I’m sitting in the blessedly awful Coffee Critic of all the stupid places in the world, catching a Giants game on the TV after driving from Auburn to Ukiah High, in a dire effort to get my brother Sam his tennis racket, for a match that was cancelled. So all in all, pretty classic, in a NorCal way.

Ukiah has this magnetism, a strange backwards magnetism that creates a vortex of strange crossings and paths. And wow the town is the same, the random alterna loner, the smitterings of just like, S L O W E d down 40 + men and women, and of course the bubbly high schoolers just sort of eternally killing time.

And the Giants are winning, which redeems everything in a small way.

In news, the show on Sunday was, well, to say the least, akward… I had broke a cello string and my whole set was based around my newer cello songs, but of course, it being Sunday afternoon I was unable to find a string anywhere in Northern California. So I get to the Edinburgh Cstle, which is this danky bar, the best diver bars that there are, dirty loud, packed with hipsters who haven’t showered for the weekend. I had an awful set personally, but I have to thank everyone that was there, because they didn’t make me feel it that way… They were super supportive and appreciative, even when my guitar strap broke mid song and the sound was all off and everything. I’m not even mentioning yet the best part of the gig for me, which was Ayla Davila sitting in, learning three songs in like, three seconds, and making them sound a lot better than I would have that night on my own.

The rest of the night was kind of beautiful in my kind of way… A 3 hour drive North leaving at midnight, to Auburn, CA, where my girl Kate is temporarily staying with her parents, who are fantastically good to me. I love driving 8 lane freeways when i’m the only one on them at 230am. Its a beautiful feeling of freedom. I listened to M.I.A.‘s new album, John Vanderslice, and just slowly careened along happily… Happier still to see Kate, whom I have missed a lot these few days that we’ve been apart… its interesting how in depth you get with a person living with them very closely for a year. I think its a good sign that after all that closeness and time, we didn’t get tired of eachother… we still miss eachother. This trip we are taking is going to be brilliant.

So that’s that for now… in short, a lot of things going on in the past few days. I’m getting ready for a show in SF on Thursday night, at the Blue Danube. I’ll have to go find a cello string now…