Weeknotes: October 14-18, 2024
Monday, October 14
I feel behind on pumpkin-acquisition and other fall imperatives. Where are my decorative corn stalks and knobbly gourds? I still have hanging ferns and a potted geranium on the porch. It's going to be November in a couple weeks and I'll be removing the screens and cleaning the windows, one of my favorite pre-winter rituals, usually done after daylight savings ends.
Lunchtime is a failure. For the second day in a row I drive out to Liberty Station to check my P.O. box and do a quick photo shoot, and for the second day in a row I find the lobby closed, this time for Columbus Day. Since I'm downtown, I hit up two different running stores to try and replace my worn out shoes, but don't find what I want. It's a waste of a trip. I console myself with a new $3 gel pen from Literati's pen bar, then head back to Ypsilanti.
Weeknotes: September 16-20, 2024
Monday, September 16
There's a bad smell coming from somewhere on the porch. Is it just my overripe trash can? I'm standing out there sniffing, looking over the rail for a decaying rodent when CC pulls up. I guide her up the steps to "the spot" but she doesn't smell anything out of the ordinary.
We play through a handful of songs in the living room while Islay whines, begging for treats. Her brat summer continues. Many of our rehearsal tapes have insolent dog noises on them, like ambient feedback. She eventually settles down, head on paws, and listens from the couch.
CC and I revisit songs from previous albums and scale down a newer one from its full-band arrangement to duo format. We also add a few more short pieces which preface longer songs like sympathetic key siblings. In this way, our next set will contain about 20 songs in 45 minutes.
Weeknotes: May 13-17, 2024
Monday, May 13
In my dream I'm on stage with State Park. Matt grabs an oversized megaphone and takes it over to his mic where he uncharacteristically adds blaring vocals to our song "Witches," then misses his horn cue at the end. After it's over we calmly discuss it for a minute as the crowd grows restless. Sensing this, I get on the mic and try to recover with some stage banter: "We were just making some notes. You guys like notes? I write tons of notes every day…"
After work I drive to Lowe's to buy one more 2"x8"x8' for a pair of Leopold benches I'm building. "Measure twice, cut once" is the old adage, but I fucked up one of the larger pieces on my first bench and now I have to buy another eight feet of lumber to gain the 33 extra inches I need for the second one. My versatile little Hyundai has transported plenty of lumber, but today a freak shift causes the board to bounce up off the dashboard and crack my windshield. The cost of this second bench just went up by several hundred dollars. It's a setback that would have sunk my mood most days, but the weather has been so nice and I'm enjoying my spring projects. I shrug it off and go home to set up my tools. I’ll sort the windshield out later.
Weeknotes: March 18-22, 2024
Waiting in the line at the bank. Snow flurries outside, another winter after a confused series of false springs. There are a handful of customers ahead of me and each of the three available tellers is occupied with a time-consuming transaction. To my left a young guy is either depositing or withdrawing his savings bonds. "This is a very grandparent thing to do, especially these days" comments the manager. The guy is wearing white New Balance sneakers, the kind with giant chunky orthopedic soles. He's already dressed like his grandpa. To my right a woman pulls her brother's death certificate out of her purse, hoping to close his account and withdraw the remaining balance. It's apparently too large a sum for the bank to handle this afternoon and she'll have to come back next Wednesday. Directly in front of me a woman in a corduroy fedora is silently involved in some unknown, but laborous business with her teller. A man wearing one of those black brimmed Stevie Ray Vaughn hats with silver bangles around it is sitting masked in one of the waiting room chairs. An electronic doorbell ding-dongs every time someone walks in or out.
Weeknotes: February 12-16, 2024
"I Want You To Want Me is one of my least favorite songs." Unbidden, 9:18AM.
This statement launches the liveliest of my various group chats into its morning of banter. There are certainly better Cheap Trick songs, though I find it hard to be too critical of this enduring 1977 earworm. I've always enjoyed hearing the Budokon version with its enthusiastic callback lines from the crowd. Honestly, I can think of so many other repetitive pop songs by lesser groups that stoke my ire. The other offending songs posited are Concrete Blonde's version of Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" and Patience and Prudence's "Tonight You Belong To Me." I have some nostalgia for the former which reminds me of the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack. The latter, while painfully precious, is so brilliantly immortalized by Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in The Jerk, that I can't really hate the song itself. All three strike me as odd bugbears, but then I've got plenty of my own.