Ok, I have gone all suburban on your asses. I am now the proud owner of a Speed Queen Wagon Queen Family Washer/Dryer for 80 bucks. She is from at least the 70's and is one tough mo-fro. She washes with alacrity, practically beating the clothes into submission. Her Royal Highnesses are named "Bitch" and "Fucker" due to the joy of moving them out of the basement of a fellow Sugarhousington, and the placement in the ready-built washroom of...hmm..we don't have a name for this place yet. "Casement Window Heaven" sounds stupid. "Old Bricky" is too descriptive. How about "Sheila?" Yes. "The Sheila." You can even say it "Shieler," if you like.

In other news, house-mate Lucas's (and yes I prefer keeping the "s" on the apostrophe "s," it is, after all, only common-sensical, since it would be "Lucases" if the twit who decided to be all Frenchified and use an apostrophe to indicate our very much un-dropped "essess" sound in the grand-old English possessive case(funny to think that anyone who spoke English had an inferiority complex at any given time and felt the compulsion to apply much more respected and grand foreign grammar and punctuation rules to the language) band is playing at Club Ego. That's the old Shaggy's for those out of the know. Go see if you are in good old SLC. They are hard-core Jazzoriffic at its best. I might make it down, if I have the Queen Bitch Fucker put a smack down on a half-decade's worth of having-to-go-to-the-fucking-laudromats's extra laundry.

By the way, It has been a windy fucker here in pretty, great Utah. You can't see 10 miles in front of your face. They say it will snow tomorrow.

Stymie that right down to the gutter, home slice. Snow would be the Frank. That's a good thing, you know.

Yes, I am just making this language shit up. I am also toying with you and the extra-long parenthetical statements, but I do like hyphens, if you haven't noticed.

I didn't have nine bucks to buy a damn pin.

So how long ago was the show now? 11 days? Yes, 11 days.

Memory suits one well, I suppose, because the inadequacy of the Les Schwab Amphitheater was clear once we crossed the bridge over the Deschutes river. "This is the beer line," someone said, pointing to the line that snaked for at least 400 feet to a gate to the beer garden. Being accustomed to Utah's rather Draconian, nay childish liquor laws we acceded to the powers that be with little struggle, taking our due place in line paying little attention to the band that was opening for the Pixies, Death Cab for Cutie, aside from a general complaint that the every band should have the Flaming Lips open for them. (As our mutual friend Jason Jones had said, Death Cab for Cutie has a lot too much cutie and far too little death cab.)

The day had started in a similar way--waiting. I woke up, as I am accustomed, early. Now early in the Pacific Time Zone is even earlier than in the Mountain Time Zone, and it made me feel like a farmer, when I peeked out the Motel window to see the dark sky and random early morning traffic passing by. Early morning traffic usually consists of people in official-looking uniforms swilling coffee. People in official-looking uniforms and farmers seem to be the only people who get up early. Well that and the geriatric, but they don't have much choice now, do they?

Seeing that, I decided that it was far too early and being that I was supposed to be on a road trip and most certainly sleeping in, I decided to go back to bed. That, of course, was pointless as I lay in bed thinking of the trip and obsessing on various things such as my current relationship status and tossing around a bit, so I decided that, for the sake of my hotel-mates, it would be best if I just went out, got some breakfast and enjoyed being in Bend, Oregon. So I wandered out into Bend, with no goal in mind other than a cheap breakfast.

Of course when you are on the road, nothing is cheap. I accidentally or on purpose seemed to find the most expensive breakfast joint in Bend. Now it was pretty tasty, but $10 for an omelet is a bit too much, unless that omelet has gold flakes on it. This one only had feta and olives on it. They did have good bread though, and the waitress was quite attractive in a sullen, artistic kind of way. She had a great accent too. "Here is your fresh bread," she said huskily, and I half expected her to add "darlink" to the end of it.

My "Too Rich for You Cafe" experience put me in a decisively parsimonious mood, so I wandered down to the river and took pictures.

The river was seemed different down there from what we would cross on the fancy 10 person-wide foot bridge later that night. After around 20 minutes of waiting in line for the beer garden, we discovered that we were only in the line for the line for beer. Here the "Alcohol Monitors" checked our identity and gave us arm bands to clearly identify us as drinking fools. So there we were, back in line, waiting. At least we had a view of the river.

There were rapids in the part of the river I took pictures of that morning; as it meanders around the Les Schwab, however, the Deschutes is a placid river, suitable for floating and listening to the concert for free. This is what we were told by the waitress at my second breakfast after my traveling companions finally rolled their lazy asses out of bed. She was incredibly slow, but fun to talk to since she seemed quite hip on all things bend. Jeff even mentioned the art program at the college, and she agreed that it was a decent program. She had quit school, but was planning on taking it up again soon.

So to stick to the original plan, we wanted to take a gander at the local ski area, Mount Bachelor. There we road the chair lift half way up the mountain and drank wine in a thicket of scruffy, victims-of-vulcanization trees. It was more waiting, but without the lines.

It was nice to finally buy the beer--even though it was the normal concert beer prices; but you could buy two at once, so it did preclude the need to head back into the mass of people for a while. Now, as many of the ancients have noted,drinking beer leads to the need to get rid of it, and this lead to the second problem and set of lines at the Les Schwab. For all the hundreds of people they had in the beer garden there were 9 porta-johns. Nine.

Nine. I'll type it once more so it can sink in: NINE. This, of course, led people crazed with the need to urinate to find bushes or buildings or trash cans to relieve themselves in. Thus the friendly neighborhood Alcohol Monitors morphed into Pee Monitors--continually busting those who decided to let their coarser nature rule their common sense.

I, however, waited in line, and consequently missed the opening songs by the Pixies. I don't know if it was the beer or the excruciating need to urinate, but I took it in stride, laughing at the tweakers running away from the tweaked Pee Monitors.

So that was the set up; a weird strange let-down of line waiting, and little satisfaction.

After the porta-john fandango, I lost track of Nathan and Jeff. Jeff managed to loose a shoe and picked up a girl who forcefully worked her way up to the stage.

Jeff managed to get his shoe back, but his concert girlfriend went the other way, but not before he gave her his number. She calls him regularly these days, but as she lives in Portland, it is a bit difficult to build on the relationship.

I didn't gain a concert girlfriend, but I did manage to dance with some women who exclaimed "Why is no one dancing!" The pushed into the crowed to get closer to the stage about half-way through, and I lost them.

I suppose the house warming was a success; although it seemed to work in reverse as we now have more booze than when we began. Don't ask me how that happened. I played my trombone for the first time in years--badly I might add; but I was toasted and it seemed like a good idea. There was a really good trombonist here; and I fear my out-of-practice overall badness disturbed him.

Oh yeah, pictures.