songs.


10:30 pm at the northern on main street everybody.

Day 200

live music sounds better against a brick wall. it looks better too.

there's a jazz pianist in town who'd apparently 'heard of me' and, although i'm not sure how or why or what that even means, he made some contacts and invited me to the brickhouse tonight for thursday night jazz and blues jam.

there was a xylophone, bass, drums, electric guitar, and a couple saxes and, after some introductions, they were more than willing to give me a shot on they keys. the flow was there for both the piano at the fingers and the harmonica on the lips. neither had ever felt so alive as they did during that jam and round of solos. i was honored by the other guys to hear that 'no one has ever come up and outplayed the piano before.' we've exchanged contact info, so i think tonight might be the beginning of more good musical things.

also the rounding off of the number of days has clicked again and landed on an even, solid number on today's american holiday. happy thanksgiving to everyone in the u.s.a.

i never imagined, specifically, that i'd be gone this long, but if you've been reading along so far then i hope you too can understand the purposes and paths that have been presented and developed in the past two hundred days. our household is heading to montana on saturday to share an american thanksgiving with friends there, so i'll feel at home and the rest of the international house will get a new experience.

tomorrow night is my first, solo gig in a coffee shop. i'm pretty pumped especially after tonight and am starting to wonder if having the job on the ski hill fall through was really a big blessing in disguise.

Day 187

realization- i'm not restless anymore. i realized this at the coffee shop this afternoon where i get greeted by name now. someone recognized me in the grocery line too. small town.

one more realization- having that job on the hill fall through was a really good thing. i remember that day 170 where i thought that these plans and means and everything had fallen apart and the trip was over.

now, tonight, i'm honestly able to say that i'm not gonna care a ton if i don't snowboard every other day.

i'm giving space to these thoughts here. to let them breathe.

this town and new friends and setup and venues have been the best place for music to grow. to be concentrated on. inspired.

our band was offered a gig to lead worship for a new year's, weekend activity. i'm pumped.

i went to the pawn shop today and met bob, an old man who walked slowly through his narrow isles of dusty and forgotten possessions until we stopped at the collection of three accordions, all of which sat like sleeping, open mouths of teeth in their individual and faded velvet cases. he promised me a deal on one when i had some money but wouldn't say how much. i could tell that he was still shrewd.

nate, a dread-head new zealander, is in fernie for the winter after his Bible school fell apart at the beginning of the term. he came over and we cooked some cheap steaks under the drone of moby and whilst an annie leibovitz documentary played on my computer.

i made this over the past couple days. the tea house might want it for their window. i'll show it to them soon.

Day 154

i had no cash today, so i went to the safeway where i was told i could get cash back with a debit card purchase. the store was busy and the lines were full with saturday evening grocery getters. i joined them in the checkout lines feeling foolish that i had nothing in my hands. the people around me started to notice, i think. my plan was to buy a pack of gum- seeing that if i had used a different bank's atm at this point, they would charge me an equivalent fee, so why not get gum out of the situation. however, the gum was still at the front of the line. way up there.. the lady in front of me turned around, looking me up and down and, seeing me grocery-less, kindly questioned if i wanted to budge her in line. appreciating the awkwardness of this whole moment, i thanked her and slide past her cart towards the front.

i needed the cash back for a show tonight in centralia. noah gundersen. he's a local musician whom i've come to discover and admire and he was playing at a coffee shop/venue built in an old warehouse. the environment was sweet and the cover was a cheap five bones, so parker, two other friends, and i went. the last weekend before the big move.

tomorrow is my last full day in washington. i'm heading up to vancouver for a few days on monday and then making the big trek to fernie a couple days later. arrangements and correspondences have been going well regarding work, but the last two weeks of october will determine, for certain, the final destiny of the winter in fernie.

Day 69

the third week of camp ended in routine fashion. the q-town camp songs are so stuck in my head now that i felt a little stir crazy as they were being blasted across the field of departing campers.

the camp directors organize a weekly bus that goes into town for staff to take to get supplies. tonight they were going to see the new batman movie as well, but the thought of riding with a bunch of talking people to pay money to experience a formulated evening was not exciting to me at all.

jen's brother was playing at a coffee shop in nearby nanaimo. the music didn't start until 7ish, so we took off to the canadian version of borders. 'chapters' was filled with the smell of new books and a built-in starbucks. after some coffee and a scan through the fly fusion magazine, i found my place in the music/photography section. they're always together in whatever bookstore i've ever gone to and i think this is great.

i stood alone in front of the shelves of band and artist biographies and realized it would take about twelve years to be satisfied in this section, so i picked up the scrapbook of john lennon. this is an amazing recreation of mementos and copies of original song scribbles. i'd read the bob dylan one back at borders in the usa. i bought a new edition of a music magazine since it was cheaper. we stopped at a sporting goods store where i found some sweet clearance shirts that not only were needed but helped to fix yesterday's issues. the recognition of the smell of left shoes all pointing one direction on a sales wall was a scary and sudden reminder of the terms like over-pronation and motion control and adidiprene and gel. we got out of there soon after this.

the bands were playing at a place called the buzz and was laid out in a J pattern. the door was at the bottom left tip of this shape, the counter was on the inside left of the curve, and black wooden tables and leather seats and folding chairs scattered the long stalk that lead to the brick-backgrounded stage. the musicians often bounced on and off stage after songs as they played covers and some originals. i had a so-called 'canada moment' in this shop.

outside, on the right side of the stalk, there was a patio where people congregated at a wooden picnic table to talk over the music. someone had a couple small puppies and a little girl in a sundress and two small boys dressed in p.j.s chased the little animals around the concrete. across the median and street was a suburban subdivision where a canadian flag flapped on a pole in some backyard. back inside, most of the girls wore sundresses and many guys had beards or dreads or plastic-framed glasses. after walking in and standing around a bit, a barista came from behind the counter and offered me a free latte. the people i was with thought she was hitting on me, but i think they'd pry just made an extra on accident. free is free and i like free. anyways, this canada moment revealed a truly vagabonded utopia.

i'm back at camp now, sitting next to a piano keyboard on a dimly lit stage. the bus rolled in a few minutes ago. it's been a good day. tomorrow is 'staff development day' and sunday starts the next junior high camp and a new week of teaching video editing and shooting and such. i'm ready.

Day 64

today is sunday. i wouldn't really know what day it was if it wasn't for the little day-title bar on this computer, but i think i miss going to church. there isn't much reason to keep a personal calendar here. this is only the first full day of the third week of camp and you could tell me that it was thursday or monday and i really wouldn't have a solid reason for disbelief. my computer would let me know i guess. even though its their first day, the campers are really intense about getting on camera. this week the kids have started learning our names so we're not just called 'cameraman.' nice.

since there has been a new flood of freshly-trained counselors, i didn't have to run the basketball courts this morning because some jobs were shifted. the other video guys had already started the shooting with the two cameras so they gave me the morning off. no camera, no computer, and no kids.

i took a kayak into the warming ocean. i ate an orange and floated farther than a shout from shore and bobbed in the gentle waves. the mainland mountains were clearly visible under the cloudless blue sky. a curious seal popped his head nearby. i floated for a little while and paddled back to the land and the dock.

i work too. i realize i tend to write about side adventures and such but somedays i can't imagine the result of logging the regular daily shootings and editing or capturing or whatever else. the breaks are valuable too.

whoa. i just found a site where you can listen to live shows from different musicians. i'm checking it out and so far so good. here.