June trip to Washington part 2

Centralia! We keep coming back here because it's a nice getaway. A little historic, a little homey, a little homely. The boy loves loves loves the trains that come through all the time. Things to do:

Insert Coin. Free play Out Run, Frogger, Tron, and a totally compelling electromechanical baseball game with what might be my favorite lever in the world. Tbe pizza is pretty good (and sourdough-crust, which works better for my stomach), and they have lots of beers and ciders in a self-serve format that enables teensy pours. The boy makes us come back two nights in a row and I'm OK with it.

I got my hair cut at the beauty college with a very personable young student. The haircut takes a lot longer than my usual haircut, but it's kind of OK?! After a while we both stop talking and it's nice just to sit in silence and take in the hubbub of all the students and the snipping.

The boy and I walk over to the trails on Seminary Hill while JL gets her nails done, also at the beauty college. Nice little hike right in town. Some of the trails are overgrown in a way that is thrilling: 

There's a lot of shopping. The TV/appliance repair place is closing down, so I buy this awesome Quasar TV repair box for ten bucks. It will be a great home for my Language Master, I think.

Night walks to the community college parking lot to charge our vehicle. Eerie but also cozy. Nice to get enough juice to come home for like two bucks. 

Of course we visit the Centralia Rollerdrome. What a place. Long may it roll. H finally gets sort of comfortable on wheels, though he'd rather bounce in the bouncy house.

Soundtrack to the Centralia portion of the trip: the new Slippers album, Slippers 08. Very satisfying stuff, kind of in the same no-waste jangle ballpark as Jeanines but less depressed. There are good surprises. The song "Sunday Morning" feels vaguely familiar, and then it hits me that she is almost certainly riffing off the Margo Guryan song of the same name. Then I realize that I bought that same album on my previous Centralia trip at the Amazoomer returns store. Crazy!

June trip to Washington part 1

Saturday morning: We take off for Astoria and walk around. En route, we realize we forgot to bring a hoodie, so we pull into Longview. Wait is that a rummage sale? Wait are those aguas frescas? We stop by. No hoodie for boyo, but my pepino and chia agua fresca is delightful and the proceeds go to possibly the saddest possible cause. We find a hoodie at a nearby kids resale and get out of Longview. Some other time.

We walk around Astoria after eating hippie food. I see a tall staircase and I want to climb it, but I am vetoed by the other folks in the car. Some other time. We walk around toy shops, piers, record stores. We go across the long bridge to Long Beach.

Lots of people in my various orbits have always been talking up the Sow Whess Ter Lodge in Seaview. We finally found a weekend availability in one of the cabins (not one of their vintage trailers, for better or worse). Pretty lovely place and scene, full of various beautiful hipsters from all over. I'm a little out of place as an Old, but it's still fun. Good records to borrow and play in the cabin, lots of Mississippi Records stuff. Toni Basil's Word of Mouth. The mosquitoes are bad, but not Iowa bad.

I catch a show in the lodge by Portland artist Bijoux Cone. The duo are trying to do everything all at once with multiple instruments and a film projector and everything breaks down and starts buzzing. I've been there, and I feel a weird nostalgia. They play drone with fuzz bass for the second set and it feels good. 

The beach is great. It's a beach. My kid really likes it. Seeing people driving on the beach mystifies me, but we all kind of take a sick fascination in watching multiple people get stuck. I really like the long paved trails up the hill from the beach and regret not bringing my folding bike.

We head to Centralia next on the long lonely drive out on highway 6 through Pe Ell. We stop to get some drinks at the mart in that small town. The display on the cash register has a multilingual "Best Little Store in the Whole Wide World" or such on the screen in multiple languages that flashes up, just long enough for me to recognize that the Arabic isn't displaying correctly. I contemplate what would happen if I were to mention this, but end up deciding it might be better to keep it to myself. 

Catching up with June 2026

I've been playing "baseball" in the park with boyo. We have one of those foam bats and balls. He is still learning, but he seems to enjoy it. Not to the point of wanting to play actual organized sports (thank goodness) but to the point where other kids will come over and join. It all feels very wholesome.

Played a Cosmonox show at the Snug this weekend. I liked the venue's grody old-school Portland energy. When we got there, there was an unexpected early show (note to self: should book an early show there) with some very young people playing enthusiastic ramshackle pop music. I enjoyed it and felt like a senior citizen. Anyway, the late show came on and it was pretty uniformly great - people playing feedback cello and drums/sampler, us playing on the squawky card box, a guitar looper doing things that were actually interesting, and of course the latest evolution of the Vardaman Ensemble. The sound was particularly gnarly, but that has never stopped me, as you may know.

On the way home from the school bus this morning, crows were yelling at me. Caw, caw, all the way down the street! I pick some raspberries from the bush. (side note: all of our garden projects and fruit trees are succeeding in a way that makes me worry about this year's fire season) Then I turn around and a coyote is trotting along with a dead goose in its jaws. 

Speaking of senior citizens: If your Apple //c from junior high school is still chugging along (mine is), may I recommend to you the A2CDVI HDMI adapter from Joe's Computer Museum? It's a cheap way to get amazing image quality out of your forty-year-old computer as you continue to make album covers on it and play Total Replay during down moments.

 

Souled American

Public service announcement: If Souled American is playing in your town, see them. It looks like they're swinging through California, then the upper Midwest, then the Northeast.

I caught their show last night in Portland. I had seen them several years ago and wasn't sure what to think. It had been in some rock bar (Berbati's Pan, wow, how long has it been) and they had gone on late so I was halfway in dreamworld. But last night - hooray for early shows - I was on the right wavelength. I sat down in the balcony and after doing a few nervous crosswords, the music stopped and the band started playing. I could feel the universe's frames per second rate change. Slow, deliberate, human, stately, a little incomprehensible. 

I had always admired Joe Adducci's fretless bass playing on record, but it's magnificent to see it live and try to figure out what makes it work. I think by the end of the night I had deduced some basic patterns, but I wasn't close to cracking the code. There were things he did that did not appear to even make sound, yet seemed to be crucial. 

They had an "elegantly understated" t-shirt that just had their band name/wordmark on it in quarter-inch letters where the pocket would be on a pocket-T:

Souled american

I admire the commitment to minimalism, but I saw myself having to explain the spelling and capitalization choices to normies and decided to steer clear.  Kind of the opposite of the band shirts I wear the most, which don't even have a legible band name. And ultimately a band t-shirt should distract from my dad bod, not emphasize it. 

Rock Mix (Focus)

YouChoob Music in all of its wisdom promised me a "Rock Mix - Focus" that contained Rllrbll, Eternal Tapestry, Pere Ubu, some other stuff that I could conceivably use to promote focus. I click on it and get this:

I suppose throwing my speakers out the window when the Doors come on might result in a sort of focus?

The Minor Thirds / April recap

Friend of Tape Mountain Chris P./The Minor Thirds has a new single/suite/epic/minepic, a five-in-one called Reckless. I always like when Chris goes a little dark and this is no exception.

Things I did in April and early May:

Went to Seaside on the beach. I'd never been into Seaside, thinking it a little declasse, but looking at it with fresh eyes, it's compact and fun, the sort of place that's fun to walk around for a long time with a kid. The kid got a stuffed octopus. I was very pleased that he has assigned the cephalopod they/them pronouns.

Bought wine at a yard sale. I take a particular forbidden pleasure in buying weird wine at yard sales. This wine was much less weird and old (and spoiled) than some of my previous finds but still pretty tasty.

Played Dragon Quest IX. So twee, so silly. Lots of opportunities to dress up little ciphers in silly outfits. Run around doing repetitive tasks while riding the exercise bike. And even by DQ localization standards, this one is bonkers. Any game that shamelessly spits out lines like this is A-OK by me:

Success! The Top-Flight Knight Fight Quest has been transgressed with finesse!

Hung out at L.L. Stub Stewart State Park and hiked with the family in early spring. So nice. Everything endlessly blooming and budding. Critters aplenty for JL to gawk at. Need to head back there.

Went to a PTA convention (!) Was delighted to see that the only other bicyclist at the convention was our old housemate (and JL's friend for decades) James.

Logo parade: Telesecundaria

 For Guatemalan online middle school education. I like the CRT bump in the back!