This weekend was nice & relaxing & rebellious. After classes on Friday we went up to practice in Echo Hollow. We played wonderfully; I realized that the concentration & precision that I am developing as a classical guitar student during the week is automatically transferring over to my bass playing by week’s end. I’m hitting all the notes, and can now work my way around the frets at considerable speeds. Sean’s playing has improved, too: he’s getting better at soloing. Still doesn’t want to sing tho. (Neither do I…)
Then Ceej & I went down to the Muse and pickt up a quarter of ’dro from Tiger’s friend Neeko. We basically spent the rest of the night sparking bowls. Jon was there, and later we went to Ryan’s for a bit to smoke him out. We were so stoned we felt almost drunk. I could see dim fractals in the dark, like on acid.
Spent the night in Gallatin at Chris & Jon’s place, a tiny square house right off South Water, where Ceejay has been crashing lately. Gallatin is pretty old & depressing, as I observed while we drove around the leafy inner neighborhoods smoking a spliff early Saturday morning before Ceej left for work. I saw more colors on the walls of the house as I dozed on the couch watching movies. There were DVD cases strewn everywhere; the floor is coverd in trash. Hendersonville Chris & Jon are two guys who don’t give a fuck. They basically just live in a sty & play shitty music & talk about good music.
Chris has “joind” Asher & Johnny’s band, and so they came over briefly. They started talking about band names: Asher had originally wanted to name the band “Genuine Ingenue,” but Johnny wanted something darker like “Mixt Fatality” or “the Sullen Tide.” They exprest admiration for local names like Neo-Fugitives & Vesta Rose and regional ones like Bike Gang Knife Fight (Tupelo, MS) as well as Jeremiah’s former habit of signing up for open-mic nights under ridiculous pseudo “band” names like Jerry Mandarin & the Poppy Caucus, or Noah Fence & the Progeny of Misogyny. Chris offerd up “Dabbler” but Johnny objected that he doesn’t want the kind of name where people will always be asking how to spell it. Chris then suggested “T.G.I.F.U.B.A.R.” since you have to spell it anyway. Ash & Johnny still thought that was too much. Eventually they settled on “the Lackeys.” (I guess that’s how they’re spelling it.)
Once Ceej was off work (same Pizza Hut as Chris), we went to his friend Davis’s house back in Hendersonville. Like Ryan’s backyard up in Echo Hollow, this area is a storied haunt of Ceejay’s core group of friends. The neighborhood consists of one loopt street, Windmere Circle, tuckt away behind the auto-body and discount tobacco shops of West Main. Two other friends (whom we didn’t visit), Stevie and Lil Preston, also live there. Then as we were leaving we saw the Marines parading into town, holding us up at the stop—they had just returned home from the Middle East & had the whole police force escorting them down Nashville Pike.
I don’t think Ceejay knows my dad is a Marine & is old enough to have fought in Korea. He was fifty-six when I was born. He actually had a wife long before he met my mom, who was the mother of my brother Luke and who, along with a daughter, Libby, was killed in a car wreck in 1964. Tragedy surrounds this family like a fucking curse, especially the women (hence my mom’s paranoiac tendencies). Luke, six, was the sole survivor of the accident (hence his fear of driving over 45 mph). Now he jokes that we’re like if the Kennedys had been Methodists, since Dad is originally from Massachusetts, too. But this is a LOT to get into when people start asking questions, so as Ceej made disparaging remarks I held my tongue. I’m not pro-military by any means, but I will always have a soft spot for the Corps.
Last night I went down to Spring Hill & helpt Jordan with some math problems in a church parking lot, with the aid of a bowl of ’dro & the last of the remaining daylight. Then we took his Geo Storm liftback and drove up to Pinkerton Park in Franklin to meet Heather & Avery (!) who are now dating (!!) each other. Funny how that works. They got the giggles as we hot-boxt Heather’s Subaru in the cool park eve. Pinkerton is evidently a very popular place for high schoolers on a Saturday night; we could see the flashes of their camera-phones flickering thru the playground jungle—
Today: drove back to campus & saw Andreas Klein play the piano, then up to Sumner Co. with Sean for rehearsal with Ceej. Afterwards, we watched The Kids Are Alright with Jeremiah, who is big into The Who.
Jordan really needs to get out of his parents’ house.