is here: The Gulf Scream

check it out!

thanks,
-k

current readings: "send me" by patrick ryan
current conditions: warm

today has been pretty great. went to i-i-i's to show allison t. the pup. then went to the original pancake house w/ helen and garrett. then did some more work on my bedroom, which is now almost finished. then set up my tables for the imagination festival (after a last minute call, it seems that for the 3rd year in a row i'll be teaching an art workshop [one for kids tomorrow and one for adults on sunday], [come hang out one of those days in linn park, if you are able]). i also made a trip to charlamagne records and found a couple pieces of vinyl treasure (why didn't anyone ever tell me about the lovin' spoonful?). also, tonight i'll be seeing "grindhouse" again in trussville with brandon and garrett. so i guess that means life is all fun today with little room for much else.

but the real reason for this post is this: i am in love with a tiny woman named juanita mi niña con el corazón de mi madre (i THINK that's here name, anyway, there's a strong chance i'm leaving part of it out). if you haven't seen her yet, you should come over and do so. currently she's living with me and we're sleeping in the same bed. mhmm. even though she pees on the floor quite frequently, she's still pretty cool.

(photos were going to go right here, but photobucket is giving me problems)

a hero of mine died tonight.

current conditions: warm, delightful

updates:
a) this week i’ve been working not 3, not 6, but FOUR different jobs! this has consisted of 1) cabinet-building, 2) u.o., 3) the bookstore and 4) cleaning an office building (while ipodding high school jams). this last job is in place of mr. brandon while him and brooke make vacation with one another. somehow i haven’t fallen over just yet from all this madness, though i've come mighty close.

b) as of late i’ve been reading mcsweeney’s and working on writing a lot before bedtime. it’s good to know my macbook purchase is being put to good use.

c) i've washed my car thoroughly, yet lightning bolts of pollen have deliberately made war upon my car. and just after my sinuses had fended them off.

d) the triceratops album “versus the K-T boundary*” is complete and all six hundred members will gather tomorrow to hear the final product. i don’t know if eventually it will be coming out on a label of sorts, but we hope this might be the case. all i know for sure is when someone says it’s time to bone, you can count on me to show up, basically.

*recorded in scenic decatur, AL, members played the following instruments during studio sessions:

stew: vocals, tympani, snare, bassoon, $8,500.00 accordian, 3 ft. harmonica w/ wheels
andrew: yodeling arrangements
stephen: forest of hair, axe (body spray, AS OPPOSED TO wood chopping tool and alternate name for heavy metal guitar)
jeanette: sex appeal (intentional)
luke: didgeridoo and other indigenous instruments of southwestern “aussie” origin
bekah: scrabble, gatorade belches, voice of eleven thousand angels
booth: studio banter, voice of twelve thousand demons
josh: leprechaun whistle
myself: BONING!

e) somewhat related: i’m looking for an old trombone that i can strip with lacquer thinner and cover in red paint, in honor of both the triceratops song “red bone,” my playing songs with redharp, and also as an attempt to make myself look cool when playing what people have referred to in the past as a “nerdy marching band instrument.” hyuck hyuck. just kidding. but if anyone finds a relatively cheap one, let me know (because i know everyone likes searching for cheap trombones on the internet when things in life are slow. right?).

that is all for now. bed is calling. night night.

current readings: "a confederacy of dunces" by john kennedy toole, and "iron john" by robert bly

i am in a state of utter bliss at the moment. my life has been pointing to right now for a long while. i am happy, satisfied, content. allow me a moment to really take this in. okay. there we are. fro serious.

i had a good time in montana. it was freezing, snowy and windy (17 below was the coldest i noticed). went snowboarding on big mountain (actual name of mountain) 2 days in a row. bundled up in layers of clothing and still cold, found a little log cabin hut area on the top of this big mountain where folks can warm up and have a beer. (*note on alcohol in montana: they never card anyone when drinking. seriously. when you go to a restaraunt, the waiter'll give you a to-go cup for your wine to drink on the highway. no joke. i guess it's rarely abused and there's hardly any cars to collide with.) so yeah, the ride from the top of big mountain to the bottom is about 3 miles. my leg muscles became extremely sore. had a bad fall into my step-broheem that proved to be temporarily detrimental to my right elbow. also went snowmobiling, watched wildlife, read books, wrote some pen pal postcards, ate food, etc. all in all a good time. on the trip out i had an unexpected 9 hour layover in denver colorado. called up stacy allen (who's family lives in the area) and asked her to tell me where to go. got a bus ticket and went to 16th avenue where i bought some wonderful retarded things (i.e. pacman collector's book, slackers lp, hat to keep my head warm.). went to a great 3-story bookstore called "tattered cover," and spent a while looking at some books. to my dismay christopher moore was doing a signing THE NEXT DAY but not while i was in there hanging out. the bastard. i would've loved to have met him, though i've only read the first 5 to 20 pages of a ton of his books and then put each of them down (a result of my apathy, not his writing). anyway, now i'm back home and hanging out with friends and starting a new job and life is wonderful. allow me to be cheesy and say right now i truly feel blessed in almost every aspect.

current conditions: 42 degrees, about to rain
current readings: "jayber crow" by wendell berry

this is the first book in a while that has absolutely blown me away. everything else i've been putting back on the shelf or returning to the bookstore before i reach the end. but this is a novel that describes life with perfect beauty and depth without getting sappy. it's about a barber and his life from birth until death, his living in a farm community, his parents dying when he's 10, his then-guardians dying when he's 16, and everything happening afterwards that i haven't quite gotten to yet. the story moves quick and has yet to drag, though the cover art made me assume otherwise. i sort of wonder how someone can churn out of nothing something this interesting. after years of reading the gospels, Jayber Crow believes “Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one,” and that “for any sin, we all suffer. that is why our suffering is endless. it is why God grieves and Christ’s wounds are still bleeding.” anyway, he finds life in the small town satisfying and perfect- something often and easily forgotten by myself. very cool.

anyway, the snowboarding trip to sugar mountain, NC was a blast. got closer to freinds. i tried a few jumps and recieved a few bruises. we took a ton of detours on the way home. if i ever return to what i once did, i may decide to post some photos here of some of the adventures mallory, seth and i had on the ride home (sans the exposed 35mm roll that got yanked out of my camera when i opened my door and saw it fall on the ground at a gas station). at one point we took a wrong turn and accidentally ended up in virginia, and then figured we could turn the whole thing into a photo op (i.e. UFO video store, buying VA lottery tickets, finding some thrift treasures, etc.). i needed a getaway, though sometimes i believe my whole life is a getaway, in a good way. do you smell what i'm stepping in?

red harp, june avenue and preston are playing this friday at bottletree. it's a $8 benefit for invisible children, an organization that sponsors kids in northern uganda. also, we're playing a thing feb. 12 (also at bottletree) for a band i've long listened to called koufax (that now includes members of the get up kids). needless to say, that should be fun and should make me plenty nervous.

oh, and cary norton takes photos that look like this:

someone once told me, "if you want to be popular, just host a party at your place and make sure that everyone you know is invited. and when they come, make sure you've got plenty of drinks and finger foods awaiting their disposal."
well, these days i'm a tad broke, so you'll have to help me out with the latter if i come through with the former. and then i can be forever popular and popular forever.

soooo..

tomorrow night - 12/31/06
new year's eve party
@ my condo
9:00ish until ?
bring food, beer or a some of both
no people, ipods or animals will be turned away from the door

mapquest this addy for directions: 3350 Altamont Rd. D-24
(in highland park, if you head up niazuma and take a slight left on altamont, you'll see a parking lot for altamont patio condominiums on the left. D-24 is on the right upstairs.)

i have a feeling that '07 is going to make '06 look like a big sissy who didn't get picked for kickball during recess, and so '06 tried not to let anyone see himself in the locker room crying about the whole thing until '07 finally came up and punched '06, leaving '06 knocked unconscious on the muddy tile floor with a bloody jaw and his gym shorts pulled up so high that that you could see his tiny butt crack.

my name is kevin and i love to play the twangdoodle.

current conditions: bearable, mild, heavenly (though being spent indoors, sadly enough)

current readings: "what should i do with my life" by po bronson

current evening plans: bottletree show & bekah's christmas party.. anyone going?

TONIGHT AT BOTTLETREE
---------------
THE APPLESEED CAST
HEROIC ME
RED HARP

8BUX
DOORS-7/SHOW-7:30
ALL AGES


and also, i'll be boning times two at this one (friday):

the plumbing has been messed up at my place for a while, and to anyone who might've been over the other night or some other time and couldn't use my facilities, i apologize. someone living around my condo had taken it on themselves to 'fix' the water problem, and somehow messed it up for everyone (i'm no expert, so will refrain from explaining). but now, the plumbing folks came out to fix it, and the water pressure has never been better. this morning was like taking a shower in heaven!

click "here" for quotation mark abuse



(via dr. frank's blog)

weather: near perfect
readings: "grace walk" by steve mcvey, then "pnin" by nabokov. had to put down "areas of my expertise." reason being, it was absolutely hilarious except i'd have to read through boring charts and less-funny stuff to get to those redeeming moments. (what are your thoughts, cary?) the "grace walk" book has a hideously tacky, baby blue-and-pink cloudy cover, but matt b. told me to pick it up despite the appearance, and i'm so glad he did. it's all about being a new creation in christ, how our old self is dead and how we shouldn't be plagued in feeling that we'll never live up to our superhuman expectations we put on ourselves. it makes you want to live better when you realize god isn't up there with a dissapointed face, saying try harder. very simply stated, and recommended for anyone that thinks they might be into it.

i also started watching the beatles anthology 1,000,977 hour long series on my netflix. i love it, but i'm waiting to get to the moptop's later years, when i don't feel obligated to sit through their numerous tv appearances of "i wanna hold your hand."

readings: just finished "ella minnow pea" by mark dunn.. about to start "the areas of my expertise" by john hodgman
weather: blisteringly cold (but at least my lips don't chap up like they did on the bus ride home in grade school)

"ella minnow pea" was enjoyable, and has aided in helping me overcome my slow-reading slump. this gal employed at the daily cup walks by my cove daily asking, "so have you read it yet?" to which i always reply "no." but when she asks tomorrow, i can finally answer "yes." it's about the fictional island town off the coast of charlotte north carolina called nollop. the council leaders there believe certain letters of the alphabet should be removed, and if a citizen is to use a word containing them, they should be publicly flogged and/or banished. pretty good stuff, and strongly recommended.

i'm ebay-bidding for a trombone mute that shall give me a kind of jazzyish sound in red harp, so we'll see. as far as the homemaking of instruments goes, not much has progressed lately, but lately i've been picking up some extra bucks doing carpentry work with michael and seth. it's tougher than selling books, but i feel like a true man afterwards. i'm sort of over substitute teaching. the kids make me feel special and loved, but they walk all over me. so i won't be answering many calls anymore asking me to come in and sub on x, x and x days of next month.

my sister christy, her husband bill and my niece alyse (a.k.a. uncle kevin's "best friend") are all coming up for a couple days for thanksgiving, which i'm definitely looking forward to. (thanks mallory for your house-cleaning help.)

this post is a tad scattered, but so is my brain. but does anyone look at livejournal anymore?

i've been staying scattered working on some art-ish projects lately, such as learning the keys, painting with oils, editing the novel and.. uhh, i don't remember the other thing.

come to this 'save the cave' benefit tomorrow night:

Red Harp
Kiss Me at the Gate
The Good Fight
Afore Notation
Heavenly Days

@cave9

[organ antics]

current conditions: cold
current reading: "amazing grace: the story of america's most beloved song" by steve turner

last night this place was the most hoppin' spot in town.
and now it's the boring-est.
can somebody come hang out with me, and maybe bring a smoothie?

oh yeah..

on a lighter note, i'll be playing trombone (AND KEYS.. gasp!) for red harp this friday night at cave9. we'll be first.

i keep talking to friends who found that last post, uhh, interesting. anyway, lately i've been doing a lot of soul searching, and my thoughts usually ramble off, and probably don't really go anywhere, which is normal for me i guess. but it still seems a little weird to post thoughts i'm having on LJ. it's particularly weird to go back and read later- if not the next day then a week or month down the road- and feel a little lame about what was said or how it came out. but anyway, i was around some older folks and had to get my cluttered thoughts out somehow. and the online journal just happened to be the first available target. it also hit me later that my grandparents in their younger years moved around a bunch too, until they did enough and got old enough to stay in one spot and watch their descendents move around a lot. but, my point for saying any of this at all i guess is to say that i wasn't talking about anyone in specific. it was more an observation of my own tendencies of needing to 'move around' and change things about myself constantly- not really location as much as hobbies, habits, political leanings, friends, etc.

in the past several months i've put a ton of pressure on myself to 'find a career' (it makes my brain vomit just saying those words- if a brain can even vomit, and lately i think i've been shown that yes, a brain can definitely vomit). so i've been working on the novel here and there, painting, teaching kids, selling books, not really taking pictures though sometimes thinking about maybe getting out and taking pictures sometime- in addition to just obsessing of where my life is heading while working to make enough money to buy time and decide the direction in which to go. i guess the main pressure in deciding what to do comes from (a) being a little miserable doing the jobs i have now, and (b) being broke doing job after job that doesn't satisfy me, although with both of these things i realize i need to find patience, trust God, yada yada.

i always believed growing up i'd do something creative/artistic for a living, and then i kinda gave up for a little while on that, but recently i decided yeah, there's no way around it, i was born to only do creative things and nothing else, that i can't and won't be happy doing anything else, that God put these desires and longings in my heart for a reason, but i still just don't know which creative pursuit(s) to put all my energy in. i always had this idea that it would've worked itself out by now, before the age of 24, and i guess it still will eventually, though i just don't see how. but maybe that's the point, since the future is such a mystery and only God really knows.

alright so enough babbling. i did what i said i wouldn't and wrote this all out on my mother f-ing livejournal. i know i probably shouldn't press 'update' and expose this junk on the internet. but i'm doing it. i'll regret it later but here it goes.

i'm updating this from my ma-maw's computer room a.k.a. the 'yellow room.' this is the room i've been sleeping in for years and years ever since i reached an age too old for a cradle (if i remember correctly). but tonight, with fewer guests, i'm moving into the bigger, more comfy and adult-ish 'red bedroom.' (note: the rooms in my grandparents' house are named by the color of the carpet in them, and it's more or less assumed who will sleep in which room after years and years of habit of sleeping here during holidays). the appearance hasn't really changed at all since i was a little kid, and that's one of the reasons it's remained it's own kind of awesome and why i love it so much. when the outside world continues to get so drastically different, in here it hardly changes at all, much like i'm sure many other grandparent-homes do. anyway, the familiarity is nice, and i wonder why our generation, myself included, feels like we have to hop around so much from city to city and home to home? is there something huge wrong with us? tonight tons of family came over and we ate several billion things and drank just as many billion gallons of sweet tea, and i'm significantly stuffed. i always wonder how things can remain pretty much perfect somewhere like here, yet still i've come to feel a little more at home in a crazy city like birmingham. it's a very strange thing, and the biggest reason i can find is in my youthfulness i've found it necessary to stretch out and figure out 'what life is supposed to be' or whatever, so to speak. anyway, these choices are good things and i'm not regretful; i just hope and pray one day me and a little lady can have a bunch of kids and pets and maybe stay in the same comfy house while years turn into many more years, until a family of our own will always have a place to return to where there's stability, good food, corny jokes and several different unmatching colors of carpet throughout.

*if you've stopped reading by now out of boredom or annoyance, i don't blame you. i never read journal entries this long, so why should i expect that from you?

anyway, the rest of the trip as i remember it has gone like this: my mom bought me a few pairs of jeans on wednesday, then matthew and i went to the beach yesterday where we went swimming, ate fish tacos, rode bikes (mine had a flat- so my legs had to work pretty hard), watched 'the office,' and slept until we had to drive home in time for me to ride with my mom out to winter haven (here), on the way eating 'hungry howie's (which is one of my tampa faves). matthew's having a BBQ tomorrow night with a few familiar people and a bunch of not-familiar-at-all (to me) people and on sunday morning we'll head to his church which i've been led to believe will be another exciting experience.

the new john green book is wonderful. it's miraculous to almost be finished, being how slow i am at the whole reading thing. when i get back in AL, i wanna purchase the new mewithoutyou album and something by that regina spektor chick. which of hers is the 'one to get?'

love you journal,
kev

sooooooooo..

what have i been up to?

-well, cary n. and i have been watching LOST season 1 like every night, and tonight we're finishing the rest.

-i just cleaned up a big puddle of pee off the bathroom floor. the toilet seat was soaked too. so i guess that proves people at the bookstore can sometimes be just as gross as those at the elementary school. basically, that sucks, unless in which case they were handicapped, then i'd feel bad for saying anything.

-so anyway, i was surfing through the internet waves to look for an old book illustration to blow up gigantic at kinko's and put on my bedroom wall. my bedroom so far is the only room that hasn't gotten to look and feel comfy and liveable at my place, so i'm doing my best to get it there now.
in the process of finding this picture i ended up ordering too much kids books off the internet, in addition to the three beach boys cd's i purchased last week. maybe i'll get in a fight on my way out the door tonight and lose all my teeth, so the tooth fairy can leave me some money to pay for all this.

-i just learned (from brandon) the danielson famile documentary is playing at sidewalk this weekend. does anyone know when? if it'll ever come out on dvd, i dunno, so this might be the only chance.

-starting to read john green(the "looking for alaska" guy)'s new book, "an abundance of katherines". nothing else has done it for me lately, except some puritan prayers from matty b i've been reading each morning. check 'em out here: http://www.oldlandmarks.com/puritan.htm/MeetingGod

-next weekend i'll be in tampa. i may actually bring the novel along, and try to get a little work done.

that's about all that comes to mind that of what i feel comfortable putting on the lj. i feel kinda like a showboat. or maybe a showgoat.