Slackjaw's Forum

Not to get all Jerry Seinfeld on you guys here, but “what is up with those?” Sitting in my car outside the place I get my coffee this afternoon were two Low-down Blues Cats, catching a Caffeine Buzz-On, no doubt, in the unusually warm winter sun. Of course, both were wearing the obligatory black Blues Hat beret with matching faded black leather jackets. From where I parked the car I knew that I was going to have to walk past these two. From my vantage point of more than twenty feet away I picked them out as Blues musicians. I just knew… I knew just as strongly as if they were mimes -- they’re faces painted white, wearing hair like Shields and Yarnell. Like a gay mans lispy mustache, nothing marks a white Blues Musician more clearly than his hat, where besides just a standard black beret, the blues code also allows for a “Newsboy” or a “Fedora” to be worn in its stead. No “Westerns” or “Homburgs” allowed; no “Porkpies”, “Bowlers”, “Buckets” or “Baseball caps”. Apparently ...

Back from the long weekend; and what a weekend it was. I woke up this morning feeling like someone spent the night punching my face with sofa cushions and it left me feeling sortta puffy, and discombobulated, and I keep bumping in to things and rubbing my itchy eyes. Time was, when I used to feel that way at the end of a three day weekend, there was no question drinking and rock and roll had something to do with it. That really wasn't the case here, but this three day weekend still kicked my ass anyway. Friday evening was so long ago; I don’t even remember what happened. I have a vague recollection that I cooked a nice meal -- I do that sometimes -- but sitting here all foggy headed this morning, Friday evening has turned a corner or gone over a hill or something. I can’t see it anymore and therefore can’t remember a damn thing about it. The rest of the weekend however, is still relatively clear. Saturday the older boy and I got haircuts at Napoleon’s -- A place that I have gotten ...

The cold has arrived, but not with snow. The windows on the 402 were white and thick with frost, and since I’m to cheap to buy an ice scraper, it made me pull out a credit card from my wallet, to get them clean. All along the roads, in the gutters and under trees, lay frozen puddles of ice, polished like mirrors, reflecting the morning sky. From the corner of Division and Stadium, the panorama of the Olympic mountains, Commencement Bay, past the tide flats and on up to Mount Rainier, was lit up orange and pink, taking their colors from a classic northwest morning, in the moments before the sun appears from behind the foothills of the Cascades to turn the sky blue. I want to reach out and put my hands in their snow -- to make snowmen for knocking down and snow-forts to hide behind. To head out to Owens Beach and put my feet in the dark cold waters of the bay -- to skip stones along it’s shore. But instead I watch for traffic from my left, maneuver around the construction on my right, an...