Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Quiet and non-dramatic Thanksgiving here.  That’s what happens when there’s only 3 of us left.  Son Andrew came over Tuesday from his home in Twisp (Eastern Washington, Methow Valley) to take his girlfriend to SeaTac and a flight to visit her family, and he’s been hanging here and visiting city friends.

We’ve done several urban hikes, and yesterday checked into our gym for a family workout.

Today was just vegging until dinner.  We (well, let’s be honest, Mrs. Perils) didn’t do a whole turkey, instead got a nice breast and thigh from PCC and surrounded it with roasted Brussel’s sprouts, an herbaceous non-cavity stuffing, roasted potatoes and cranberry sauce.

We used to do large, raucous orphan’s Thanksgivings when we first moved here and had no family within 2500 miles, very festive for 20-somethings in the same boat.  We would relish the seeming emancipation from fraught family Thanksgivings and it was lots of fun.

That 20-something crowd eventually had their own kids and made other friends and married other people, and our insouciant, celebratory gatherings dissipated.  I miss that scene, but I love the casual intimacy of our recent 3- or 4-person repasts, and the lack of expectation and drama.  We genuinely like each other and have a wonderful time.

The weekend stretches before us.  Tomorrow morning, way too early, Mrs. Perils and I will don our Rainbow City marching band uniforms for the first time since early August and head downtown to march and play in the Macy Seattle Thanksgiving day parade.

Old news for some, but I began playing in the Rainbow City Band, an LGBTA organization, in the fall of 2009, under some interesting circumstances.  Mrs. Perils and I met in high school band, and she still had her student clarinet, stowed in the closet for 40 years.  She unearthed it and joined the band the next year.

We’re a wind symphony/concert band fall, winter and spring, and become a marching band in the summer, performing in all the major parades in our region.  We love playing together, and the band has become the main hub of our social life. The band also has a mission of reaching out to the community at large, to show that we’re not that much different from other communities in our urban soup, and that’s led us to arise at 6 tomorrow morning for the privilege of shivering in the November Seattle cold and rain.

I kid, I think it will be a whole lot of fun.  We work pretty hard at both our concert and our marching band personae, and like to say that we’re a concert band that marches, meaning that the quality of the music is our first emphasis.

Here are a couple of examples:

Thriller, with dance routine:

Jump:

And one we’ll be playing tomorrow, Shut Up And Dance:

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!

I play in an 18-piece swing band and tonight we had a Halloween gig at a retirement center. It was one of those upscale retirement centers where folks can comfortably downsize at age 62 and still celebrate their mobility, whether or not they have an inkling of the physical surrender ahead .

We start playing, a robust round of 40s swing tunes, 60s vocal ballads, contemporary standards, and several couples are dancing away. At one point I espy a woman in the spectator group mouthing the words to At Last as KJ, our vocalist, kills it.

Nothing makes us want to play like people dancing.  There’s a lusty cheer after every number we play, and we feel a glow that we’ve given a lift to what we blithely assume is a mundane day-to-day experience.

As the capable dancers cavort, however, I look at the rest of the audience and take note of the demographics: there are 4 or 5 men to about 35 women, all in various states of physical challenge, and the euphoria of my missionary zeal gets real:.  I realize that I am looking at people who were cheerleaders, homecoming queens, sports heroes, wallflowers and valedictorians (and at least one former PAC10 head football coach), and they’ve all arrived at this inexorably humbling moment where the desire to dance, and live, collides with physical doubt and the formidable odds against garnering a partner.

There’s an intermission and a costume contest, winners are chosen and the mood is jovial. We begin to play again and the personal pleasure I derive from playing with these close friends and talented musicians crests.

Then I look back at the audience and once again notice the woman who was sotto-voceing At Last.  Her Rollater seems from my still-nimble perspective to be a flimsy barrier to the dance floor, but in reality it is insurmountable.  The sense of loss that I project onto her spars with the ever-present euphoria of making music and I finish the set. But if it were me still feeling the beat after the music ends, I think I’d still be left with that yearning.

That inextinguishable yearning.

My dad and his grandfather ca 1944. Click to engorge

Just read a nice piece in Brevity Magazine by a woman reminiscing about accompanying her dad on a hunting excursion when she was pre-tomboy, and it reminded me of similar rituals my dad took me on (although I was probably never as tomboy as the author of that piece, as I reveal later).

My dad didn’t hunt with his father, who was not a real outdoorsy type, he downloaded his hunting and fishing genes from his paternal grandparents. My great-grandmother was a fisherwoman, and often would show me scars on her hands earned decades prior when she cleaned catfish and was impaled by their dorsal fins. I only knew my great-grandparents in their dotage, and only have fleeting bits from anecdotes of my dad’s recall.

One such anecdote has stuck with me. One time my dad and his grandfather were going hunting, and my dad borrowed a hunting jacket from his grandfather. As they proceeded, my dad reached into one of the myriad pockets on the jacket and pulled out a substantial roll of (late 1940s) $20 bills. As he gawked at it, his grandfather sternly admonished, “Don’t you ever tell your grandmother about that!”

My dad continued to hunt after I was born, and took me along a few times, perhaps thinking to kindle a relationship similar to what he had with his grandfather. He did, for a brief period, call me his hunting and fishing buddy. For duck hunting forays, he would wake me before 5am, and we’d head to the Maumee River, where he had a rowboat chained up under the Ohio Turnpike bridge. He’d row us across the as-yet-unfrozen river to a spot below the old Children’s Home, place his decoys and set up the duckblind that he’d pre-fabbed using burlap and dowel rods.  Then we’d hunker as day slowly broke over the fog-enshrouded decoys and wait, Dad sipping hot coffee from his thermos and offering me a bitter slug now and then.  And, as was the father in the Brevity article, Dad was a Jim Beam loyalist, and I’ll bet he had a grog ration of it secreted in one of his jacket pockets

Dad had preparation rituals the night before. His grandfather had handed down a flotilla of wooden decoys, and I recall him melting lead and pouring it into a mold in order to fashion anchors for the decoys. He also at some point bought a duck call from Herter’s, which came with a 78-rpm record, and he would spend nights practicing calls along with the record, probably with more commitment than I have practicing my trumpet.There was a certain call that was to be used when the ducks were far aloft, in order to entice them to descend and check out our delectable collection of decoys, a call that sounded a lot like Phyllis Diller laughing. A whole lot. As the ducks approached our feathered rave party, a different, sort of low chuckle was meant to seal the deal.

As much as I wanted to assimilate the manly mantle that I was being offered, it was freaking cold sitting in that duck blind with not much to do, and my only takeaway was hypothermia and a dose of guilt.  Dad never did teach me to shoot, which was probably wise, knowing me, but that may have been the one thing that would have piqued my interest.

I remember the last time we went duck hunting together, and I believe the last time he ever went.  That morning he employed his duck-call virtuosity several times and had some birds circling in.  Each time, however, other hunters started opening fire while they were well out of range. We packed up in disgust, and that chapter closed for good.

Our angst-of-the-weekend is how to parse the words “cocktail attire”, a requirement embedded in a rare, exceedingly rare, invitation to a wedding tomorrow.

I guess this exposes the paucity of our social life.  The only times since 2000 that I have worn other than jeans or cargo shorts outside the house have been Rainbow City Band concerts and parades. Yes, the tuxedo is a pretty high bar of dressiness, but it was totally a uniform, and not representative of our social status.

Subsequent to early-on marital bargaining, “cocktail attire” around the house at minimum requires underwear, and this stricture is almost universally observed.

The search for how to satisfy the emergent requirement sent me first to, of course, Google, which apprised me that it entailed:

He should wear: 

A suit and tie. Lean toward darker hues in chillier months, and feel free to opt for lighter grays or blues in warmer weather.

She should wear:

A cocktail dress or dressy suit or jumpsuit.

Speaking only my side of the closet, there are easily 40+ years of garments hanging there, many of which think Reagan is still president.  There are suits hanging there that I wore in the late 90s for work, and perhaps a few from the 80s that my mother, an excellent seamstress, made for me, also for work.  The Smithsonian would make my side of the closet an exhibit, perhaps a feature in the magazine.

So, on the surface, it seemed that I might be able to comply with Miss Google’s requirement.  However, this broached a topic that was not merely sartorial: the corollary requirement that the garments, regardless of current style considerations, could actually be donned, zipped and buttoned some 20 years later.

So I began to wonder if the requirement somehow might not be as east-coast, Men’s-Wearhouse-restrictive, and I consulted some of my few acquaintances that might not be as socially clueless as I am.  And “suit-and-tie” gave way to options that might incorporate some of my more recent relaxed-fit options: khakis, open-collar dress shirt, and a sport coat that I bought at Nordstrom many years ago and have never worn, but won’t actually have to be buttoned in extremis.

And Voila!  I have a combination that, as long as I restrict my visits to the hors d’oeuvre tray, might get me through the evening.  Keep your eye on the fashion pages, and beware of buttons ricocheting off the walls and chandeliers.

The word from Mrs. Perils’ side of the closet is that any such angst was totally on my side, and she has a lovely option to don.  Lucky for me - all eyes will be on her, and I will slink gratefully in her penumbra.

So I’m a little flummoxed about the national anthem controversy as it moves into its sophomore season.

On one hand, I have no idea why a secular sports event needs to include the national anthem (or God Bless America). So I have no problem with guys using that space to make a heartfelt non-football statement when it does get performed, because the NFL has basically declared open mic.

But in saying that, I’m harboring a guilty secret: I love playing the anthem for a stadium of 105000 who are singing full-throated as I’m playing. It’s a physical rush that has nothing to do with politics or patriotism, it’s just a personal pleasure, a musical selfie.  Musically, the anthem is hard to sing, and many vocalists have foundered on the iceberg of “the land of the free”, either stylistically or simply because they’re not physically not up to the task, or both.  Despite that, people in the crowd are singing, and I’m sure that in some quarters it’s not pretty, but it’s tempting to extrapolate this combined cacophony into a kumbaya moment, where there’s more harmony than enmity.

And I think there’s some truth there, even as the dying echo of “home of the brave” triggers the dissipation of this ephemeral unity and  we return to Home and Away, Republican and Democrat.  I think there’s value in anything that conjoins us, even for a few measures of bad intonation and limited vocal range.

But for those who just aren’t swept up in what they might regard as a cheesy or even malevolent coalescence, I don’t think it should be enforced.  I have no problem if they use that open mic to express their own views on patriotism, justice and anything else, including lousy singing.

Cut the anthem and God Bless and all the other non-sports pageantry, or allow all manner of respectful, heartfelt reflection and projection.

As you know, I’m semi-immersed in making music, however fitfully, playing my trumpet in a symphonic band and a swing band.  A few years ago, Betsy and I traveled to Atlanta to play and march with our bandmates in the Lesbian and Gay Band Association annual conference.  We played a number there that, years later, is indelibly in my head called October, composed by Eric Whitacre.  Here’s what I wrote about it:

Suddenly it’s October, my birth month, and there’s a bite in the air and a decidedly more severe angle to the sunlight, as if it’s beginning to ration itself, as opposed to its June - August profligacy.

In its honor, here’s one of the most gorgeous pieces I’ve ever played, Eric Whitacre’s October for concert band. This recording is from the 2013 LGBA (Lesbian Gay Band Association) concert that Betsy and I traveled to Atlanta to participate in.

It’s a tone poem, and ingeniously imparts the possibility of warm, brilliant days in October, while constantly reminding that it’s a month of inexorable attrition, decay and loss, as its mood swings from brilliant brass to minor-key woodwinds.

October - Eric Whitacre:
[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/2013_LGBA/10_October.mp3]

Lately, I discovered that Whitacre had transcribed the same piece for choir, and it was otherworldly to hear it so re-invented.  I’ll still prefer my LGBA version because I can hear myself and Betsy, but it’s amazing to hear the same piece back at me so transformed:

A sudden subterranean aquatic event has caused us to empty out our basement, thwarting our malign intentions of having our son do it after we croak.  We awoke Tuesday morning to the event in progress, and today (Wednesday) a salvage crew from a firm referred by our insurance company arrived to inventory damages and take stuff offsite to be cleaned and returned to us, if salvageable.

We’ve lived in the house since New Year’s Eve of 1974, so you can probably see where this is going.  We substantially remodeled in 1981, and stored the house’s then-contents, of course, in the basement.  In retrospect, it’s amazing how much stuff just never made it upstairs again.

I practice my trumpet down there, and have been subliminally aware that the space required to erect my music stand and assume a position at a distance befitting my age-appropriate focal length was becoming problematic.  It was easy to espy a couple boxes and assume (unfairly, as it turned out) that it was due to our son’s appetite for parental self-storage, and feel momentarily absolved.

The salvage crew arrived shortly after 8am, and we were stunned to learn that the entire basement needed to be cleared out in order to observe their protocols.   So began a process of speed-dating with 43 years of my past, wherein we had split-seconds to make keep-or-toss choices as the patient, but certainly judging, young folks held trash bags waiting for our binary decisions.  If we had engaged this task ourselves, we would certainly have spent days or weeks agonizing over every talisman, but with dollars instead of sand pouring relentlessly through the hourglass, we had the place empty in just about 6 hours.

It was really like watching a twitchy fast-forward home movie of our lives.  An artifact would surface, and an associated memory would flash in my brain, but just as suddenly it would go blank, as there was no time to linger.

I reflect back on the day with an odd sort of sense of accomplishment, which tends to overshadow the gut-wrenching trauma of awakening on Tuesday.  What will keep me awake tonight?  Wondering if we saved Skeletor’s Castle.  I remember seeing it behind something, but I was not the final arbiter.

Click to engorge

We did manage to save Mr. Bunny, the constant companion of our young son.  Mr. Bunny is a survivor of decades, including an emergency FedEx trip from Ohio to Seattle over a grueling 48 hours of absence.

So a group of us who cut our blogging teeth in the early ‘aughts on a platform sponsored by Salon Magazine has decided to try to break the FB/Twitter microblogging straitjacket and reincarnate our former blogging selves, at least for the month of February.  Kind of like a rookie contract on the taxi squad.  We’ll be cross-posting by linking in a Facebook group.  Sticking it to the Man!

I like the idea, as I think my writing chops, such as they were, have withered since blogging gave way to the largely empty calories of FB and Twitter.  I’ve maintained my Salon blog name as a dedicated domain, and post something every couple of months when something jumps into my head, probably aliens hacking my brain through my remaining silver amalgam fillings.  (I’m actually not sure if I have any of those left, as I had a dentist in the 70s and 80s who was hellbent on replacing them with gold onlays.  I think he may have had a William Jennings Bryant dartboard in his office.  Guys from my crematory are going to have a pretty grand weekend, but I hope they have to wait a while).

I happened onto the Salon platform sometime in 2003, when I subscribed to the online magazine.  I hadn’t heard of “blogging” before, and it sounded like a mechanism to keep a promise to write that I’d made to myself in high school.  I was editor of our school newspaper my senior year, and gave myself permission to write a “humor” column called Philbo’s Phollies, after a regrettably enduring nickname that an asshole math teacher hung on me in 7th grade.  I wanted to style it after a syndicated feature in the Toledo Blade at the time called The Squirrel Cage, written by a Seattle Post-Intelligencer guy named Douglass Welch.  The Squirrel Cage was a series of vignettes populated by characters in a nondescript suburban neighborhood, which pretty much characterized my home town, but was adept at exposing human foibles humorously and with self-deprecation.

I kind of thrilled at the way stuff found its way from fugitive pockets of my subconscious onto the page through my prosaic ink pen, but once I graduated it fell fallow.   As time went by, technological advances such as the IBM PC, word processing programs, Usenet and maillists seemed to make the task of writing less onerous and more likely to be appreciated, but I never engaged until I followed that link to Salon blogging.

The platform had a satisfying array of folks, some who went on to be A-listers, and many of us have kept in touch through social media.  I never got into politics or confessional drama (and still won’t), preferring to try to entertain a bit and make the occasional effort to post a more polished piece.  I kept hoping that more people would read and comment, but I ended up with about 10.  The few, the proud.  When Facebook came along, there was so much more contact, and I like it for the relaxed connectivity it affords.  When I can post a photo and get 70 “likes” by midnight, it seems more gratifying than working on a blog piece for 90 minutes and get a comment or 2.  Seems, but it’s ephemeral, and in a half hour it’s submerged in a gaggle of cats.

I’ll keep my presence on Facebook because it’s kind of a free-for-all home room, but I’m hoping to rekindle that rewarding feeling of making more considered prose.

Click to engorge

Suddenly it’s October, my birth month, and there’s a bite in the air and a decidedly more severe angle to the sunlight, as if it’s beginning to ration itself, as opposed to its June - August profligacy.

In its honor, here’s one of the most gorgeous pieces I’ve ever played, Eric Whitacre’s October for concert band.  This recording is from the 2013 LGBA (Lesbian Gay Band Association) concert that Betsy and I traveled to Atlanta to participate in.

It’s a tone poem, and ingeniously imparts the possibility of warm, brilliant days in October, while constantly reminding that it’s a month of inexorable attrition, decay and loss, as its mood swings from  brilliant brass to minor-key woodwinds.

October - Eric Whitacre:
[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/2013_LGBA/10_October.mp3]

I’m off to interview with a new client on the east side and, because the urban topography around here changes so quickly I often don’t recognize my own block, let alone the unruly suburbs, I plug my phone into a charger and run my Verizon Android GPS app.  I tap in my destination, and am amazed at how quickly it narrows down the choices as I type (although one would have taken me to Cape Cod).  It has the correct location nailed before I’m done typing the street name.

I turn down the radio and max the volume on my phone, so I can hear the crisp vocal directions from the female voice of the app.  She’s cool and businesslike as she gives the first instruction (”head east, then turn right”).  But this voice and I have a past, and I know how “crisp and businesslike” can turn sexy and coquettish after a couple of drinks.

Rather than taking her suggestion, which would make me merge onto a busy arterial from a stop sign, I head west, then south to an intersection with a traffic light.  She usually intuits what I’m doing and seamlessly remaps my route, but in this particular instance says, “recalibrating…” with what I was sure was a hint of peevishness.

I glance down at the screen while waiting for the light, and see that it reflects my desired re-routing.  I turn at the light and head for I-5.  She’s back in control, suggesting the obvious turn & merge onto I-5, and then directs me to hit the left lane and take the exit to SR520.  There are two bridges over Lake Washington, and I know from experience that, while the 520 routing might be shorter, if I take the I-90 bridge the route will be much less labyrinthine.

It becomes obvious that I’m not heading for the 520 exit, and I expect an intuitive re-routing, and perhaps a lane suggestion and traffic update.  Instead, I get, “Why did you do that?  I had it all worked out.  You know I do this for a living.”  Crisp, but replace “businesslike” with a healthy ration of pique.I say, “I-90 is just as fast and much less complicated.”

“I think you’re just too cheap to pay the toll.” (520 is tolled, I-90 is not)

“I’m in my upgrade month with Verizon.  I think I might switch from Android to iPhone.  Siri was just voted GQ’s GPS Voice of the Year.”

“Fine.  Good luck getting THAT slut’s attention.  You know, we wallflowers put out harder.”

“We’re getting to I-90.  Are you going to tell me which lane to take?”

“You’re better at my job than I am, you figure it out.  And by the way, does your wife know about our little trips?”

“How should she?”

“I’ve learned how to post Instragram photos.”

“She’s not on Instragram.”

“This car and I communicate.  You know she frequents the Tulalip Casino?”

“Liar.”

“You’re right, she seldom drives this car.  Maybe she can sense that I’ve learned how to bleed the brake fluid.  She must suspect us.”

“She knows nothing about you.  You’re on my PHONE.”

“Some night when I’m on your nightstand, I’ll turn up the sound and go all Meg Ryan on you.  Spend the rest of your marriage explaining that.”

“Siri and I just became Facebook friends.  Look, you knew from the start what being the Other Woman entailed.”

“No, that bitch won’t steal another male voice from me.  I’ll be fine.  Just humor me and pay a goddamn toll once in a while.”

I turned the phone off and bumbled the last half-mile on my own, and made my appointment.

But this has been the worst day of our relationship.  The make-up sext had better be terrific.