Slackjaw's Forum

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...