ham and cheese

Waiting for a traffic light to change green, she and I decided to start a band called "Rome Was Totally Built in a Day". In the lane next to us was a panel van that had a bobble head of Seattle icon Ken Griffey JR on the dashboard. The man driving the car was shaving himself with an electric razor; one of those ones that has three circular cutting heads organized to be as close as possible on a planar surface. 

We'd practice together everyday while laying around on the floor of a friend's garage. Our first song was titled "Ken Griffey JR doesn't care how I drive, he just loves me." We thought it was hilarious and talked about what our friends would think about it when we eventually played it for them. We'd go round and round changing verses.

One night it got a bit late and we decided to go to the cinema after practice and see some Marvel movie that was in theaters. It was one of the ones where no one is wearing a cape. The theater had a new addition of ham and cheese popcorn; we both were really excited. I suggested we write a new song called, "Ham and cheese popcorn tastes good while falling in love in a theatre." She laughed and rolled her eyes. 

We never played any of our songs to our friends.

we're either destroying ourselves our discovering the words for color


It's been exciting to see this piece come to life. It's also been awesome to finish a whole two days early from opening and have 48 hours to sit around, bite my nails, and hope nothing breaks. This has also been one of the more nebulous pieces I've made in recent memory, in that the ideas that have gone into it have contracted and expanded within my head a lot more than usual. Where it started is still there, but it's a bit like a 40 year old talking about what sort of lunches he had in kindergarten and how it currently impacts his life.


too much butter


He started buttoning his shirt from the very top button: the one that is hidden by the knot of a tie. Most people start at the button 3 or 4 down and then work their way up or down like a beagle following the scent of some wounded animal; or maybe a black lab, golden retriever mix with the buttons like small cookies as she makes her way along the outdoor seating area of a bakery.

He owned a small restaurant that was very expensive and didn't have many tables. The only hors d'oeuvre was an entire stick of butter elegantly presented adorned with edible flowers and drizzled with extremely rare olive oil; olive oil created from olives picked from a tree outside the kitchen and ground using human-powered grindstones. A single, toasted piece of bread was served cleaved into the mass of butter; wedged like airplane wreckage among an earth made of dairy. 

Customers would be served this dish, no matter their desires, before their meal. Without fail, they would look cautiously around the restaurant trying to gauge if they were, in fact, supposed to eat the entire stick of butter with only the single dried piece of bread. Since there were so few tables and eating times were always staggered, they had no reference, and fearing embarrassment about not being part of the in crowd, they would consume the entire serving of butter on the tiny cracker; a dairy haystack overburdening a small wagon made of wheat.

When he went home from work, his nose would always be running, but he refused to carry a handkerchief. Instead, he stared up at the ceiling of the metro pretending to examine the route map, letting the snot drip down the back of his throat.

He was usually home by 11.