Heather and I are rounding Black Butte and Mount Shasta on the highway passing exits for Weed, California. There’s north, south and central Weed. If we were more musiciany musicians we’d be making a lot of jokes. I mean, we’re still making the jokes, but they’re not terribly informed and are pretty much just us reading signs out loud and thinking how much our hippie friends would be begging us to pull over, cause, well – you never know. The scenery out here is immense beyond comprehension, but I think I might actually finally be sick of pine trees and snow-topped mountain majesties. I want suburbs to embrace me and to have a nearby shopping district in which I can window shop, browse, and truly contemplate my pathetic financial situation in the comforting fluorescents of a mall.
Yes, I’m craving a mall.
The last two nights have been spent in Reno, Nevada sharing a bed with a tiny, tiny beast named Daisy who enjoys spelunking under the sheets of sleeping strangers. I woke up a couple of times having rolled over and her, but she’s sturdier than she looks and took the abuse without complaint. Upon our initial arrival there was a WHOLE lot of barking but now that she’s accepted our presence she has grown used to us as space-heaters and belly-rubbers.
She’s owned by our new friend, singer-songwriter Justin McMahon. Gravel-voices and beautiful, he’s toured more than we have and was slowed down recently by hand injuries. As we’ve been swapping songs for the past couple of days I’ve watched the tendons of his left hand crawling and writhing and I can’t imagine the fear there.
Heather and Justin really hit it off, swapping stories and poetry. I sat and read Harry Potter and included myself in the conversation when I wanted to. It’s been nice to not be the social one, but sometimes it makes me feel a little stupid to not be able to relate to the depths of my more literary friends. However Heather feels Justin’s a good middle ground between her and I, as his aesthetics wander from the non-fiction memoirs of journalists to fantasy and science fiction to an unholy worship of Stephen King. Add to that a true appreciation of similar feminine aesthetics and it’s no WONDER I like his songwriting so much.
Eventually we find ourselves in a coffeeshop just over the border in Oregon, watching the darkening skies dripping and spitting. As soon as we rounded the mountains, North-Western America Lived up to its rainy stereotype and drizzled half-heartedly on us. The coffeeshop itself is lit like the malls of my homesick daydreams, hung with mediocre art and everything a north-western coffeehouse should be, perhaps – I’m listening to the conversations around me: a grizzled traveler turns to a yuppie hiker and says “salvation is always a personal journey” and gets “yeah, but just thinking about freedom doesn’t make you free” for a response – and it’s like listening to code and counter-code in some counter-culture cult. Scrabble and chess and conversations about his holiness, the Dalai Lama and a strange mix of classical themes and hip retro-pop piped through overhead speakers. We’ll play an open mic in town and then scuttle a further three hours up the road before we crash. We just kill time in the presence of game-playing prophets.
