So, it turns out that the podcast only shoots out one track at a time, so for those of you subscribed to that thingy, I’m reposting the demo version of ‘Up Into The Blue’ here, since it didn’t make it to your magical downloads.

For those of you who are thinking, what exactly are you speaking of, I will repost here the commentary I made about the song below the track…:

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Here are a couple of versions of “Up Into The Blue” off of ‘Midnight Door’. The first is the album version, and the second is a rare demo cut.

Up Into The Blue is yet another song where the imagery of my Catholic upraising plays a prominent role… this idea of absolution for our wrongs in an almost whimsical way, of waiting for the holy parade pervades this song. In some sense I feel like this song is about my older brother. We were inseparable growing up, and the last verse of the song especially reflects my strong memories of being best friends, and perhaps the extend rumination at the end of the song is a meditation on the things that have changed since then… not in a bad way, just the pulse of life gets quicker, things get more confusing as you grow up. Obviously this is a fairly emotional song!

I like how the demo gives a version of the song that is a bit more whimsical and a quicker tempo. It is a very different perspective

The first track off my first solo album (1997) is available now over at the page for

One Sung Over

The whole album will be available soon on the site for registered users.

By Bruce Springsteen.

Best rock song ever? Arguably.

This morning the wildfire’s smoke has blown down from the mountains and into our valley here in Nevada City. The sun rose red and wearily I made the coffee and the protein shake and headed out the door.
Stay tuned here this week for a couple of things:
One Sung Over, my very first album, will be available to those of you who register (create a user name, password easy, 5 seconds).
The first video off of ‘Midnight Door’ – “Closure”

Last night I put together a stack of 20 or so packages to send off to various places my music. From Sub-Pop to Filter Magazine. I’m confident that if only people give the album a listen, it will catch people’s ears.

A long weekend, spent some hours watching Shakespeare play (“The Taming Of The Shrew”), some hours working on video for closure, many hours on packages, and other hours on catching up on much needed rest.

Harvesting tomatoes from my garden, making salsa. Life is good when you do that.

Currently reading :
The Shadow of the Wind
By Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Release date: 25 January, 2005

Moonrise 1 2,
originally uploaded by haikuluke.

so last night I went up to the side of a mountain to check out the eclipsed moon rising full. It was a subtle effect, by then the eclipse had mostly passed.

I sat on my tailgate and checked my compass because I couldn’t even tell which way was east, exactly.

It was nice though to run into a fine fellow who was an amateur astronomer, he had a lot of fascinating stuff to say about telescopes, gravity, quantum physics.

Could be on my way to something, could not, you never know.

Change has been prevalent, and yet, as it is with most people, its not fast enough, big enough, rich enough, glamorous.

But I have a new job. Any kind of job at this point is somewhat amazing… and you know, it feels alright. I like to not feel like crying everytime I have to cough up rent. Rent is horrible. Especially in this town. But now I just throw my money away happily. Maybe that isn’t an improvement. But either way, jobs allow that to happen. Yay!

South Yuba River State Park – October – 1,
originally uploaded by haikuluke.

Up late last night, endlessly reading Kafka On The Shore, last book read was ‘no country for old men’ by cormac mccarthy and before that ‘the first horseman’ by john case. well, a strange mix of literature, a strange obsession with reading lately. an escape within an escape i suppose.

On the road out to Bridgeport State Park, only to find the road is closed. No troubles, drove down and past the signs and found a nice spot cropped out looking over the river.

On a sunny day the sound of the distant river moves from one ear to the other without pattern yet hypnotizing.

I spent the afternoon lying on my tailgate, listening, watching, thinking, absorbing the sun, reading, and taking pictures.

I’m such a loner lately, but that’s ok I think for now. Its how I’ve always been. nothing new there. Sometimes I think I just need to appreciate that so that I can appreciate my friends and friends yet to be. Or just so I can appreciate my own identity, and find solace in that. I think there is nothing wrong with a little solace in that. I wish I had more time to put into it, and that more people found that to be valuable in some way.

Tonight just letting time flow around me. Very quiet. Back and forth between books and wine and this computer.

October time.

Dracaena – 4,
originally uploaded by haikuluke.

The Yankees and Tigers are on the TV, I don’t know why I’m letting myself sit here watching it, but I am and I never do so that’s that. Last night’s beer bottles on the table. Lunch? Bread and cheese.

Kate left on the road today to go visit family in Sebastopol and then to head up to Portland to visit that fair city. Her sister and nephew are along for the ride.

And so I’m on my own in Nevada City for the week. I’ve got an album to finish, things to work on, but I will miss Kate. I’m a lucky guy with her in my life and I feel that when she goes.

Tea Shop – 5,
originally uploaded by haikuluke.

Those who know me lately know that I’m: anxious AND i drink a lot of coffee. You could reverse those and claim cause and effect. Either way. BUT all these things in my life are changing slightly at the moment.

For instance: I am drinking tea a lot, and I feel like it is different entirely.

I have a job to go to today and that is also different entirely

it is really cold

i feel that yes i have too much yet to get done, but the pressure is lightened.

TEA is good for you. I like white teas and oolong, probably because they are expensive and it makes me think they are fancy.

I took a lens off my old (real) camera and taped it backwards to my digital camera. I don’t know why I did this, I just wanted to see what might happen. Well, it kind of turned the whole thing in to a magnifying glass of sorts and hence, the macro pictures are amazing. that’s all you can do with a second lens taped to your camera, but nonetheless, its neat.

So this is it, checking in after all these months.

How is it life? It changes every day. Right now I’m sorting through old files and hard drives, trying, vainly, to get it in order. I want to bring order to things, to make them brighter.

I’ve been sort of in Nevada City for a while now, having my way and not. Suddenly I’m feeling stuck. As if too much has gone on without going on.

We went to Samoa, and felt the humid air, watched my brother get married, celebrated, fretted, felt what it was to be in tropical paradise with a lot of questions hanging around your life. Questions I can’t even relate here.

But they seem resolved.

Kate is in the kitchen making pumpkin pie, zucchini bread, and broccoli casserole. Couldn’t get any better really. The air is pushed around by the fan, Summer outside, as usual. Music in the making, the album sits on the hard drive. Couldn’t get any better really.

And yet, I’m feeling the missing of a vital part of my life. The part that feels that I know what I’m doing, that I’m in any kind of control whatsoever. This time here in this town has been up and down, but never really rapidly toward anything… each new alleyway seems to end up a dead end, back here, wondering what to do, and what I’m doing, with my self.

I’m so desperate for decent work, for a bit of cash, for direction in my wanderings. I long to have a bit more crystallized beauty in my mind and waking life, and I’m tired of having nightmares, regularly.

I’m tired of feeling old, older, and not feeling that it is leading anywhere. I long for the spiritual, and the practical. I long to be released from a long dry spell.

So here is to it. nothing new to report really, just letting it get down and out. letting it be where it will.

May. Day. Its that between Spring and Summer thing, where truly there is reason to celebrate, if you are into the sun at all.

Things have indeed changed here, finally, too long on the waiting list quickly evaporating.

I’ve found work, which, though I’m not anywhere near working my dream job, is a big huge sack of lead off my shoulders. I’m even doing some work that I really like and want to do a lot more of, working for a photographer and framing prints. The other work is another persona, where I show up, make money and leave.

And the apartment is alive, full flowers are bursting up from the warm soil all around the house. I’ve taken to planting as many houseplants as I can, attempting to start new ones, and generally fill this place with life.

Kate is painting and she is painting amazing things, her series on hands is so beautiful and profound I stop everytime I see them, and they are in our house everyday.

What else… o, you know, taking pictures, making music. Inspired, but in a slow way. I think that, oddly enough, now that I am working I will have further impetus to push the results of my work in music to further levels, and not discount it as much in my life… working crummy jobs gives me reason to want to put out great music.

My cello is to be fixed soon.

I’ve been discovering the rivers around here, and finding out that Nevada County (California) is a fantastic place, with amazingly beautiful Mountain and River scenery and feel.

And that’s that, I’m exhausted, but wanted to check in.

It has been a while to check in. I feel like I’m building up commentary for when the real excitement begins, but then, this could be it so… I’ve yet to find steady work, though things floating hallucinatorily on the horizon. That would be nice, idle hands are making me update my blog.

I don’t feel like documenting too much of the trip until I’ve got some income coming in. And so I am putting it off a little bit. I am right now, however, reviewing the minidisc recordings I made during the trip. Some of which are really neat. Some of which seem to have been recorded over accidentally.

Life is filling itself out, slowly, its like waiting for the shower to get hot in a freezing bathroom. And its taking a long time.

And yet though not a born optimist, I look forward feverishly.

The goal is to finish the albums I’ve got started, play a bunch of great shows, move in and out of different cycles at will. Enjoy. That is the goal.

Kate set four alarm clocks this morning for six o’clock, a necessary precaution to make it to work by seven. I got out of bed and as I walked past the mirror I unfortunately saw myself, looking as if I’d been asleep for ten years.

But then I got excited because it snowed last night, and I decided that I’d go out and take pictures before the whole loud world woke up. I drank like seven cups of coffee and headed out.

The world is loud, man, I don’t mean to complain about mundane things, but right now somebody is operating a leaf blower (in the snow), and its this constant loud annoying on and off of an engine specifically built to annoy the hell out of people. It might as well spray itching powder while its at it. Its far too early for leaf blowing.

Which is why I can’t do a landscaping job… OK, working at UC Santa Cruz there was this general hippy ethic that you didn’t really douse things in chemical solutions in order to make them grow. Around here its considered the work of God to plant bio-engineered pansies in rows next to astro-turf and then to coat in a few millimeters of anti-life solution. Many hyphens in that last sentence. In fact, I’m not kidding, I’ve read a ‘series’ in the local paper (two stories, should have been zero) about the big growing business around Nevada City: brush clearing. So rich scum buy promising real estate so that they can have a longer commute to jobs that they hate, and they look at their land, and they think to themselves, what if this were just… lawn. So they literally, quite sadly literally hire people to plow down every living thing, brush, trees, animals, flatten it, just flatten it, so that they can have a nicer view of the highway from their mcmansion. This is a true story, I wish I were making it up.

And then food serving. First of all, it is highly desirable to have a (very expensive) college degree (in music, so it almost doesn’t count, unless you live in Berlin) and work a food serving job. Everything you could wish for really. But that’s fine, I can’t knock it for now (desperate) because you can make a lot of money and literally be asleep in terms of actual responsibility, which sounds like shucking the idea of responsibility, but that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that you can go home and start right away to do whatever it is that you care about doing (in my case music) because its as if you just rolled out of bed mentally.

And there are so many positions for ‘admin asst’ out there, which basically is shorthand for ‘do the work I don’t feel like doing’. Including the ever stimulating data entry, for companies you can’t comprehend staying out of the red financially. Maybe someday you will be elevated to the person who buys everyone frappe’s a few times a day from the Starbucks down the block. Yay.

That’s my ever so optimistic outlook on jobs at the moment. I need to get it out of my head because it makes me insane how flat the world can seem some time, constantly striving for the lowest point.

But I do need work, badly. I need work to keep my hands from becoming idle. I need work because it makes me feel good. I like doing good work, and getting things done. That’s part of the reason I enjoy making music, I feel like there is an ultimate end that I have trained myself to get to (almost there) where I can produce quality music because I know how. Not as product, don’t get me wrong, music ultimately will never be product, but as something filled with intention. Good intention.

When I work I can focus on something intensely. I would not notice an earthquake if it happened to take out my neighborhood, I do not notice fluctuations in temperature, the need for food or hydration, I do not lose focus for anything. Its satisfying.

I took some pictures this morning, and now I’m creating the next project. I’m spending my days thinking about how I’m to pay rent somehow. I can’t wait to not have to think that thought.

Life has been settling in somewhat.

Playing the piano, looking for work.

I put up some pictures of our apartment I’ve been promising:

flickr photos from me

Sitting here in Cafe Mekka there are so many influences swimming around noisily between my senses, music in my headphones, the grinding coffee machine, new people everywhere, new faces, a new world really, called Nevada City.

We landed from the trip and instead of feeling the launch off energy of faithful hope and new beginnings I kind of collapsed into a troubled half state of worry and disappointment. Disappointed that the trip was over. Disappointed that back in California I was no more close to a new life than when I had left: new life being a career, a direction, no complaining, just doing. Disappointed though in a more vague sense, tired, able to be happily numbly in and out of my parent’s house, mostly in, and afraid to make the big changes.

So it was a period of transition. Kate was in Auburn, diligently going back and forth to Nevada City looking for places for us to call home, while I drove all through the familiar but alien towns of “my” Northern California, Geyserville, Sonoma, Petaluma, San Francisco, looking in all of these places for a place that felt like home in at least some minor way.

Christmas gave me purpose. To spend it with my family for me has always been a sacred obligation, not to be broken, and being with my brothers was crucial for me, I have missed them so much in the last five years, and here they are new people, adults not kids, being not only that but the most amazing people I know.

And then I worked on cleaning out my parents overflowing and overwhelmingly cluttered garage. I mean, just a two car garage filled up stacked up mice running around and boxes full of important and not so imporatant all mixed into one. It took me a good near two weeks of working everyday to sort through it all in any kind of meaningful way. And the whole time I am uncovering trunks full of ancient memories, lost and forgotten locks of hair, family pictures that everytime I saw one made me pause and retreat into a place inside of my mind and self that is still a child. And it stretched me out in all ways, desperately lonely in my parent’s garage of all places, doing something utterly contemptible work wise and yet amazingly fulfilling AND I felt a very worthy duty for the family, necessary to protect the priceless artifacts that had not been eaten up by the passing of time.

And then that ended.

And Kate followed through on this apartment, a chance look one day, a couple of days before Christmas. It was a place we could afford. It was something. We’d been nothing homeless for nine months, couldn’t hurt to have a couch or a bed to call our own. I went and saw it and I really didn’t feel it… I was disappoionted, I nearly broke down the night before we had to tell a yes or no, but decided with Kate that we needed to get SOMETHING going, whatever it would be, and so reluctantly we said yes. And then the landlord calls Kate and reports that things have changed. We can move into HIS old apartment, an amazing spot on top of Deer Creek with a big old living room and high ceilings, big windows, two decks, and a piano on top of it.

Its a turn of fate and luck that I had I hate to admit been waiting for.

And so we packed the U-Haul with everything that had been sitting literally gathering cobwebs, pulled it out, painted all the walls white and established working areas in a few days, perhaps the fastest move in in my history.

So now I’m here. We’re here. The creek whistles its sound around our bedroom through the night. The space has this amazing feeling of freedom to me.

I’m jobless, need work, badly, not just money, but work. I’m desperate for good work.

The music is to come along.

And that, is where I am, today.

O wow. I have so much to report. So much that to sit here now and write it would take hours. Which I have this afternoon, finally, but do not have this morning.

In short, I’ve moved, and the apartment is great. That’s it in a nutshell. Which is also why my posts are so limited. More, of course, to come.

Buddy the dog and Noah the cat are slumbering indignantly while the crickets mumble loudly outside. Its not even close to cold, at the peak of darkness from winter here in Hopland, NorCal.

Just got back from dinner with the Welches, a holiday kind of dinner, number 7 of seventeen it seems, the kind of dinner you come home from both satisfied and regretful at once, full, tired, drunkish, where did the rest of life go?

Its good though to be doing these kinds of things, out to dinner with my family, meeting their family, two families colliding like a couple of galaxies, not even or symmetrical, but perfectly formed in themselves.

Its good because in high school, or whenever I last lived here, o, yes, high school, well, there was that stopover after the Europe trip, post graduation, but I don’t remember stuff like this per say, anyways, lets say high school I would have inevitably hid in my room and played guitar and listened to Creedence Clearwater or both, and drawn pictures of circles for six hours and told myself that was the way it had to be. You know, the true life of an artist. But now, accepting that maybe, maybe after all this I actually am an artist, I no longer have to prove anything. And so I went out to dinner.

Although I did have to prove something to myself post Christmas day, my hair was long, I was unshaven, wearing pajamas around the house had become commonplace for me, easy, easy to be slowly circling the endless questions that have become my identity upon return from this latest trip. I had to prove to myself that I had not slipped into something inescapable. I had to prove that though I didn’t have a job or school to go to, that I wasn’t starving or in jail, that I had some sort of deep purpose, some sort of day to day inner smile. That’s what it comes down to, something you laugh about with yourself, on your way to or from work you think how silly it is, this day to day thing we do. That’s what contentment is for me really. I remember 530 am on the way to work at the pear factory in Ukiah, Summer becoming a tragic memory, and thinking how silly it was, that I was in that car, the sun rising again, drastically sleep deprived and unsatisfied.

Anyways, I was around my family, Pete comes up with T from the city, to be married in June, and they are looking spotless and stylish, not over the top, not yupped out, not anything I wouldn’t wish upon myself, just kind of content and getting married and having jobs and apartments and happy to be young and doing it. I felt a million miles away from that entire existence and it bummed me out. I couldn’t understand the use of hair product, why? hadn’t used it in eight months, campfire was my stylist. Nate and Sam, beautiful and vibrant in college, the energy of the dorms of Santa Cruz wafting from their voices and stories, and their lives one great open highway into promise and potentiality. Mom and Dad, thirty some odd years later laughihng with and at each other, out to party with friends, old friends, more times in two weeks than I have in the past year.

And I don’t thrive on self pity, nor do I believe in it in any way. So I don’t go there, but walking soggy footed out to the back of the house, to see the view of the highway from above the rooftop of my parents house, the christmas lights glowing in the cold air, I think to myself steadily about the choices I ought to make right now.

I got my haircut yesterday in the department store salon, started cleaning out piles of boxes in my parents’ garage, and cleaned my room. Took a shower, shaved, and looked for jobs online. Ran into Joe Leonardo, close distant friend and person who asks all the wrong and right questions at the wrong right moment.

Ready to give up, in the best of ways, to say Oh well, I guess I just have to live my life from here.

Christmas, it came and it went. The days leading up to the Day, I was driving on the highway back and forth to mall land, Santa Rosa, solitary witht he rain constantly slamming the windshield, my own company with a camera to hold the days down one by one, presents to buy, things to distract myself with. At night I would settle down to turning on the christmas lights, putting together the model train set, decorated in completion with fake snow and clay gazebos.

I felt giddy thank god. The night before Christmas was and is a perfect crystallization of a whole year, a whole lifetime of affection and interaction in my family. I took the moment, the one moment I have always needed, to stand in front of the tree with its heavy syrup of colored lights, covering the hastily wrapped presents laid out in piles beneath the tree, the scene as primal to me as anything could be, a pure expression of my childish desires, something I can remember with clarity and reverence. I took that moment, and many others, sleepless on Christmas Eve, 27 years old. I thought about Santa Claus above the rainy clouds, how, in spite of everything, all evidence and clear thinking, so many kids were believing headily in his reality, its hard to not accept that in some way he is there.

Christmas morning we sat there, opening presents, making fun of each other, laughing, myself with my coffee, a little dumbfounded by the generousness of life and my family, my family really truly giving, and able to give, in ways that are more genuine than pop culture could conceive as fiction.