mirror2, originally uploaded by visualkaos.

Sometime around 1:30 a.m. last night — OK, this morning — I laid in bed, awake.
I had fallen asleep easily enough, early in fact. Before going to bed I had two healthy doses of Jameson which effectively landed me horizontal before 11 o’clock. But as it often happens when I drink, I fall asleep quickly but not deeply.
Soon enough, I was awakened by the sound of purring in my ear
Nighttime kitty. Needs petting.
After some stroking was given to one of our three attention-starved pets, the one who sleeps with us every night, I stared at the popcorn ceiling for a while and realized that it seemed pretty light in the room for 1:30 a.m.
I sat up in bed.
It was quiet. Peaceful, save for the droning of a grey and white ball of fur at my side and the soft swooshing of the ceiling fan.
Spooky stared at me.
I stared at Linda.
I quickly came to realize the perfection of that moment.
Moonlight seeped into the room. It flowed through the slats in the window shutters like a vanilla milkshake and spilled across the bed, painting my purring wife and kitty in blue-white pixie dust.
I sat for nearly an hour, honoring the moon, celebrating my existence in the universe and without her even knowing it, falling deeper in love with my sleeping wife.
I don’t remember laying back down or falling back asleep again. It’s as if at that moment, time stood still. The earth stopped spinning and let the moon flood my simple, humble, human bedroom.
In the morning when Linda gently woke me, as she does every day, with a coffee on my night stand and her cool hand on my face, I didn’t know if I dreamed it or not.
But after my first sip of black coffee I tasted something and checked that she didn’t put cream in it.
Hmmm, vanilla.

All of this of course has nothing to do with the photo above. I could hardly express with words that experience, let alone on film or CCD.
This person applying makeup backstage performs at The Queen Mary in Studio City.

Took this photo what is now about 2 years ago in a funky little club in Pioneer Square district of Seattle.

We got into to downtown kind of late, I think it was a Sunday night. Surprisingly, the streets were nearly vacant. We had some kind of wrappy thingy in a Lebanese take-out joint a few doors down from this club. Then we just walked around trying to find some live music in this part of town famous for its diverse mix of musical flavors for the tasting.

We found nearly none.

Then we walked into this joint and drank Rainier while these 16-year-olds with leg warmers on their arms and pants down around their knees and no shirts on exposing their skeletons and gobs of eye makeup slammed out massively distorted, 3-powerchord progressions from Gibson Flying V’s pumped through old Fender tube amps to the two-dozen or so children pumping their fists in the air.

Pretty awesome actually. We loved every minute.

Officially this is a test post of the SimpleFlickr plugin for WordPress. If I ever get this figured out I want to try to stick a tiny flash object in the template to display down at the bottom of the page or better yet, at the bottom of the sidebar, with some thumbnails that you can rollover and/or click to take you to sets in my Flickr photostream. Was that sentence long enough?

This is my first attempt at extending WordPress and there are some people out there who may read this (shut up Brian S) and giggle to themselves.

Yeah, it’s pretty simple but not for a code moroon. So here goes.

One of my favorite movie lines comes from the great 1980 film “Where the Buffalo Roam.” The film is very loosely based on a number of semi-autobiographical stories written by Hunter S. Thompson. In one scene Thompson, played by Bill Murray, has been kicked off the press plane while covering the 1972 presidential campaign of, presumably Richard Nixon.
However, after drugging a colleague he steals his clothes and credentials and manages to get on the crew plane. Later, while in disguise he finds himself in an airport bathroom when a group of secret service agents come in and carefully check the room and all the stalls. They leave and a moment later the candidate (Nixon,) played brilliantly by Rip Torn, walks in. Continue reading →