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We’re leaving Seattle, finally heading east. When the day is done we’ll finally be a noticable distance off the West Coast. I’ll be able to look at a map and see real distance between us and the Pacific Ocean and that familiar cold Atlantic won’t seem such an impossible distance.

As of today, Monday morning, I really consider us homeward-bound, and though we’ve got almost four weeks to go yet, and we won’t be there for long, there’s still a certain comfort to knowing that at least a temporary familiarity awaits.

We’re traveling down winding highways through pine-covered canyons and cloud-topped mountains, watching the white mists snag on needle-tipped evergreens, rising from snow-caps and vanishing the rocky steeps.

Heather’s comment: “That would be an awesome sledding hill till you DIED!” That’s pretty accurate. We’re just crossing the snowline ourselves and the trees around us are peppered with it (colour-wise I guess “salted” would be more appropriate, but they SALT the roads to KILL snow… so really, I’m at a loss… perhaps they’re just dusted?) and the drifts tower up the sides of the roads and snowmelt from the mountain tops comes careening down the rockfaces – whether these waterfalls are permanent or transient, they’re ripping the mountains down around them and one day these too will have vanished.

I like the violence of this coast. A lot of the East Coast, for whatever reason, is old and worn – the Midwest is all ex-oceanfloor and had been trampled by millions, if not billions of years of all those associated pressures. Here, the mountains are young and jagged and have all the teen-angst and rebellion the Earth can muster. Here they still claw at the sky, still immortal. 

Heather and I are driving through mists and drizzle and snow and patches of sunshine and for the first time in my Life I’ve just used the word “trippy”. I’ve been looking back in the side-view mirror and the sun is catching the roadspray at just the right angle and we’re literally leaving rainbows in our wake.

Over the past several days we’ve been staying with a friend we’d met at the New Deal Cafe almost a year ago. Her boyfriend and roommates have proven a good match for me, and we’ve played card-based RPGs and watched Star Wars, and Tina even accompanied us to the Sci Fi Museum. We met up with our friend Jeff (from the New Deal as well) who’s out here on business, and it’s like having a little patch of home that doesn’t have a patch on home.

We’re driving through driven snow now… angry stuff that clutches, grey stuff that blinds, obscuring roadsigns and patches of ice and Heather navigates the mountain pass fearlessly. It reminds me of coming over the mountains on route 40 into California, PA but eternally elongated. Looking at the map, I have no idea when this will end.

Last week, back in Oregon (which I’ve displayed an unfortunate tendency to mispronounce) we stayed with Heather’s friend Andy who took us hiking and fed us fantastic meals. It’s strange to stay with someone who’s got all the trappings and Living space of a college student who is as aggressively hospitable as an Italian grandmother. In the four days or so that we were there we never got in before 1am – and though we tried desparately not to wake him up as we crossed paths in his tiny room, invariably we’d turn our backs on his sleeping form one moment and turn back to discover him missing – only to find him cooking at the stove, generating salmon or egg sandwiches with wild abandon, insisting that we have a proper dinner.

Our time in Oregon passed with two open mics, both of which were discouraging to the point of being painful. There were a couple of people who approached me, displeased that we were there – expressing that open mics were for amateurs and that it wasn’t really appropriate for us to be there. One guy actively accused me of having mislead the host in order to sign up (!!!?) and another, after our CD pitch, pulled me aside to tell me that this was really a community for people who did it just for the Love of music, with the implication that WE were there simply for the money… I could use up the rest of my monthly quota of question and exclamation marks here, but I’d be better served TRYING to use my words here.

Now, it’s completely possible that I’m simply being far too sensitive here, but one of the people who talked to me then walked out of the venue without even bothering to play his slot, so he must’ve felt relatively passionate about it.

This response isn’t unheard of, but is frankly so rare that I’d forgotten it existed. I remember when I was relatively new to the whole music thing, I used to not mention CDs or anything from the stage as a couple of the open mics I frequented seemed to take offense at that. But it’s such a rarity to encounter that attitude now, probably because the prevelance of DIY CD production allows ANYONE to have a CD, that I haven’t bothered catering to that for years.

I guess it’s just hard to please everyone.

Fortunately, the attitudes encountered at the open mics didn’t reflect the people who came out to our Wednesday night show. Twin Paradox turned into a great night with an intent audience that drank us in eagerly. I finally met the owners and fell in Love with them too – kind, supportive people.

Thursday was our first appearance in Seattle – driving into the city itself, I was simply shocked by how big it was. The sprawl of the Emerald City gives the impression of being more far-reaching than most any other city I’ve encountered – and we’ve just passed through LA and San Francisco – I’m curious about its statistics. It climbs the mountain walls and stretches on forever, with water a pervasive, divisive creature spreading tentacles through the whole metropolis.

Part of me felt like there should be some sense of homecoming – here was the purported source of all the music that hit me so strongly in my high school years – Alice in Chains and Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and Nirvana… this was the birthplace of Grunge – a revolution so swift that by the time I realized I’d been swept up in it it had already been adopted by the mainstream and co-opted by fashion companies.

I never did grow out of it though, and my interior self-design sense has been permanently tilted towards flannel shirts and ripped jeans and my aesthetic has been permanently set to some slowly evolving monstrosity of teen-angst and unadulterated play-your-heart-out passion, scream till your throat is raw and play like there’s an eternal war between your fingers and the strings…

Coincidentally, we even arrive in Seattle on Cobain / Staley Day – the day Kurt Cobain committed suicide… which at the end of my freshman year of college left me so very unaffected. I’d grown disappointed in Nirvana and become completely enthralled with Alice in Chains… years later when Lane Staley overdosed on that same day…

THAT was a bad day. I never shed tears for him like I did for Robert Plant (yes, I cried when Robert Plant died… and felt really dumb when I found out it was just a tennis player with the same name as the singer from Led Zepplin) but I was disappointed that my heroes had now gone the way of all the role-models of all the previous generations. All the Jimis and Janises and Jims… drugs and depression wipe us all clean… and I wonder if my own threadbare sanity will keep us from greatness…

Our first date in the Seattle area actually involves are a ferry trip out and across the Puget Sound over to Bainbridge Island and into a tiny coffeeshop which barely acknowledges our existance. Despite the presence of Jess (a friend from Ellicott City, actually) and her small contingent, we play mostly to ourselves and the host. A speaker placed on the street outside allows us to cajole and seduce passerbys, but we prove unequal to the task, and many shrugs and arm-gesture-intensive excuses are the only replies to our little “come inside and play with us” songs. People pointed to cigarettes and babies and take-out food… a couple of individuals popped their heads in and listened to a song or two, but we generally completely fail to win the locals over.

It’s probably for the best… we’d RACED to get to the gig on time, missing the ferry out by about 3 minutes, and we RACED to get everything packed up and out on time, getting to the ferry back with about 3 minutes to spare. All in all, a lot of racing on Thursday. Note to self: dotted straight lines over bodies of water = ferry route, dumb ass!!!

Friday’s show was a whole lot more fun. Arriving at Hotwire Coffee (OBEY THE BEAN!!!) with it’s slightly S&M-tinted advertisements (my bumper sticker includes whips and handcuffs with their logo – I guess nothing “slightly” about it…) we had a bad start. Our posters aren’t up, they’ve spelled our wrong, the people working the counter seem kind of affronted when I asked about them… Hell, at this point I don’t care… we send posters all over the place and they only seem to get posted about 75% of the time – either they get lost in the mail, or they arrive a couple of weeks late (come ON US Postal service!!! We ALWAYS give you a LEAST three weeks!!!) or they get shoved on someone’s desk and abandoned because no-one can find the tape right at that moment… or whatever… but in this case we had a contract to mail WITH the posters, and THAT’S what I was concerned with… after much smoothing of ruffled feathers we finally get to the root of the problem: a change of ownership and a confused shift of booking powers… I don’t care, I just want to play…

At around this point I round the corner and run into Jeff – a friend, fan and cohort from Maryland – many of you know him from behind the soundboard at the New Deal Cafe. He’s sitting at a table with a shit-eating grin. I’d expressed in an email to him that I half-expected to run across him somewhere out here and that apparently cinched the deal. I guess he never passes up a chance at an almost-dare. It was great to have his enthusiasm and smile in the audience, and he’d brought a couple of friends.

Another suprise for the night – Richard the saw player from Albuquerque, NM was out in Seattle visiting friends and brought his saws and his friends out to the show… a good sound system at our back and an audience willing to gather tight around the stage that included friends from Maryland, New Mexico and Massachusetts turned this into the highlight of our musical experience in Seattle. Richard even joined us on stage on some songs and we performed a couple of warbly ebow / saw duets. Why all the theramin

players in the area totally failed to hear the call and didn’t cock their ears and come rushing out to join in I can’t even guess.

Thank goodness (and by goodness I mean our friends and fans) for that night or I could’ve turned to a more typical release of depression and instrument homicide (and rob suicide) before the end of the week.