Strange Pulse

I’m still all giddy and euphoric over them.

I got some great pics.

One of the very best live bands going. Seriously.

I went to Main street and met up with a friend from Flickr to take pictures. As it turns out, there was an classic car show, so we had lots to take pictures of. We walked all over and had a blast.

I really love living here.

Since moving to California, I haven’t seen any famous people walking down the street. I do live in Orange County rather than Los Angeles. And I don’t spend a lot of time walking down any streets. But I don’t think I’d be very star struck if I did happen to see some movie star or whatever.

I don’t idolize anyone. But there are some musicians I am such big fans of that if I were to run into them, I think I’d completely freak out. My freak out would probably not manifest itself outwardly, but my heart would race and my mind would definitely stop working.

I know this because today my sister-in-law who lives in Santa Monica called me up and said, “Hey isn’t Jackson Browne that one guy you really like?” Well, it turns out he’s participating in the Santa Monica high school music program’s performance tonight and tomorrow night. I haven’t been able to figure out if he’s actually going to sing a song or two, or if he’s just giving an introduction to the performance, or what. But just the idea of being able to see him at an event like that had me freaking out.

Before moving to California, I asked people if it was wrong to want to move there because it’d mean living closer to Jackson Browne, and I think they thought I was joking.

I don’t know what it is about him. I mean, I really don’t know much about what he’s like personally, and I don’t really care–it’s his music that I love.

I feel the same way about Mike Scott of the Waterboys. I’m seeing the Frames next week, an Irish band I simply adore, and there’s probably a chance I could meet the singer or one of the band members. But I’m going to have to think beforehand about things to ask him about besides, “When’s the last time you talked to Mike Scott?”

Seriously.

I’ve been thinking about how quickly time passes. It’s freaking me out a bit, that my kids are getting so old. My oldest is turning 15 next week and in high school. My youngest is 10 and will be in middle school next year. In a few years they’ll be out on their own.

My brother-in-law is on his way home from Iraq. He’s been there over a year. A year is such a long time to be away from your wife and kids. And yet it went so fast (for me, at least).

There’s a song by the Red House Painters called “Things Mean a Lot at the Time” that goes:

Scares me how you get older
How you forget about each other

And it’s so true. I have some friends that I’m still in contact with from years ago–email makes that a lot easier. But I’ve been thinking about some childhood friends I could probably track down–thanks to the internet. But do I really want to? I haven’t seen some of them since I was 12. Well, maybe I’ll try to contact a couple of them, stay tuned.

I totally missed seeing Brant Bjork and Fatso Jetson in San Diego last night. I’ve been looking forward to that show for weeks! I am so lame. I can’t even believe it.

Saturday Daniel and I went to a skate park in San Diego with our friend Dave. Dave is Daniel’s oldest friend, they’ve been best buds since high school.

Daniel saying hello.

Dave in profile.

Dave catching some air.

Daniel stretching his calf.

Me with San Diego barely visible in the background.

Daniel skating–that’s Dave being dorky in that little dip up above.

We had fun. I get dizzy being up so high, and there’s nowhere to stand except right on the edge of everything, so I was a little tense, but it got better as I got used to it. This park is underneath an overpass and I’m kinda surprised there weren’t more people there on a Saturday.

No, not the band, although I may post about them someday. I guess my trip to the cemetery yesterday has me thinking about my brother and sister that died–or more likely, it was just this Patty Griffin song I can’t stop listening to called “Goodbye.” I was playing it this morning while driving my kids to school and I started telling Elijah about the song and why I like it–because it reminds me of Darryl and Jenny. So he started asking me about them, and it’s nice for me to be able to talk about them, because most people don’t really want to hear about your dead brother and sister. Death isn’t a comfortable topic for a lot of people.

I’m very comfortable with it, though. Being acquainted with it so well. And I’m also vastly more comfortable with the idea of my own mortality than a lot of people I know, thanks to my diabetes.

My brother Darryl died in December of 1990, just after his 34th birthday. I’m 34 right now. It’s weird to think about that. He had cancer and was in remission, but then went into the doctor again and it had spread everywhere. He didn’t live too long after that. He died in my parents’ living room (home hospice care) and my parents were with him when he passed.

My sister Jenny was a paranoid schizoprenic. She attempted suicide a couple times (she was a complete mess if she went off her meds). She was living in a halfway house when she died. It was eight months after Darryl died. She “woke up dead.” They found her in the morning, face down on the floor of her room. She had pills in her pocket. So they did an autopsy to figure out if it was suicide. They didn’t try to determine cause of death–just wanted to rule out suicide. Which they did, so her death was simply attributed to natural causes. We don’t know why she died.

She died the day after my other sister’s birthday. Or maybe it was the day before. Either way, it makes it hard. It was really hard on my mom when she died, so unexpectedly, and then not knowing for a week or two while we waited for them to get the autopsy results done if it was a suicide or not.

My brother would’ve loved the internet. He was into computers very early on, used to dial up bulletin boards back when those were the only thing going. He also would’ve loved a lot of the music I’ve discovered the last few years–stoner rock in particular I’m sure he’d have loved. When I was a teenager he used to lend me his Dead Kennedys and Megadeth albums. It makes me sad that he’s not here to share them with.

Mostly it makes me sad that my children will never know them. Jenny was the most generous person I’ve ever known. She was always giving her things away. She worked at a thrift store and she’d often come over with a bag full of clothes for me. Most of it didn’t even fit, but she was just so enthusiastic about giving things to people. My parents were always buying her things that she needed, and then they’d just have to buy them again, because she’d give them away.

The day after her funeral, my parents went back to the graveyard and took most of the flowers from her grave and distributed them among other nearby graves, including Darryl’s and my nephew Joey’s. Because that’s what she would’ve wanted.

–

Occured to me the other day
You’ve been gone now a couple years
Well, I guess it takes while
For someone to really disappear
And I remember where I was
When the word came about you
It was a day much like today
The sky was bright, and wide, and blue

But I wonder where you are
And if the pain ends when you die
And I wonder if there was
Some better way to say goodbye

- Patty Griffin

I love how peaceful and quiet they are. And you get such a sense of history from them.

When I was a teen, there was an old pioneer cemetery just down the road from us. It was right on a big busy main road, but hidden from sight, and it wasn’t being maintained. It was small, and all the grass was overgrown. I used to walk down there sometimes. Once when I went I found someone had put red fingernail polish on some of the gravestones like it was blood. I didn’t think that was very funny and tried to clean it off but didn’t have anything that would take it off.

Anyway, in the corner of that cemetery is one of my favorite graves. It’s surrounded by a small cast iron fence. The grave stone is for someone named John Monster, and his infant, which is only referenced as “Baby Monster.”

My brother, sister and nephew are buried in the same town as that one, but in a different cemetery, up on a hill. I don’t have pictures of their graves handy, except for this one of my nephew Joey’s.

That little marker to the right of the bench is his.

As a teen I also used to visit Jimi Hendrix’s grave, but I don’t have any pics handy.

Today I went to a pioneer cemetery in Anaheim. There were some old graves there–some of the gravestones had broken and they just laid them down like modern gravestones.

This tree was growing into some graves, kinda creeped me out:

These are the heartbreaking ones:

This was the coolest gravestone there:

I’ve been wanting to check out some of the hiking trails in Orange County, take my camera along and take some photos. I found a website that lists details of a bunch trails, and the closest to me is actually right next to the Newport temple, so I decided to go check it out.

It’s basically a gully under an overpass. Not fun at all. There’s a small waterfall over some rocks and some caves. Sounds cool, right? But all I could think while I was there was that it was prime body-dumping real estate. And a perfect place for homeless people to camp out. So I didn’t venture beyond the overpass.

Here’s where the cave/waterfall was:

So I just snapped a few pictures of weeds and then headed to one of my favorite spots, the Bolsa Chica wetland preserve near where I live.

I thought this bird only had one leg, until he put the one that’s hidden down. I don’t know what he was doing with it or how it was folded up, but it tripped me out.

My church is building a temple in Newport Beach, which is just 20 minutes away from us. We drove down on Sunday to check it out. It’s pretty close to being done. We couldn’t get up close to it, all these pictures were taken from behind a chainlink fence.

This temple is unusual because it’s not white. My favorite temple (that I’ve only seen in photos) is the San Diego temple. I need to visit it now that I’m only an hour away. Daniel and the kids, before we moved down to Cali, visited a friend for a few weeks in San Diego. They drove past the temple one day and another friend in the car said, “That’s where the evil warlord lives!” The kids just said, “Uh, no…That’s the temple!”