who let us on the internet

in the spirit of all things just for fun:

swinging the bat & talking with the sea

thanks to the artist's way [don't judge a book by it's cover...yeah yeah, bad color scheme and cliche illustration], i've gained a little more creative desire and drive recently.  the past few weeks it's been so nice outside--sky blue sky fall days that ask me to see the leaves where they are--on the trees--rather than indulging preemptive visions of them on the ground. with the autumn light leaning in they look so good up there, where they're supposed to be for now.

i've been coming to lindsey gardens, looking over the baseball diamond where, as a member of the ragtag mets little league baseball team, i mostly refused to swing the bat.  i was convinced the pitcher would throw four errant pitches before throwing three strikes. i expected to get walked. most times i was right, but sometimes i struck out, a spectator with a bat in my hands.  step up to the plate, but don't take any real chances.  it's interesting and a little sad to sit there now in almost idyllic weather, thinking about 11-year old julia watching pitches go by, content to endure whatever fate the pitcher's abilities dealt.

here i am 16 years later, trying for something more, and knowing my satisfaction in this pursuit will be directly related to my willingness to swing and swing hard, whether or not i connect--i can't expect any of this to be given to me.

"a creative life involves great swathes of attention...the quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. the capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention...the reward for attention is always healing." -the artists way, julia cameron p. 52-53

and yet so much is given. some trees beg to be climbed, branches sprawled out like an invitation. i watched a 20-something kid, unable to resist this tree's allure. he laughed, occasional glances down at his girlfriend below, as he searched for another foothold. he seemed alive with childness, to borrow a phrase from emma lou thayne--equal parts awe and delight--no plans to come down, but well aware he was up up up with plans only of higher, each vantage point promising new eyes with a little more effort. 

so many serious thoughts from a girl with cutesy socks on. it hardly ever stays serious for too long around here. here are some things i do when i'm not in pursuit of lofty goals. spend too many hours designing my favorite nike id kyrie irving shoes (which ones do you like the best??), draw things on the church program while listening to harry potter in the car,  and read mary oliver poems. 

utah jazz inspired

“I Go Down To The Shore

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.” 

― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings

thanks for the new eyes, sea.

because sometimes you have to do things

best rappers in town.

walking

You have a walking doppelganger, a swagger jacker, someone who, from afar, in the wrong light, lumbers along just right to be mistaken for you. I've wanted it to be you, wanted to shout across campus and watch the mile wide spread across your face, teeth somehow animated in full-disclosure.   It's never you, though--at least not yet. But when I see that saunter, my heart splinters, half for the you and half for the un-you in my midst. 

Walking is perspective. How shadows and shapes make themselves into what they really are and aren't. They're not you--the shadows that stop and start. 

I can stop and start, every step a deliberate choice. I can turn the corner and go inside the corner store, the one I've always wondered about, or I can breathe and listen to my mind give and take, stopping at the really old tombstones to remember people I've never met, or I can watch family dinner from outside, light pouring over the snow from the front window, forks in a constant rotation.  

Spaghetti takes a kind of slow I never see when I'm moving certain and frantic now is not the right place.

rickshaw

so certain is the driver of the dimensions that slink behind him that he can think about drinking water, he can think about sleeping, he can think about the way his wife's lips hung from her face this morning, one arm draped over the sudden mound of her stomach, the other slung over her eyes in protest to the early sun--while he weaves through the dusty morning market. 

 

his skin wears tough like a baseball mitt--tired but familiar to the daily routine. his calves put on a show as he pedals, but the eyes of his customers are up ahead, watching the road--certain every fish salesman, every child walking to school, every stray dog drunk with the smell of kebabs will wander into the path of the bike. the driver absently fumbles the bell with his left thumb and wonders what his son will look like.

 

everything is free now

a few weeks ago i went to a show at kilby court alone on a whim. recent experience has taught me that solo-concert-going whims should only very occasionally be followed. premonitions aside, i indulged the whim and it fell quite nicely into the very occasional positive experience category.

 i really don't listen to ben sollee's music. i have listened to one song in obsessive spurts over the past 4 or 5 years--panning for gold. if one song can compel me to show up at your concert it must be something else. and it is. the night started less promising than i was hoping. i got to the show and a band composed of dads in their 50s with a 30 something bass player played 90s inspired rock like it was still the 90s to a crowd of fifteen. i resisted the urge to stay glued to my phone. i pretended it was the 90s. i bobbed my head, clapped, tapped my toe, sure, why not?--pretty determined to get my $12 out of the night.

 i saw it was more of an "all bands no fans" kind of night and felt badly i hadn't brought anybody else. i've seen a lot of shows marred by the band's disappointment at a mediocre sized crowd. they play to get through it, and it feels just as plodding and routine as it is. but mr. totally regular level-headed genuine ben sollee came in and said "hey, it's perfect weather out here and there are a lot of chairs. i think i'll just play unplugged around the fire pit." a man after my own heart. any one of my mission companions will attest to the fact that i would often eat lying down--ultimate leisure. i like sitting down at shows where the music is less dance-y and/or the musician is sitting down. i shouldn't make fun of those 50 year old dads. apparently i am a senior citizen. anyway, we all shuffled out and sat down to a kentucky drawl and cello occasionally accompanied by crickets, trains, and sirens. he laughed at the interaction of sound. he told us how good it felt to play after a night off and he played like it felt good.

he played a gillian welch cover, "everything is free" at kilby court (!) which is 100% taboo, but well-earned when your show is poorly promoted, i guess. i was glad he did. i'd never heard the song and it was revelatory for me in some surprisingly important ways. i'm more jaded than i wish i were sometimes. it's lovely to encounter those who don't intend to ever get to that place, who know a good fall night and who emanate gratitude.



incidentally this version of "panning for gold" features guitarist craig wagner, whose performance i attended alone at usu when i realized i had to do this. i think it's one of the prettier songs i've heard. enjoy. i think you might.

mama says i would have liked you

this is one of my favorite pictures of one of my favorite people i never knew--my uncle, greg.  i know him best from the stories my mom tells about him, brimming with all the admiration of a much younger sister. stories collected and then recollected from a child's eyes. or, stories passed to her from her mom, then on to me. it's an oral tradition that keeps him alive. he's a fabled man shrouded in mystique.

greg recorded his own album, driven by the rain, in the late 1960s on destino records, a label of his own design. this was practically unheard of then, and it's still impressive to me now. in high school i became interested in music, how it comes to someone, and where it comes from, especially among my own.

**************
my dad spent quite a few saturday afternoons in the basement, jimi hendrix blaring.  that always sounded more like an invitation than a demand for privacy to me, so i often found my way downstairs, my legs cropped up on the love seat, i watched him.  "mom, doesn't like jimi hendrix. she thinks he's too noisy," he'd say, tilt his chin up, close his eyes and punctuate it all with a facetious dance move to entertain us both. it was one of those saturday mornings i first heard the beatles' white album, and a brief discourse on "julia" and why i should like it. i didn't have to try to like it. i just did.

 i learned how to work a record player from my dad. it's a careful process. i practiced on records that were already scratched up or warped. later, under close supervision, i graduated to neil young and bob dylan and even the beloved beatles records.
***************

eventually, i was self-promoted to unsupervised vinyl listening, and still, i find my mind slightly hoping my dad never reads this. my sister, charlotte, hung a "driven by the rain" era poster of greg in her usu dorm room, and i realized i'd never heard his album, or his voice, even. granting myself this permission, this is what i heard:









"forever gone away" - greg welch



 



"walk on by" - greg welch

his post-apocalyptic haunting refrain and unrequited laments moved me, maybe mostly because he is part of me. here he is, a warbling voice hidden under decades and dust, and yet it is a voice teeming with youthful confidence. he had worked so hard to have these sounds pressed in wax, for someone, anyone to hear. it made him real. and it also broke my heart to listen, to imagine what could have been.

i invited my mom to tell me his story again. she told me of the main characters, the dates, the times the places--how he chose to enlist for battle on vietnam's front lines just to get out of there sooner. she told me how he was fun and zany. he let her go on dates with him, he always had a girlfriend, and he was always playing his guitar. she wept, for what could have been, but also in deep gratitude for what was. i think she also wept for the real part of us that, when we lose someone, we sometimes close off, a little afraid we might spend the rest of our lives crying. it seemed there was no fear this time. she sounded happy to see that old part of her heart, happy to hear 40 year old memories pour from her mouth.

******************

a few weeks ago my mom and my aunt asked me to search through greg's boxes at our house for his obituary. i never found the obituary. instead, i found emblems of a very human life lived. i found speeding tickets. i found love letters. i found 4th grade artwork. i found carefully traced and hand-designed "destino records" logos. i found this picture.

greg and becky got married despite the daunting possible consequences that war totes around. the first few pages of their wedding book have pictures like this, their faces glowing and unassuming. the last three quarters of the book includes pages with titles like "our first house" and "our first anniversary," pages fate kept empty.

i found a briefcase full of greg's poetry, personal writing, and songs including this one--a seeming premonition written by greg to becky.

the drums are rolling

 by greg welch

becky, the drums are rolling

becky, the bugle's blowing,

calling me to fight.

becky, the flags are flying,

becky, the women are crying,

becky, the plow's a-lying

rusting in the night.

the men in your family all are wearing blue.

there's glory in their minds but killing men is new.

i'll see them in the battle in the fury of the day,

they'll know me by my battle flag and coat of rebel gray.

fare thee-well, hate me for my honor.

fare-thee-well, hate me in the war,

fare-thee-well, hate me till it's over,

then love me as before.

my life has been a flame

struggling in the wind,

and now the storm has come along 

to put it to an end.

if you never hear me

or see my face no more

you'll tell our son his father died fighting in the war.

fare thee-well, hate me for my honor.

fare-thee-well, hate me in the war,

fare-thee-well, hate me till it's over,

then love me as before.

heartbreaking-- greg's self-loathing, his nostalgia for the past from a preconceived scarred future--"...then love me as before."   

gregory - marines, pre-vietnam war

greg in vietnam

without any knowledge of "the drums are rolling," this is the song i wrote after that conversation with my mom. it's almost eight years old now, full of what i was and wasn't then, and hopefully, at least a small part of what greg was.

1969 

by julia mecham

june of 1969, hard tears my mother cried--

a man brought words of woe to her front door,

flag in hand, said you weren't coming home anymore

mama says i would have liked you

mama says i would have made you proud

and i will not let the bullets of time gun your melody

down to the ground.

upon the wall your name's inscribed--

not the way it should have been written in big city lights

but shadows of a cause that was not yours

swallowed your dreams and made your name common decor.

mama says i would have liked you

mama says i would have made you proud

and i will not let the bullets of time gun your melody

down to the ground.

early 1988, mother gave birth to a little babe.

shortly after learning of your fate, i asked,

"when we gonna stop going to war, keeping score...

when are things going to change?"

mama says i would have liked you

mama says i would have made you proud

and i will not let the bullets of time gun your melody...

 i wasn't sure why i felt i should post all this. a legend is demystified, the oral tradition is broken--there is rightful sadness in that, but i think my promise to greg is better kept this way, in writing. "i will not let the bullets of time gun your melody down to the ground." i hope to some degree i fulfill greg's petition for us to love him "as before" the war. i love him for the way he lived so i could see that old part of my mother's heart when she talked about him with fresh tears.

finishing stuff

so, i've had a time of it finishing much of anything lately. i think this picture most clearly validates my point:

cutting off cut-offs evenly is a lifelong struggle for me. so after two sour attempts these pants have been lying in my room just like this for weeks. unfinished. 

creatively, i am doing this sort of self-help book that has been good for me thus far. it really is the summer of self-help. which is fine. as part of that broad category, i attend a songwriting club monthly, put together by tom. it's been a good exercise to get me trying to write and being more playful with music. 

i find my hands going to the same old spots on the guitar. in anticipation of potentially having to teach group ukelele classes at work, i picked up the ukelele. not knowing a thing about it was kind of a blank canvas and gave me a musical freedom i haven't had for a while.

 i don't even like the ukelele, you guys. but here this is:

since dawn (an aside)
how've you been(?)
gone so long?
miles of time on your face since dawn

some know not but to call you new
call your name and it's foreign to you

it was an aside, i am sure-
meant for no one this side of the stage door.
it was an aside, i am sure-
overheard, but not much more.

the trains still blow from the west
light up the valley the way you liked it best

it was an aside, i am sure-
meant for no one this side of the stage door.
it was an aside, i am sure-
overheard, but not much more.

how've you been(?)
gone so long(?)
miles of time on your face
but not much more.

WHITNEY IS DEAD {the things i missed and didn't}

so gretchen and i were talking after alt-j 's (lovely) concert about how when you're away everything changes, yet it doesn't. i think such pop culture developments are especially evident coming from the extreme sort of seclusion that a mormon mission requires. as i was rattling off the things that i have noticed, gretchen mentioned how she wishes she had documented the changes she experienced upon her return. this is a running list of things about which i have been taking mental notes the past four months. some of the events were mentioned to me briefly while i was gone {see the time charlotte wrote an email with the subject line WHITNEY IS DEAD--leading me to frantically scour the text to ensure she was not talking about my former roommate} while the rest are just discoveries that felt surprising and worth mentioning. it's strange how old news can feel so new. it's kind of a cool experience in an age of information overload. there is so much music for me to listen to. i don't know that i'll ever catch up. my effort to document: did i miss much?

{ images borrowed from my friends's actual instagram profiles}

cats are a thing.

so is ryan gosling.

instagram.

pinterest.

spotify.

blogging gives way to tumblr and tweeting.

city creek mall is a place.

you can take trax to the airport.

southbound I-15 becomes a passable thoroughfare.

two humans i didn't know before came into existence.

"super" as an adjective becomes super popular.

eating pho also becomes super popular..

colorado movie theater shooting.

fearfully mocking north korea becomes a trending pastime

obama gets re-elected.

amy winehouse dies

memes happen. (although i wish they would die with no possibility for re-election).

"said no one ever" becomes a catch phrase.

the "mormon moment" comes and goes and brandon flowers backs it up.

everyone acts like they liked arrested development all along.

selfies become even more shameless.

the ukulele craze peaks.

bangs are neither here nor there.

middle parts are back for women, and nothing says "i don't care, yet i do" quite so well.

just like my dad promised, men get into parting their hair again. can't say i'll miss the up-spikes.

red lip stick. all day every always.

whitney houston dies.

snoop dogg changes his name to snoop lion.

the mormon missionary age requirements change for women from 21 to 19 and 19 to 18 for men.

dub-step tromps all over popular music.

the jazz miss the playoffs again.

doc martins make a mainstream comeback.

the word "janky"

totes jelly= totally jealous.

#hashtagging things in normal conversation.

gangnam style puts k pop on the global popular music map.

the world somehow forgives jessica biel for being on "7th Heaven" and justin timberlake for being in "N'SYNC" as they become america's sweethearts.

hello kitty is sold everywhere.

jeremy "linsanity" takes the NBA by storm.

adele becomes a household name (though i'm still partial to feist...heard one of her songs from her "new" album in a GS25 convenience store in Jinhae, South Korea in Dec. 2012 and in that 2'30" i thought maybe i should come home early to buy the album).

"downton abbey" turns me (and maybe you) into the classiest snob ever. FREE BATES.

"YOLO" becomes. had to look it up on urban dictionary.

the world was supposed to end.

so glad it didn't. there are too many moments between the bullet points that i am grateful to have lived. please add your own bullet points &/or moments in between. i'd love to hear from you.

this man is slammin

i've been trying to figure out how to let this kid know i'm single. and deeply moved.