Thursday, October 17th

For many reasons I have been celebrating a personal holiday every year on October 17^th. When it lands on a Thursday it extra special. There is a feeling in October that you are in the company of a very dear friend, and you both know for whatever reason you will not see each other in a very long time. So the feeling is a calm presence, yet very strong, and tinged with a bit of sadness.

This year I spent my three days off leading to the 17^th in a nice way. On Tuesday I drove to the beach with my Mother and Sister. Every millisecond was visual overload of psychedelic beauty, like gold and red flowing into your eyes at 60 miles per hour. There were quiet times when my sister read her textbooks in the back, and my mother and myself simply were conduits of yellows, reds, purples, and light flashing off forest streams alongside the highway. At the ocean we could see for miles on the empty sands, and I could let Lola off her leash safely to run her full strength with that simple joy that dogs have.

The next night I went with my dear Friend/Twin to see the premier of a documentary on The Satyricon, a punk club in Portland that had a run of nearly 30 years. It was an emotional night for many reasons. The first was that this was the first time I had gone to see a feature in a theater since coming back to the US, and it made me miss my Berlin friends quite a bit. It was intense to see thirty years later so many faces from a youth that set standards for the rest of my life in what friendship means, and also to see what both time and hard living has done to many of us. Indeed, many did not make it to 2013. The film, Satyricon, Madness and Glory was a success for a few important reasons. One was it showed clearly how a nightclub is more than a place where people listen to loud punk and experimental music, score heroin or coke in the bathroom, or breakup with a bad lover, but a nightclub can also be a political work of art. This film showed us as a politically minded generation, and the owner of the club as an artist. The film had nice many performances that had me very much missing playing music live, but more importantly it also showed the violent side of gentrification in a section on the bombing of that block by a few would be developers, and police intimidation in a section on an alleged riot started at the club when police roughed up the owner. Afterwords I went with a group of folks to The Matador and oh did we conjure the old days, ending in an impromptu dance in what was by no means a dance bar. God, it was a night to love life.

Lastly, today, the 17^th, I went for a nice long walk at a nearby marsh with a dear friend. Tonight I cook dinner listening to music made by my friends Cheryl E. Leonard and Jim Campbell. Cheryls compositions are as if nature came alive and started playing weird and lovely songs, and Jim’s are like all the flotsam and jetsam and debris from our overworked, beaten world had started vibrating, pulsing, shaking and humming.