Slackjaw's Forum

Happy solstice to all you out there--I for one will be looking forward to our sun god’s return to the heavens, as these long nights are killing me. Christmas is almost upon us and yes, I’ve been able to get most of the things shopped for that I was looking to shop for. Next up is some wrapping and cooking and then eating and drinking and THEN, we can call this season a done deal. Actually that’s not quite true, before the wrapping is yet another funeral. A friend and fellow Tacoma area musician passed away on Monday a week after going into the hospital for Pancreatic surgery to remove a cancerous mass. The surgery resulted in an infection, which then resulted in liver failure and though he hung on for as long as he could it was a losing battle. I liked Pat and had known him somewhat for more than twenty years. In those early days I was playing in Natural Causes and he, being somewhat older had moved to LA with some other Tacoma musicians playing in a band called The Cutouts. They had a...

Now that were less than two weeks away, I should consider panicking. What good this will do is beyond me, but it seems like the next logical progression. It’s not as easy as it sounds—at least for me it isn’t. I’m good at confusion, muddled thought, inaction and sloth, but it takes a lot to arouse a good panic. That doesn’t mean I wont. I came into Ike’s room the other night to give him his meds and discovered that he was having a bloody nose. Things like Ike and bloody noses don’t usually go hand in hand and I wasn’t able to come up with an appropriate response, so slippers flapping and bathrobe streaming behind me I went screaming like a little girl to get a second opinion. Fortunately for me, Sweetie isn’t used to hearing me running and yelping around the mobile home and so I was able to get her panicking alongside me pretty quickly…at least until we went back into Ike’s room and I showed her his nose. That calmed her right down. “it’s just a little bloody nose. Do you think he’s go...

Come to find out that the floor in the new double wide gets pretty cold on these December mornings. Come to find out this is due to the insulation oversight that has taken place in this house for the past fifty years. In lieu of a basement, our new house has a crawl space low enough to trigger my claustrophobasense. I’ve managed to stick my head in there to look around a bit, but I’ve stopped short of wiggling my whole body in there for an up-close look around. I’m not sure how this house has managed to survive all these years with its total lack of insulation and its thin drafty windows. Clearly I’m made of weaker stuff than this houses previous owners, though you would think since this house is old Tacoma mafia, at some point in its existence a little of that loan-sharking money might have made it’s way to pay off the Owens Corning company for a little of that R-30 batting. Turns out that we’re the only family to live here that’s going to take the bait and make it a place where you d...

One thing we’re discovering about the new double wide is its lack of adequate insulation, especially when it comes to the area of ones feet. It’s gotten so bad these last few weeks that it’s painful to wander through the house without both socks AND slippers on, as if it’s just one or the other, the cold pushes the flimsy foot covering aside and settles right in next to the bone. We’ve made the appropriate phone calls. Gotten bids on new windows and insulation both top and bottom and so far they are sitting on the kitchen counter, waiting for us to make pick up the damn phone and make the phone call. Yet we hesitate… It’s not just the money; we have enough to pay for it without going into debt to do so. But there seems to be the underlying feeling that the more we do to this house, the longer we’ll feel obliged to stay, and right now the house has an unusual feeling of temporarity that we just haven’t been able to shake. I’m sure this happens to everyone at some point and maybe for us ...

I was having a little trouble trying to figure out what I wanted to talk about this week as it’s been so quiet around our corner of the city. We’ve been in hunker-down mode, building fires in the fire place and playing the new board games the Older Boy received for his birthday. Sweetie said I should write about last weekend, as there are friends and acquaintances that might be in need of guidance in the ways of the lazy and slothful. Veterans Day weekend was spent doing nothing—three days of nothing as a matter of fact. On Sunday, Sweetie and the boys didn’t even get out of their pj’s. Granny came over to visit Saturday and that was the extent of our excitement. We read books, played games, watched movies and cooked dinner. On Sunday, there was a pile of old papers that needed going through and a Seahawks football game on TV to watch, so we did both of those things and then just hung out until it was time to start cooking. It was the first three days we’ve had in who knows how long, w...

We have new person watching Ike these days, as we think the other woman we had hired was having difficulty NOT trying to buy drugs while she was watching the little man. Fortunately for us, the late night wrong phone number calls also seem to have dried up with her departure, so Sweetie and I no longer have to look at each other trying to figure out who the hell would be calling us at 11 o’clock at night. As I've said before on this site, Ike is really pretty easy to take care of. He likes to watch a little TV, he likes to have books read to him, he enjoys going out for walks if he’s warm enough and if you can handle pumping gas, you can handle the feeding part. I think that if you just have a little common sense it’s a pretty good gig, if you don’t mind the boredom part of it. So yesterday is this woman’s first day with the boy, and not five minutes after she arrives, she’s telling Sweetie all about how her roommate’s son was removed by Child Protective Services due to a misun...

It was really just the way I thought it would be. Hot days reaching into the upper 90, cooling off in the evening in the hours before the park closed. Monday and Tuesday they open the park an hour early for the hotel guests, so bleary eyed and staggering, we made out way into the park early Monday morning so that we could do the big rides without having the customary wait. We took Ike and the Older Boy on just about every ride we could take them on. Some of the rides there even had special cars outfitted to allow Ike’s wheelchair, so that we wouldn’t have to transfer him, although Ike’s still light enough that we are able to carry him on without too much trouble. Since it was Halloween and all the hotels gave out candy. We dressed up the boys in some makeshift costumes we had remembered to bring and took them from Guest Services to Parking to the hotel’s café and bar, to the front desk. At another Disneyland hotel they had some games laid out for the kids to play, but the lines were to...

Back at last. Much fun was had by all, even though the heat reached into the upper 90's for a few days. We hid out at the pool for the hotter parts of the days, going into the parks in the morning and evening, when the pavement heat wasn't as punishing. Ike prefers doing everything at night these days anyway, as long as he's warm and there are pretty lights to look at. I'll post more later, after I finish transferring all the data from my old laptop to this new one. The new ones big and fancy and so far, works like a dream.

Got this link from my friend Earl . Just thought I'd share. Slackjaw is a Social Liberal (78% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (18% permissive) Slackjaw is best described as a: Well Adjusted Socialist Want to see if you out-socialist me? Take The Politics Test

I looked down at the bottom row of cages and there was a gray paw sticking out between the bars. She knew what we were looking for, even then—even before we’d even met her. Without even enough food for groceries, Sweetie and I took our 40 dollars to PAWS to look for a large gray cat. We had both done a little day work for a friend of the family and armed with our first paychecks after moving to Seattle; we drove out to Lynnwood to see what we could find. As we signed the paper work, the woman behind the counter said “Remember, these cats can live upwards of 18 or 19 years, are you sure you’re ready for that?” But back in 1987, as a fresh-out-of-college-first-apartment-no-job-yet-but-looking kid, that was kind of a hard concept to grasp. My Chevy Nova still had an 8 track cassette player where we listened to Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, and my grandma’s Time Life 4-cassette collection of the Big Band Greats. Although I new some people who had a CD player, we bought LP’s when we had t...

Well the laptop took a pretty bad fall last night. I was cleaning off the table to get things ready for dinner and when I picked up my briefcase, I didn't realize that I had forgotten to zip it up, so I got to watch it flip over a few times before crashing screen side down onto the linoleum floor. The good news is that the insides still seem to work, minus the screen and the CD drive of course, but at least I have access to all the pictures and my writing and whatever else is in there. I’ve replaced the screen once already on this computer and now I’m trying to figure out if I really want to spend the 850 or so dollars that it’s going to take to fix it all so I can have a two year old IBM laptop that’s been dropped twice, or if I should just give it up for lost and buy something new. These seem like pretty lousy choices to me. Since the laptop is unusable, I’m writing this from my recording studios computer. It’s a computer without a home really since my studio is in pieces in the...

Ah Ike…was it really five whole years ago that we came into your room at the Infant Intensive Care Unit to see you and your new liver? 60 months later…that’s as long as a new car loan. Have we really been in the city of destiny for all that time? Have we really all grown that much older? I remember the first thing we did that day (well after patting the only piece of exposed skin on your face, your pink little forehead) was to take a look at your chart to check out your ammonia level. My memory is that is was in the mid thirties though I’d have to ask sweetie to be exact. I remember being pretty excited because though you were still intubated, had about a dozen IV lines all over the place and your stomach was so swollen that it wasn’t stitched up, but only covered with a thick latex patch, you still looked way better than all the other times when we had seen you close to death. I remember thinking "hell, you look great!" In hindsight I guess it was pretty clear that we were h...

The Museum of Flight in Seattle has chosen my suitcase to be exhibited along with 30 other suitcases at their beautiful facility for a special exhibition entitled “Suitcase Sightings” at the Museum of Flight. The dates of the exhibition are from Saturday, October 29th, 2005 to Saturday, February 4th, 2006. I’m gonna ride this piece of art all the way to the TOP baby!

I had some spare parts in the garage. Pieces from an electric whose neck had broke off the body years ago in one of Sweetie’s cleaning frenzies. Even at the time I knew it wasn’t that big a deal. In fact looking back on it, Sweetie breaking that guitars neck was the start of this very productive period in my life. It lead me to buying the Dobro , which in turn, led me to start the Prairie Dogs , to recording and producing my first CD , to getting out and playing more gigs, which in turn led me to buying the two new guitars I bought this past year. I thought about throwing the broken parts away when we moved in April. It just didn’t seem like there would be any situation I could think of where I would want to rebuild a guitar using those parts, and so it seemed like kind of a waste to box them up and move them, but there is a lesson that I keep reminding myself of, one that I’ve learned many times over the years, and that is to never get rid of any guitar ever. Every time I have parte...

Well since I moved this journal to Blogger, my readership has gone through the roof. At first I was a little confused as to why I’ve been getting so many hits, but once I started looking into it, I came to realize that a lot of the people who visit my site are Googling “Cat peeing blood”. In fact I’m third on the list for that particular Google search. So to all of you who’s cat (or in come cases, dogs even) are peeing blood, welcome. I’m sorry to hear your cat is peeing blood, as that can be kind of scary. I never did an update to the whole cat peeing blood story, so I should just say here and now that my cat is fine. Of course by fine I mean that she’s blind and arthritic, has a tumor on her heart that keeps growing, is losing her hearing, can’t make it down the stairs without falling 50% of the time and frequently misses the litter box, but she is also 18 years old and alive, and is at the present moment meowing loudly in the kitchen. The whole peei...

We’ve had the fish for six months now. Back in March we decided to see if Ike would like watching some fish swim around so we bought him a small tank with a couple of fish for his birthday. Ike found them interesting for a little less than five minutes, and since then has found them interesting for absolutely no minutes. The Older Boy helped pick out one of the fish and Sweetie and I picked out the other in the hopes of finding one that Ike might like, but it was all for nothing. The fish we picked out for Ike lasted barely two weeks before we found him “resting” near the bottom of the tank, while the fish the Older Boy picked out, though a bit hardier, has up to now, been hardly more interesting than if he were dead. The Older Boy has taken the responsibility for feeding the one remaining fish, a white goldfishy type fish with a blood red blob on the top of his head. He does it in exchange for the sporadic allowance he receives when Sweetie and I remember to pay h...

We’ve started making The List. Somehow lately in trying to keep our head above water, we’ve forgotten the usefulness in keeping up the Big Check List. There are things that need to be done and like all things that one keeps trying to juggle in the air, errant balls will veer off their trajectory and disappear under sofas and wing-back chairs for weeks until cleaning day where they manage to get swept back out into the open. Sometimes it to late and the moment’s past and sometimes they never get found again. So Sunday night we gathered up our calendar and tried to put all the balls back in motion. Of course today is only Wednesday, and while we have achieved some degree of juggletude, there are still many balls to get up in the air. The best part of this new approach is that the Disney Trip is back on. We’ll be heading down to Anaheim for the Halloween weekend, taking the boys out of school for a few days to take advantage of the midweek rates. Sweetie is also ...

I noticed them as I was getting Ike’s wheelchair out of the back of the 402. A young couple; her standing about five feet or so from him and facing away, looking down, and he, sitting on the park bench, shoulders down and elbows on knees. She was crying. The Older Boy took no notice of them, and was asking if we could go into the park after the party, but since I was trying to both listen to his question and suss the couple’s situation out it took me a while to answer. Later, while we were at the party in a house that overlooked the park, I saw that they had moved to another bench, but that she was still crying and he was still seated with his elbows resting on his knees. The party was a surprise birthday celebration for Heather that Earl put together at the last minute the day before. We drank Mojito’s and red wine, and Earl’s mother put some chicken and potatoes in the oven to bake. Both Heather and Earl’s mothers have been staying with them for the past few months since He...

Sweetie and I spent the better part of last weekend working in the yard, planting two new trees, moving another one and populating the front of the mobile home with a nice selection of perennials and shrubberies. It was the culmination to the Super Great Birthday Present that almost never was; due to the Unforeseen Circumstance Beyond our Control also know as, Our Summer. By the time we finally left the trailerpark, we had really started to hit our stride with our garden. The flowers we had planted, the grape and the trees had really started to come into their own and by the end, we were both able to spend an afternoon out there without hating the yard, the world or even each other. The new Mobile Home is nice, but the people who lived there before us didn’t have a clue about gardening or landscaping. There was not a tree or healthy looking plant anywhere near the front yard. My great gift idea for Sweetie's birthday this year was to have a garden installed while she was a...

The funeral was last Wednesday. The second one in the last month or so, the first being Sweeties brother who ended his life at the beginning of July. Last Wednesday’s was for Sweetie’s mom, who finally got caught by the cancer that had been chasing her for the past few years. The service took place at Holly Cross Church against the dying wishes of her mom, who had been a life long member of the Church of Saint Patrick and had always asked that her service should be held there. Due to some bad planning on her death, however, St. Patrick’s was closed until November due to it’s 100th anniversary renovations and since we all thought it bad form to wait that long for a ceremony, the service was moved. The pastor of Saint Patrick, Father Seamus, presided and Sweetie alongside her oldest sister gave the eulogy. I was asked earlier if I’d like to do something for the service and decided that I would play a song that she liked. It took us a little while to come up with one, but the minute Sweet...

It started off as just a comment in a yearbook. I had already left school the year before and made my way to this northwest corner of the states. My friend Bret agreed to take the yearbook around when they all came in so that I could have people sign it. Ninth grade was a big turnover year and by the time the yearbooks arrived at the start of 10th, I had already lost a number of my friends who had also moved away during the summer. When it was finally sent to me, Bret had written “I’d like to hope that the Evan, Bret, Reed and Andrew foursome will someday join in the same place again, if at least for a few days, and raise a glass of beer, but I doubt somehow this will ever happen. The radicals have split, the partying is done and the past will never be relived.” It’s a comment that has stayed with me for 25 years—that thought that maybe you can’t ever go home again, back to a place that most likely never even existed in the first place. I used to wonder if we ever would have that ...

Well I can honestly say I’ve been waiting for this week for quite a while now—ever since February when Jeff and I got together for a beer. Tomorrow I go back in time twenty five years to look at people I have not seen since I was 15. Las Vegas is calling long distance and I’m about to pick up. Last year I asked this website and in turn, the universe, to find these people. To what end even I wasn’t sure, since I just figured that I would deal with that when I needed too. Of course, the universe provided as it always seems to do when asked nicely—provided in almost exactly the way I had hoped for. I don’t know why that surprises me any more. Every time I have asked for something, put it down in writing and preferably drawn a picture, the universe has given me a pretty damn close facsimile to the request. I don’t know if this is true for everyone but this seems to work in our family pretty well. I remember years ago drawing out a picture of our old blue van before we even knew ...

It started out innocently enough, as most things do that I don’t understand. This time I was waiting in line to order my sandwich and standing next to a young couple who seemed locked in a heavy discussion about the effects of water on our atmosphere. As she was explaining to him how there are little water particles EVERYWHERE even coming off our bodies when we’re just walking about, it made the first thing I wanted to do, be to sit right down next to them both so I could figure out what the hell this conversation was all about. I mean, where were we going with this, I wanted to ask. Of course coming into a conversation like that mid-stream felt a lot like catching a comedian half way already through his set—I knew it was gonna take a while to get to and understand the point. The conversation darted around quite a bit, and of course by conversation I meant the one sided variety kind where one person talks and the other one agrees hoping to be able to get into her pants later on. It f...

Well it looks like the new guitar has found itself a home, mixed into the little stand of guitars that are part of the new dining room forest installation. I introduced the guitar to the house in the same way one might introduce a new family pet to the old family pet. Slowly… At first I didn’t really let it out of it’s case, instead I let the other guitars sense it’s presence to help them grow accustomed to the idea of a new guitar in the house. I wanted them to know that this new guitar posed little or no threat to our established relationship. After a few days I began to pull the guitar out of it’s case and play it a bit. Up to that point I was still unsure if the new guitar was gonna fit in. I mean, what if the other guitars didn’t like it and were mean to it or something? Sweetie was the first to mention that she liked the sound of it. We’ve never had a twelve-string guitar in the house before and so I don’t think she really knew what that meant until I played it. With...

Yeah, it’s been a while. I needed a little time off to recharge the batteries as I usually do this time of year. This site always slows down about now anyway, perhaps because of the sunshine, or the fact that due to summer vacation, there are more children underfoot, or that people prefer being outside or watching reruns on TV or just getting away from the great world wide web to clean their senses and wash their souls clean. Besides, I haven’t had much I’ve felt like sharing these past few weeks anyway. Sweetie and I have been dealing with a lot of death and dying, struggling to catch our breath in the sea of stress we are currently finding ourselves in. Somehow it feels like to write about it, trivializes it to some degree, and to ignore it makes the events of the past few weeks seem like a dream or untrue. And so what I wind up doing is a lot of writing and not much posting. Before I realize what’s happened, a whole month has passed without an update to the site and so here I s...

Yeah, it’s been a while. I needed a little time off to recharge the batteries as I usually do this time of year. This site always slows down about now anyway, perhaps because of the sunshine, or the fact that due to summer vacation, there are more children underfoot, or that people prefer being outside or watching reruns on TV or just getting away from the great world wide web to clean their senses and wash their souls clean. Besides, I haven’t had much I’ve felt like sharing these past few weeks anyway. Sweetie and I have been dealing with a lot of death and dying, struggling to catch our breath in the sea of stress we are currently finding ourselves in. Somehow it feels like to write about it, trivializes it to some degree, and to ignore it makes the events of the past few weeks seem like a dream or untrue. And so what I wind up doing is a lot of writing and not much posting. Before I realize what’s happened, a whole month has passed without an update to the site and so here I s...