Slackjaw's Forum

and you can read the nice story they wrote here . I had planned on this article coming out the day before my show at Shakabrah Java, but due to the fact that THEY'RE NOT DOING MUSIC ANYMORE (I manage to find out on Monday) I guess it'll just have to float out there in the world, unaccompanied by a live show. This really only gets to the heart of the problem and that is simply I hate going out and drumming up gigs. Clearly this is going to be my new years resolution…and like everything else, I will get better at it with time.

I don’t mean to complain about nurses…but complaints seem to slip out of me as easy as a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of Starbucks coffee. They work hard, I know they do—they rely on large institutions to give them pertinent information on individual patients, and no matter how hard they try to “personalize” your “care” or how many panel-group friendly variations of “Social Worker” they come up with, there is always this nagging feeling that they’re a little boat tossed on a stormy sea, and are at the core, an extension of the big clumsy ocean they pretend not to be. One might think that here a week later I might not be so concerned about this. After all we left last Saturday so why bring this up now? Well, of course, because we’re back, although this time we’re not staying—we’ve just come for the day to get permanent casts put on Ike’s legs and ankles and by permanent I mean the ones that he’ll have on for the next six weeks or so. The casting specialist came in to the waiting room befor...

Well it’s been a while since I’ve written a missive from the floor of a PICU. Today’s comes from Swedish Hospital on Seattle’s First Hill. It’s our first stay here with Ike and so far it’s been pretty good and by good I mean we haven’t killed any of the nurses yet, although Sweetie looked pretty wrung out by the time I got here this yesterday morning. We came in Thursday so that Ike could get his ankles and feet fixed as they’ve been getting more and more twisted as of late. We were thinking that if we were to ever want Ike to bare a little weight on them, we’d have to give him something to stand on other than the sides of his feet and ankles. The doctor says everything went well and when you look at the casts on his feet they seem nice and straight. He said he was able to move them into place without cutting or moving any bones and that should help with the healing time. We’re coming back next week so that they can put the hard casts on and he’ll wear those for the next six weeks. For...

I brought a small amp I borrowed from a friend that would allow me to plug in both a mic and my guitar and set up on a little stage in one corner of the salon. Last night was Third Thursday gallery walk and I was playing at Embellish , in front of works by Houston, a local artist here in Tacoma. Actually it wasn’t a real stage…I’m not sure what it was to tell the truth, behind me and below some of the art was a large collection of hair coloring products with a few sample strands hanging down the sides, so maybe this was the hair section. Clearly don’t spend enough time in Salons to know all that goes on in one. I stood behind the railing that held the baby carrot platter, the pita-chips, the lemon-grass soda and wine. Trish, who runs the place, seemed nice and I had a vague memory of meeting her back when Doug played a Third Thursday in their old space a few years back. She was kind enough to say that my name sounded familiar as well. Two other stylists were milling around, but they d...

Well there were times when I really thought this was never going to get finished, but let me tell you, I've got a box of them all shrink-wrapped and staring out at me from beneath the cardboard flaps and that’s a pretty cool feeling, I tell you what. I sent the first bunch to CD Baby yesterday morning and then took them all around to the people who helped me put this together. I worked harder on this bunch of music than I have worked on any other musical endeavor, and I’m very happy with the results. All that being said and all, I know I’ve been remiss. When I pulled up to the old trailer this morning, there were weeds poking up through the cracks, cobwebs in the windows and all the sheet covered chairs were covered in dust. I can see black mildew in the corners of the bathroom and rusted lines from where the faucets leaked and dribbled. I’m still undecided about moving back in. I’ve opened up a new trailer over at myspace, but I don’t like the feel of the place. I’m trying ...

Where have I been? Where have I been? Well I’ve been around…just not been doing much writing lately. Summer is a time for getting out behind the keyboard for a while anyway, hanging out in the back yard barefooted and playing with the dog. I gave up my job at the Mill beginning of July. I’d been there for almost exactly 7 years and it just seemed time to up and move on. What’s next, you ask? I’m not exactly sure at this moment. Until school starts back up and the boys are gone for the day I’ll be around the house. We had to let our caregiver go a while back, as steeling out of the change jar and lying about hours worked wasn’t really workin for us. In some ways it was better than the caregiver who kept trying to make drug deals while she watched the boy, but if those are the only two options, I guess you can see why I might be needed about the singlewide these days. Family health has had it’s ups and downs I guess…well in truth it’s mostly Ike with the ups and downs. Sweetie ...

Last winter when the floor boards had started to freeze up in the morning and we found ourselves having to put on fuzzy skates just to get to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee to start our day, Sweetie and I decided that instead of spending all that time with the laces we’d find somebody to put a little more insulation in the double wide. Since the doublewide doesn’t have a basement but a crawlspace, I have never taken it upon myself to wriggle under there due to late onset claustrophobia, discovered after getting stuck in a decking installation accident—trapped between the two-by-tens and dust for the better part of an hour after running out some forgotten Romex for an outdoor outlet. We had up to that point, lived under the missinformative idea that while the insulation under the house was clearly not up to the task, there was some degree of insulation, no doubt old and weather-beaten, lodged between the floorboards of our new home. While Tacoma has never been known for its harsh wi...

Before I could work on my upcoming CD from home, I had to do some hard work transforming our unassuming tool shed into a place I can put my recording gear and finish laying down tracks. The biggest problem since we left the trailer park over a year ago has been the lack of space I need to leave all my music junk out and accessible and to set up the computer that I record with. Of course the first thing I had to do was to get it cleaned out...unfortunately I didn't think to get my camera out while it was all full of tools, but this is the first picture I took. I started by putting up the desk first and loading in a little bit of equipment to clear a path in the garage for all the displaced tools. The wood for my desk came from an old building that was torn down on Pacific Ave. Large pieces of old growth fir that you can't find anymore. After I got the shelf built, I had to sand down the wood so I wouldn't get splinters. This is the first time that I realize I shouldn't h...

Well Sweetie picked her up on Monday morning, since she figured that it might make for a smoother transition if she were to come home when the boys were at school and things were a little bit quieter. She's a cautious dog, and took her time looking around the doublewide. Sweetie said the only time she got a bit frightened is when she peeked into our bedroom and saw her own reflection in the mirror. We named her Ku'ya which may or may not mean dog in native Australian aboriginal, as an homage to her Aussie Cattle Dog roots, of which we now think she has very little of. Mostly now we think she's part Lab part Bull Terrier with what appears to be either some Cattle Dog thrown in, or something similar. She's very sweet and thankfully housebroken, and while we've already had a fight break out between her and Teddy (in which Teddy had his plastic nose chewed off) both of them insisted they were just roughhousing and got a little carried away. (At least Ku'ya was carry...

We have for a while now been thinking about a dog. Some of us in this family who are closer to the age of, oh let’s say eight, are downright obsessed with the idea. For years we had played the “Old Cat” card, but that game was even starting to run stale for Sweetie and me. We put the last cat to sleep at the end of last year and for a while then rode the “we’ll get a cat in the spring” card. Yesterday was really the first of the “Shit or get off the pot” days, crystallized by the older boy accusing us of never intending to get a dog in the first place on the way to the first baseball game of the year. (The older boys team won by 7 since I know you wanted to know) Sweetie and I have upon several occasions talked about getting a dog but the concreteness of setting a time or date always eluded us. It’s not that we didn’t want a dog, it’s that we didn’t trust our ability to pick an appropriate one for the family. We knew what we didn’t want, knew it like the back of our hand, but as for wh...

Well this past week found me back in a studio again, although this time I decided to simply go into Pacific to lay down the basics instead of doing it at home. I took advantage of the fact that my old friend Doug was in town to get himself hitched and since I was the one who arranged him and his new bride access to the Cabin On The Bay for a few nights, he was more than willing to spend a few quality hours in the recording studio on my behalf to repay his debt. I don’t think Doug and I have been in a real studio together to lay down tracks in almost 20 years. It was just the two of us, with me in an adjoining room playing my guitar and singing and him in the big room on the other side of some soundproof glass, playing the drums. I had fairly low expectations going in. Doug hadn’t had any time to learn any of the new songs, and so I had to teach him how they went before we could record them. I was hoping to get at least four songs finished, but in the end, we got all eight. There...

Well the Trailerpark celebrated its fifth birthday this past week, and while my posting has slowed down as of late, I keep feeling that it’s only a matter of time before circumstances change and words start coming out easier. The good part is that I’ve been writing new songs in lieu of weak prose, and am just starting the long process of recording them all and putting out a CD this year. I don’t know what I expected of this site when it started, I certainly wasn’t thinking five years down the road. I think in some ways it was a response to the fact that I was having trouble writing songs and I was hoping that one thing might help another. In a lot of ways it has. I started The Prairie Dogs after I began this site, I wrote the soundtrack to Kennewick Man: An Epic Drama of the West , started playing music on a regular basis and finally got my BA from The Evergreen State College . The biggest surprise from all this writing is how it hasn’t gotten easier, or all that much better. I t...

Today is my birthday and this is what happened. My car is in the shop. The rental car that I was to pick up at lunch this afternoon wasn’t there yet, so instead I went to a little Pan Asian restaurant at the top of the hill where I had a decent plate of curry and fried krupuk. From there I went to a wine shop that Dewy and Ham like, but that Sweetie and I haven’t been to yet. Nice owner, nice wine selection—we talked about the trailer park and he showed me the new wine bar that he was opening that day right next door. From there I decided to head down to Kings Books to find something to read and on the way, lying in the street, were three fifty-dollar bills calling out my name. They looked lost and a little lonely, so I put them in my pocket and I have to say, they seem a lot happier now. I bought two books; A Long Days Journey into Night and a Tony Hillerman novel that I haven’t read and headed back down to the rental car place to see if my car was there. It was, but due to the fact...

You can’t always tell all the ways you’ll affect your child as he grows up. Most of the time the things I worry about are not the things the older boys brings up in those moments before sleep—in that space between the end of the day and night. Last week on the first day of spring, as has been tradition for the past 5 years, we headed out to the ocean in honor of Ike’s birthday. We were a bit late in going this year due to scheduling conflicts with Sweetie and my work, but it was actually all for the best. Ike wound up coming down with massive ear infections in both ears about a week before our trip and so it gave us some time to pump him full of antibiotics before heading out into the next winter storm to make its way along the coast this time of year. That night Ike had a massive seizure causing him to vomit and spasm, and for about the next 30 minutes or so, Sweetie and I wondered just what the hell we were gonna do up there in Moclips, miles from a hospital on a Monday night, if he ...

Sweetie and I celebrated the 24th anniversary of our very first date yesterday. On that night, we went to see the movie Ragtime, staring Jimmy Cagney in his last movie role. I had already sneakily gotten our first kiss out of the way the night before at an impromptu cast party for the musical Grease that we were both in. Sweetie, because of here talent and fine singing voice was the lead, Sandra Dee, and I was Teen Angel and pit orchestra guitarist. Afterwards I took her to my house to meet Toby, who I found out years later, she thought would be my younger brother, but he was just our decrepit English Bulldog, in the last year or two of his life. Toby was a sweet old dog who in his later years suffered from a bit of arthritis and eventually died during surgery to remove a cancerous tumor. Sweetie, who grew up with a lot of cats, had never owned a dog, and this led to a few episodes where she would decide that we should take the dog for a walk and Toby would grudgingly allow himself...

Yeah, it’s been about a month…I took a little vacation from the site for a while, to recharge the batteries of my little double A Mag-lite of a web site. I had hoped to keep going strong until at least April, where this year I will have made it to my 5 year anniversary, but a strange thing happened at the start of the New Year: I ran out of things to write. Note, I didn’t say things to write about, because of course, there have been plenty of things to write about, but it feels more like I ran out of words. Or perhaps like I still have words but can no longer string them together in any meaningful way. Whatever it is, it absolutely required me to get away from the keyboard for a bit, at least in the “I should be writing” sort of way. I’ve also not been going to the Truck Stop lately as I’m back on the wagon, at least in the way of food, and the last thing I need these days is to be starting at Vern bringing another piece of pie to another customer. They have good pie there, and i...

If I’ve been a little remiss on the ol’ website as of late, it’s just that this is the first week I’ve had any time to sit down with the laptop at the café and put finger to keypad. Ike started back at school Tuesday even though I’m not sure how prepared he was for that to happen. Let’s just say his schedule is still strictly on vacation hours; by which I mean that he was awake and chatting in his room at close to 1 a.m. this morning. That’s the kind of kid Ike is though, and I think if it were up to him, school would start right after the sun sets, and he would sleep in past 10 a.m. every morning. When I went into his room to give him a kiss goodbye this morning, he didn’t even budge. Sweetie said he didn’t even open his eyes until he was being loaded up into the school bus. Talk about a rude awakening. Monday he went to see the surgeon who took off the soft cast on his right leg that had been pissing him off. All the sites where they had to go in to take hardware out and release tend...

Everything went smoothly...Ike did great, but due to poor communication between the anesthesiologist and the surgeon we are spending the night. They promise that we will all get to go home first thing in the morning.

Happy New Year to all you and yours who have come by my site both today and over the past four years to see what’s going on at the Park. In fact, happy everything…Happy holidays, happy morning, happy scrambled eggs, happy drive into work, and happy surfing the internet. Today, on the start of the 3rd day of the new year The Trailer Park is decreeing today, January 3, 2006 “Happy Everything Day”. And why not, I ask you? Surely we are as deserving as anyone else to be happy, and while it’s one thing to be deserving, it’s quite another to grasp joy with both hands and take it for your own. Today is all about that…it is all about putting the blessing of happiness on the ordinary to make you realize that there is nothing about life that is ordinary. We have created a world (or at least a corner of the world) that is all about scraping life’s hard edges off in the hopes that this newly founded piece of smoother comfort will complete the Life-Puzzle-of-Bliss we all crave. Where we seem to hav...