On the Twenty-fourth Day of 2025…

…I sat for meditation for a seventh consecutive day. And then the rest of the day is a little bit of a blur, not because it was especially busy, but rather, because it was not busy, to the point where only three things are memorable about the day: 1. the aforementioned meditation streak, 2. the sitting in my brother’s frigid house for an hour and a half while a realtor and a potential interested party checked the place out, and 3. the SuperWave gig at the Tigardville Station Pub and Grill. Of the three events, only the third one there will stand any kind of test of time in the old memory banks, so I will describe it as best as I can. An old neighborhood pub, the Tigardville Station is nestled squarely in downtown Tigard, Main Street. Clearly a throwback institution, and a testament perhaps to the storied history of the place, it seems to be the oldest surviving business, housed in the oldest building in the downtown area, and is surrounded by new infrastructure, a seemingly brand new city, north and south of it, or east and west, depending on your understanding of the compass. It’s a cozy place and has the vibe of any old school neighborhood bar. It has a generous stage for music, with (surprise, surprise) an actual drum riser! I wore my new yellow pants with my new yellow drums and a black shirt with my Pacman tie. Purple high top Converse. We had a lovely time. It was unquestionably a good gig. Lots of enthusiastic listeners and dancers, most of whom, stayed almost all night through nearly four hours of music. Four hours of music is a lot of music. As I get older I become less and less enthusiastic about playing for four hours. But I’m getting better at pacing myself, underplaying as much as I can, focusing on playing well and less on being flashy (I have never been all that flashy; can’t twirl a stick to save my life), and these things, and not drinking, have made the effort more manageable. But I can tell you about two things that went wrong last night–about the worst imaginable things for a singing drummer. I couldn’t see my music stand for shit. I still have lyric cheat sheets, even for songs I know really well, and I couldn’t see those lyrics in the dark. Happily, I made it through without a hitch. I know those songs even better than I thought I did. I would love to ditch that music stand altogether, and yet, I hold on. The second thing to go wrong, more seriously by a wide margin, is that my bass drum pedal broke twice! Once in the middle of the set the chain came away from the beater-pulley-thing. A quick 4 minute break and a drum key remedied the situation. But then the chain broke a second time, coming away on this occasion from the opposite end, where the chain meets the pedal! This happened in the middle of “Love Shack,” so I played the bass drum parts on the floor tom like a caveman and thus got through the song. Our dear guitar player Dave, bless him, did not even notice that something was amiss. That must have been some pretty convincing floor-tom-as-bass-drum work! Luckily, “Love Shack” was the last song in the second set, so I had a fifteen minute break to fix it (with the help of most of my bandmates) and eat a Caesar salad before we had to play again. The Tigardville Station asks bands to play from 7 to 11, as humane as a four hour show could be, so I was home early, shortly after midnight. I was starving. So I ate and listened to Arooj Aftab in the kitchen. I got to bed around 2:00 in the morning.