Walkin in the Spiderwebs

Here are the things that I love to do that a lot of other people do:

• Read everything I can get my hands on and purchase more books than I will probably ever read
• Write, both professionally and creatively
• Learn about and implement graphic design and web publishing programs
• Sing in the car, in the shower, with boys who play the guitar, and at sing-alongs for the musical episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" while surrounded by drunk geeks
• Tell dirty jokes with my Portland soul mates and laugh until we all complain about the compressed pain of various innards
• Give scarily appropriate nicknames to new acquaintances. (Latest gem: "Skelly" for a hipster kid with 7 inch thighs that reminds me of the King of Halloween from "Nightmare Before Christmas")

Here is the thing that I love to do that not very many people do:

Create things with my loom.

I love to make things with my hands. I don't need to be the most creative- I have a lot of friends that can, in the space of their morning shower, harness a far greater command of visual symmetry, framing, composition, light, and emotion than I can when I dream. What I love is the ritual of bringing new form out of things that are often small and lonely and forgotten. When I do my work, I make things that keep people warm, that give their feet a place to land, and bring brightness to a once dark room. I create places where you can lay your baby, dust off the day, or warm your voice, and I do it all with my hands, my back, my feet, and a giant awkward contraption that has been my most reliable friend for going on 13 years.

I could tell you our history, but it is the creative equivalent of hearing your parents reveal that "We met in a bar." Right time, right place is all. I was a 16-year old college sophomore, she was a cedar beauty of indeterminate age that I bought from the classified section of the newspaper (when such a thing was actually used as a reference for more than just, "Fluffy, the pee-pee goes HERE.") Having already declared my major to be fine arts (and unknowingly also having condemned myself to a mandatory graduate degree in an actually marketable field), I was thrilled that I would no longer have to spend hours in studio listening to the didgeri-doo heavy mixtapes and idealistic hippy prattle of ridiculously hemp-clothed morons (you must remember that the 90s were pre- organic cotton) whose dreadlocked boyfriends/life partners were constantly stopping by to ask for money. Getting my own loom meant getting to do my work in a place stripped of any bullshit that was not my own.

My first studio was the sun room at the front of this huge old house my family rented when I was a kid. The best thing that can be said for it is that the light was incredible. The worst was the seasonally menopausal symptoms it experienced in the winter and summer, causing me to lose feeling in my toes and dehydrate, respectively. I would stay in there for hours at a time, crashing, beating, and pounding my work into its clumsy place and making all sorts of gorgeous racket while I listened to the Beatles, Ani DiFranco, Barenaked Ladies, Ben Folds Five, and Ben Harper- who I did not really "get" at the time, but was giving my best shot because I was in love with a long-haired hippy boy that played the mandolin and had gone to his concert. My walls were papered in pictures of friends and midnight runs to Taco Bell and magazine clippings of that kid from "Empire of the Sun" that had grown up to be kind of a hotty. A row of dime-store buddhas lined my yarn shelf, and giant sacks of wool provided places for guests to lounge and even take a nap on if they could get used to the whoosh-whoosh-slam-CRASH. It was the perfect space to cut my teeth artistically, and I will always remember that space as light and perfect and pocket-sized for my creative convenience.

Subsequent studios were less glamorous- my graduate school apartment (Cost $395 for two bedrooms!) had an entire bedroom that I could devote to my art, but also had the unfortunate destiny of sharing that space with the computer upon which I spent approximately 300 hours a week writing lesson plans on volcanos followed by in-depth analyses of the toilet training habits of 2-3 year olds. Sadly, I was so tired at that point in my life, I only spotted the grammatical mistakes in such papers and not the irony.

The move to Portland and the accompanying increased cost of living meant that my loom and I were technically a co-habitating couple, as we were jammed so tight into tiny bedrooms that we could roll over in sleep and spoon with one another. Eventually, I started to focus on my career, my friends, and boys that were not. worth. the. effort. and decided that since I was "not really using it anyway", it could find a home in the eaves of my parents' place for a little while.

Fast forward two years and I am living in another new all-my-own place- a beautiful one-bedroom home situated in my own little mini-Shire (okay, fine, Lake Oswego) and I finally have the room for studio space again. Lucy- her given name since the sun room- currently sits in a well lit area and off-sets my addiction to TV on DVD by providing me with a productive end result for eight consecutive hours spent drooling over Agent Sealy Boothe.

Magically though, she has given me the opportunity to get to know those I love just a little bit better. Once they can get over the mystery and moving parts, it seems that the rhythm of woosh-woosh-slam-CRASH seems to create the comfort of a roaring fire and therapist's couch, hypnotizing and prompting awkward revelations at the same time. Some of the most meaningful and surprising interactions that I have had in recent months have taken place while winding warps, fixing tension problems, and taking out color combinations that did not work.

I have only one worry, but it keeps me up some nights: My art form is not sexy. I am not a painter with bare feet and legs covered in blue and orange splashes. I do not draw picture perfect images of clasped hands leaving charcoal smeared across my fingertips and forehead. Oy, there are bits of yarn sticking to my carpet and clothes as if to sublimate the procurement of the legions of cats that it expects I will one day own. Amaranta Buendia from "One Hundred Years of Solitude" wove and unwove her shroud from her middle years until the day she died a spinster virgin. Penelope wove to ward off suitors while she waited for Odysseus' return. There is no historical precedent for weavers being any sort of sexual dynamos, and the fact that the tools of the trade could actually severely injure one who attempts to incorporate them into their R-rated proclivities does give me cause to worry that perhaps I have chosen wrong in my arena of expression. Every artist knows that the first and foremost reason we do the work is this: to get laid- everything else is emotional/intellectual/I-forgive-the-universe-for-not-sending-me-a-pony gravy.

Cock-blocking aside, I must repeat that I remain hopelessly, beautifully, and desperately in love with the work that I get to do. It forced me to put a sign on my light fixture saying, "Food and Water" as a reminder that both are important on a marathon Saturday featuring a new warp and brightly colored wool. It's what keeps me in wedding, Christmas, birthday, and thank you gifts. It's what helps me focus on the things in my life that require my attention, and hide from the things in my life that probably need my attention more.

Thank you Lucy, for being a goddess, a shelter, an out-of-reach branch, and a life-preserver when it was needed. Right place, right time, indeed.

Come Downstairs and Say Hello

The other night I went to my first concert in years.

Okay, that's not true- this summer I went to see The Swell Season at the zoo with some girlfriends, but forgive me if I do not count laying out on a fleece blanket while next to me hipsters are drinking red wine from goblets in the shape of ocelots as an actual concert experience. Subsequent sexual fantasies about being Glenn Hansard's guitar notwithstanding.

I went to see Guster, a band with whom I am celebrating the single longest relationship of my life.

Before moving on, I must bore with brief history. (Yes, I am wearing a satin smoking jacket and sitting in a library in a high-backed leather chair next to a roaring fire. Why do you ask?) I discovered Guster ten years ago while attending my first big arena concert- the Barenaked Ladies at the Rose Garden. Okay, yes, you can go ahead and laugh, but please keep in mind that this was before the song about monkeys when they were still writing songs like "The Wrong Man Was Convicted" and killed their harmonies. So there.

The appeal was immediate- this band had a drummer that played the drums with his hands. Instead of floor toms and bass drums, he rocked bongos and djembes (that's a hand drum, right?), and the rest was a drum kit complete with cymbals and hi-hats and everything. And he slammed them all without the safety of two sticks. I was at that concert with about ten friends, and we all kept turning to each other going, "Is that guy playing with his hands?" "Look, he's playing with his hands!" "I am pretty sure he is playing with his hands." Hey- it was loud and we were excited. You can make fun, but the minute that you see someone slap a symbol with their fingertips and follow it up with a military perfect drumroll played with the sides of his palms, you pretty much lose the capacity for any type of quasi-intellectual thought and become obsessed with your own wooden spoon and stovepot roots.

After that night, my friends and I were hooked. We bought the merch and music and wore and/or listened to it endlessly. We went online and discovered that the drummer was an online journaler- which only made those of us narcissistic enough to also write our thoughts down on LiveJournal love him even more. The fact that most of his posts were scatalogical in nature just further convinced me that he was, in fact, what my mother had been talking about when she told me that someday I would find true love.

Thus came a community-based tango with fanatacism. Guster toured constantly and we saw them every time that they came within 100 miles of our little college town. When they played at home, we dragged noobs and determined their future social interactions with us by whether or not they saw Adam Gardner and Ryan Miller's harmonies as revelatory. When they played far away we dressed in weird clothes and adopted personalities of people who don't care how they appear to strangers-praise be to the closest available deity that this behavior was not accompanied by alcohol consumption because who knows what would have happened. We became these loud people that screamed like teenagers suffering from the after-effects of Lautner-smolder, and who licked tour buses to prove their uniqueness as fans (Thank heavens that last bit does not include me- Tammy still has to get a yearly shot.) I very nearly converted to Judaism after discovering that all the of band members yearly took part in seder.

I owned every album. I had t-shirts for each day of the week. The "Guster is for Lovers" sticker on the bumpers of the two crap cars that I drove in college proclaimed my only love and earned me car honks from people appreciative of my then-alternative tastes. (Oh no, wait, that was my driving the wrong way on a one-way. Bygones.) The boy who broke the copy of "Lost and Gone Forever" that I bought at my first concert became dead to me, and even now, when I see pictures of him at a summer picnic that my sister attended, I think, "That asshole broke my Guster CD."

But then, you know . . . we grow up. The White Stripes happened. Jay-Z closed escrow on my soul. American Idol brought us closer to 2012 and I may or may not have gotten caught up in the hype over "Daughtry"- a musical low which still causes me to wake up in cold sweats. My musical tastes refined and then became unrefined. "Amsterdam" was good, but it took me a while to learn to love "Keep It Together". By the time "Ganging Up On the Sun" came out, I was struggling with a piss-poor job in a worse economy and did not want to hear richer-than-me white guys singing about someone being their satellite. In addition, they became more popular and started playing bigger venues and demanded more money for their tickets. It turns out that I am devoted up to about $25 including surcharge.

My once special-occasion Guster shirts with the felt covered llama and the Animal House lettering became workout clothes. I became less interested in music and more interested in reading dystopian literature and watching television about men that spend their days analyzing blood spatter and their nights feeding their inner Little Shop of Horrors while wearing the hell out of a form-fitting henley. Guster was relegated to Saturday cleaning music and what I sang with Kendall around campfires on church camping trips to impress cute boys.

Which brings me to this week.

I got a call from a sweet friend of mine that I had not seen in a while. She said that she had tickets to the Guster show and wanted me to go with her. I texted back an emphatic, "YES", but then changed my mind about twenty times over the next several days. My book club was meeting that night. There would be too many people. The last time I went to a concert I couldn't hear anything for three days, which just furthers the insecurities I am having about my late twenties that cause me to go fetal. Eventually, though, the day of the concert came, and although I knew that my altogether gorgeous friend would have no problem finding a last minute date, I decided to put on my figurative "I'm still young" panties and actually go out and do something fun.

We got to the concert venue and the place was loaded with hipsters and college students. Oy ye oy. The opening band was a collection of moderately attractive long-haired hippies finishing a cover of "Cecelia", which was promising as it is my favorite Simon & Garfunkel song about a girl that likes giving it away. I stared at the nymphs on the wall of the Crystal Ballroom and begged them to please not make me experience feeling someone's genitals pressed against any part of my person again. (I have horrible luck at concerts.)

And now we are joined by: my boys. They looked older and slightly thicker- just like me- but still good, in that unwashed, on-the-road, "What city am I in? All the Arby's look the same!" kind of way.

Then- they played.

Although the first song was not one of my favorites it was an immediate and semi-traumatic adrenaline shot to the heart of memory and joy in its purest sense. Feeling drumbeats so deep from my shoulders to heels. Singing at the top of my voice with no regard for the guy recording the performance on his cell phone in front of me. Watching two of my good friends' faces as their Guster virginity taken by the musical equivalent of Lloyd Dobler.

I was reminded of the small joys of concerts in general- the stoners that are dancing like they are dying tomorrow, those intensely focused post-college-age grecian columns that refuse to externally manifest that the band is rocking so hard but eye you like you are a Nazi for talking during slower songs. Shouting until your voice is gone. Not giving a damn about activating your long-dormant tonitis.

Amusingly, there are things that had changed. "The Airport Song", once the crowd-pleasing favorite that caused the audience to go into apopleptic fits most aptly described as "batshit", was recognized only by the few old-timers like myself. Unfortunately, nobody had sent us the memo that what we loved was no longer cool, so there were about four people that screamed like a mouse was running up their pant leg while the rest of the crowd backed away as though they were afraid of catching Beiber fever.

I left the evening lightened by the experience and weighted down only by the absolutely pointless but fabulous silver Guster belt buckle that my friend loaned me some green to purchase. Of audiological necessity, we shouted our reviews of the show back and forth to one another all the way home. Insert contented sigh here.

The following evening my sloth caught up with me (The attribute, not the animal. Being unable to outrun a sloth would either speak very poorly of me or very highly of the animal.) and I was forced to attack the giant monolith of dishes that had been forming over the previous week. As this was no small job, I decided that music was necessary for the moment. Still buzzing from the excursion of the previous evening, I popped on the boring-yet-self-explanitorily-named "Guster" mix and sang loud and true and further frustrated my upstairs neighbor and the action he was likely then pursuing from his long-suffering girlfriend.

The moral: You can't reverse your own personal evolution, but you can remember that the point from which you evolved was pretty great and give it its due. Even when you go all the way up to heaven, you gotta go all the way back home.

(For those who would like to enjoy the meanderings of my first true love, visit the link below.)

http://gusterjournal.tumblr.com/