Category: Uncategorized

Laura Veirs “I Can See Your Tracks”

We are nothing if not creatures of habit. This is how we become stuck in a rut, running and humming as we do around the same variables. Which is why we require context.

Context: The part of a written or spoken statement that surrounds a word or passage and that often specifies meaning. OR The circumstances in which a particular event occurs: SITUATION.

Because those who suffer from this disease they call nostalgia want nothing more than to be surrounded, to muffle the daily grind in order to soothe and give one meaning. And meaning is fluid, a mixture of content that changes like shaken cans of paint decaying in the backseat of a forgotten ’49 Hudson.

So the question becomes: Can you change your vehicle?

Distraction

Morning Commute plays The Hotel Utah on Wednesday, June 15th. Doors open at 8, but if you get there earlier the food is good, the bartenders are friendly, and the history of the place will absorb you. For $8, that’s not bad.

It’s human nature to stray. If not in body, then in mind. At least from time to time. Which is why you see my gaze soften and stare away. But it’s not you, it’s me. Just me chasing shadows through the recesses of my own regrets. Rephrasing attempts left undone and muddling the things too rigid to affect things as they should

So, no. I won’t be able to make if for coffee because…


Urban Wayfarer

Eleanor Murray / “Street to Ride” [Click Song Title to Listen]

Prisms formed along his walls, light fragmenting light in the most peaceful chaos he’d seen in months. And if it weren’t for that weekend in New Mexico, he would never have found his way. But he was safe now; he had stones of turquoise counter-balanced in his perspiring palm, shifting ever so slightly and guiding him yonder.

Papa

It’s interesting, what memories remain. John Berger states in his collection of essays titled About Looking that only the frame of a life continues, while the rest, the idiosyncratic experiences that act as content, is like daily newsprint: forgotten practically before the ink is dry. My memories seem to follow suit. I remember my childhood vaguely as happy and well adjusted, but individual memories have largely become the fodder of yesterday’s news, composted into the foundation of my adult life. They are my maker, and I not their master. Blame this on one too many nights of heavy drinking during my “experimental” college years, the fact that computer memory now substitutes for its organic human predecessor, or whatever you desire. Regardless of the reason, in the wake of my father’s death I’m acutely aware of what my memory chooses to frame.

As a wee little lassie my Father would take me with him to pick up a Racing Form from the local newsstand around the corner from our humble house situated in a Horse Racing mecca at the southern end of California. I piled my gangly, uncoordinated limbs into his Acura, which always smelled new with a hint of the vanilla air fresheners so despised by my Mother, and away we’d go through traffic with the greatest of ease.  He navigated using a system I would come to call ‘Blind Driving”–a technique which entailed drifting from one lane divider to the next. From the center, slowly to the left until eanh eaNH EANH!! Thwump thwump thwump. Whoops. Center again and then the process repeated to the right of the lane. Back and forth, back and forth; a relatively soothing sway to an unlicensed driver with no concept of danger.

It was during these trips that I came to understand I was special because my Father had magic powers: he controlled traffic lights. When approaching a red light, my Father merely had to blow in its general direction and the light magically turned green. My Father was the Jack Frost of traffic control.  Once we arrived, I waited for him in the car certain he’d return with a treat. What would it be this time?  A lollipop? A Kit Kat? No, a Snickers?! It was anyone’s guess. Inevitably he’d shower me with more candy than one kid could stomach (a diabetic vicariously indulging his sweet tooth through his daughter), and we would eat most of it in the car so my Mother would be none the wiser. While exceeding my sugar intake for the week, he taught me  how to whistle and snap: two valuable assets for a tomboy living in the Land of the Boys. I cannot convey how many hours were spent snapping and whistling. Or rather my Father snapping and whistling and I snapping and spraying soundless wet air onto the Acura’s dash, much to his chagrin.

I never did learn to whistle. As for my Father’s magical powers, well, I suppose you can chalk it up to a slight of wind executed by watching the opposing signal as it turned yellow and thusly timing his gust to coincide with an inevitable green. Be that what it may, I know what I remember. I remember a life filled with green lights, free passages, and cloudless intersections thanks in no small part to my  Father’s protection and guiding wisdom. And now that this memory is framed in print, saved from the cyclical scourge of forgetfulness, my Father’s magic is no longer a hazy biographical fragment  but an integral component of narrative in the story of a daughter and her father. Act I, Scene I.

Curtain.

Yes, It Is. Hard to Be

Music marks moments. Hollywood has deftly exploited this fact since its inception. As with literature, the best music speaks to or about conflict and acts as a signifier.

The day my father died I was walking flesh and blood, but hardly alive. Inescapably filled with such tempestuous emotion, I was rendered hollow, a veritable human husk incapable of motion. Everything became very, very still and I was left alone within myself. Everything was beyond the realm of reason, every task beyond comprehension. To book a flight home created luggage to be packed, necessitated friends and colleagues to be notified of pending absences and on and on; the tasks amassed exponentially and my embattled neurons were incapable of making muscles move. Then the news traveled. I answered questions absentmindedly because my mind was frozen, resultant of a voluntary paralysis to salvage my functionality, my sanity much like the catalytic process that shuts down unessential organs to preserve those that are vital. I must be kept vital. To think is to feel. I must not feel this or I’ll be crippled and there are things to be done…

I flew home a fatherless wretch, drenched in isolation and surrounded by people with no knowledge of my loss: a scenario at once comforting and infuriating. Normally terrified of flying thanks to a profound fear of heights, I was at ease in the air for two reasons:  I was ambivalent about dying should the plane free-fall to the ground, and I was listening David Bazan’s newly released Curse Your Branches for the first time. At a time when my nerves had been emotionally soldered, Bazan’s soothing voice and complex lyrics restored a modicum of feeling with their earnest simplicity. Ever relevant regardless of context, the opening track Hard to Be provided refuge for me at a time when it was…well…hard to be a human being.

Four months later, three methods of coping failed, and a switch to waterproof mascara that was a long time in coming, Curse Your Branches remains the soundtrack of my father’s death. Or, to be more specific, the soundtrack to events initiated by his absence, the audio of the void, the soundscape of the sinkhole. Because music marks moments and moments scar music. Their divergence creates a coping mechanism and, eventually, a portal for memories which no longer burn but mollify.

Until that day, burn baby burn.

Robert Allen Meldahl, Obituary of

On October 19th, 2010, Robert Allen Meldahl—noted Southern California Jockey Agent—passed away peacefully in his sleep; he was 61 years young.

Born in Long Beach, California on March 22nd, 1949, Robert Allen Meldahl was a southern California baby-boomer who, after brief residency in Washington D.C. and Washington state, settled in as California’s true native son. A gifted athlete, Bob attended Arcadia High School where he excelled in basketball and baseball, and helped execute such notorious pranks as cementing a Bob’s Big Boy statue into the quad of his alma mater. Upon graduation in 1967, he briefly attended Pasadena City College before moving onto pursuits more aligned with his temperament: salesmanship and softball.

He took a position at Senco Tools in sales and joined the United States Slow Pitch Softball Association (USSSA), with which he traveled the US. In 1976, he was reintroduced to his future wife, Janis, and began a love affair that would last 34 years. After their marriage on October 23rd, 1976, they traveled the country with fellow USSSA cohorts, sharing R-rated high-jinks and cementing deep-seated friendships that would last his whole life.

In 1980, he began his career at the very place he snuck into as a raucous teen—Santa Anita Race Track. From humble beginnings he honed his skills as a shrewd negotiator to become one of the best in the business—representing such gifted riders as Frank Oliveras, Rafael Meza, Corey Black, Patrick Valenzuela, Corey Nakatani, Mike Smith and the legendary Laffit Pincay, Jr. An uncanny judge of character and a passionate devotee to his chosen field, Bob knew people, horses and the track better than any other man in the industry.  He was a mountainous, if not sometimes infamous, figure on the track circuit and his shoes have yet to be filled since his retirement in 2009.

Unfailingly generous, Bob would empty his pockets of his last dime for a friend in need and did so on frequent occasions. He was, above all else, a devoted husband and father who spent many an afternoon relegated to the sidelines of his daughter’s softball games after ejections for arguing with umpires because nobody messed with his daughter.  He could sweet talk a pool shark, shoot hoops with the best of the white-boys, and Lord knows he always knew a guy for whatever needs arose.

His absence will be felt every day, in every way and this world is poorer for its loss. He leaves behind his wife, Janis; his daughter, Nicole; his mother, Betty, and her husband, Manny; his brother, Tony, and two sisters—Kim and Kelly.