Choppin' it up!

I have been on the road for a couple days, and I can see why I missed it. I can also not imagine trying to write coherently and do all the things I got done while I was in Portland. So now, without a topic in mind, I must begin my journey back to literacy. While in Portland I was privileged to stay at Troubadour Studios, which is operated by my old roommate from college Caleb Baker. As always we had a lot of fun, fought a little bit, and got some music playing done. It is nice to go through life with someone and realize that you are both progressing in what you do, yet at the same time have fond memories of the stupid things you did in the past. When Caleb and I were living together we had a place we called "The Cave", or "The Hobbit Hole".

It was a ground floor apartment that had it entrance onto an alley. In front, if you walked the slightly curved staircase to 3rd ave, you were greeted with a fine view of Ellensburg Washingtons famous castle. It was built in the late 1880's and was meant to house the governor, but the Ellensburg fire of 1889 ended its chances to be the state capital, thankfully. I think we both liked the location, we were obviously very classy men, so the castle was a wonderful neighbor, also, I loved being in walking distance of both the campus and downtown. Caleb just liked living in an alley.

During our time of living together there was always a lot of tension as well as mutual respect and love. We were both songwriters, as well as very strong personalities. And we were also very prone to know everything. At the same time we had similarly odd senses of humor and we liked a lot of the same music. Thankfully we have both developed in our crafts. Anyway, this would all be boring if I did not tell a humorous story.

One day I came home from class to find Caleb fiddling around with a totally broken chair. He was whining and in general being very pathetic in his attempts to "fix" the chair. I told him to throw it away, it was a piece of junk. To which he replied by asking for Super Glue. I just laughed knowing that it would be a fools errand to try and use super glue when wood glue would be required, if even that were worth it.

Of course I am sure I needled him a little bit, it was pretty funny listening to him moan and groan about the broken chair. I also took secret pleasure in it because he used to drive me crazy by taking me around the apartment and showing me his stuff, then he would say "That's a nice (chair, bullfighter wall hanging, lamp, shampoo bottle, etc)!" then wait for acknowledgement. So when his "nice" chair broke, I was not sad.

Finally after listening to him a few minutes, I told him not to waste his time. I offered him my machete and told him he should just chop it up. He bristled at this, and started working faster and even less effectively on the chair. I offered it again. Then I just went back to my chambers and got the knife. When I got back he was still down on the ground trying to massage the life back into the chair. I held out the machete. Caleb looked at me with a menacing expression. He looked back at the chair. Then without a word he grabbed the knife from my hand. What followed can only be described as stunning. He demolished the chair so thoroughly and efficiently that all I could see was a blur of splinters and flailing arms. When he was done there was not even much left for me. In fact one of the splinters flew and stuck in a dresser. It was nice. After it was done we both shared a laugh and felt that we had bonded through the experience. To celebrate we just left the chopped up chair in the living room and went about our business.

The next day was Friday and for some reason my friend Landon and I decided to pick up some beer and go to my house. When we got there we found that Caleb's crazy friend Hans was over and he and Caleb were drinking beer and playing guitars in order to prepare for a show they were going to do the next week. I was really happy about this and got my own instruments and joined in. The only problem was that Lando does not play music. Most people would get bored and eventually leave, fortunately Lando is so weird he found something to do. We probably played for at least 3 hours, and Lando stayed busy the ENTIRE time! He spent the evening crawling around the kitchen floor and whittling the pieces of chopped up chair with a large knife. By the end of the evening our kitchen floor looked like a saloon covered in sawdust! It was truly a sight to behold! The funny thing was that we all had a really good night. After we were done jamming we all went to a party. I did bring my friend Brit over to jam later, but he was nonplussed by the wreckage.

After a long night, we of course wanted to rest the next day, so we did not clean up the chair. I think we must have left it like that until at least Tuesday. The only thing that I did not like about the situation was that at one point while we were not home my landlady came in to look at the boiler or something. I don't know why but I felt like a total creep, the guy with the totally destroyed chair with wood chips all over the kitchen. But she never said one thing about it, so I guess maybe she did that kind of thing herself on occasion!