it's tuesday-like-monday, the first in september, and i am awakened by the buzzer before 9am. now i associate buzzer while asleep with "something terrible has happened, let's take you away!" so of course i let it wake me up. i went to the living room to make sure there were no frantic messages on my phone and that rachel and her friends had left and therefore presumably gotten out all right. all was well, but now i was awake. the bags under my eyes were truly unattractive when i made it into the bathroom.

the last day of bumbershoot was nice, of short. chris and i just wanted to see wilco at 1:30. that's it. other people, not so much. they wanted to see a bunch of other shows that were later and run around to workplaces for free food or something, so they dispersed, armed with loose directions and a couple scrappy maps from me.

i walked up to chris's place, hoping to catch the 74 up there before it was too full. chris was tired. such a sleepy panda was he. first he could not find his keys. eventually keys were located in the bathroom. then he could not find his bus pass. this was not eventually located, which sucks, because those are expensive to replace. by this time, it was about the time the 74 was supposed to swing by 15th and 50th, and we were a few blocks downhill. the two-bus route it would have to be. of course, the 71 was late and full, so it was late getting downtown, and we miss the tripplanner's suggested connection. ultimately, we were 15 minutes late for wilco, but it was still a good, long set that we enjoyed very much.

then we went to the comedy line to wait an hour, standing, to see sara silverman and a bunch of other people. nick swardson was the host, and he is always fucking funny. apparently he has a bunch of groupies, because this large group of kids yelled at him, "we love you, nick!" he said, "that's great...i love cock." as we walked out of the theater, we noted the huge line for mystery date. "guess they all know the mystery by now," i told chris.

it was raining, we were tired, and, for us, bumbershoot was over, so we left without a handstamp and went to the bus stop. we decided that, since it was gray and rainy, we wouldn't take a side trip to golden gardens, and instead just went for calzones at pizza brava and rented some movies at scarecrow. we came back to my place to christen my dvd player with taxi driver, and after it finished, we were both so tired that we fell asleep until rachel called to say they were waiting for a bus at fairview and harrison. i think they got back here around 10:40. i drove chris home because he was so tired, then came back and rachel and co. were preparing themselves to sleep, so i hung out in my room until 2am, doing the same things i always do online that late at night.

today is a day for resting, paying rent, and enjoying the company of friends for quesadilla night. hurrah. :)

listening: the magnetic fields - xylophone track

my, oh my. what a yesterday it was.

i didn't sleep enough, for starters. i was kind of in an ass mood. i drank two cups of coffee, ate a bowl of raisin bran, and drove to downtown to the bus station around 11. of course, i made one wrong turn off eastlake onto fairview instead of stewart and got completely turned around in the ugly one-way maze that is seattle's downtown streets, but i was still there in plenty of time to meet rachel's bus. on the drive back, i unwittingly got on the freeway and while changing lanes nearly swerved into someone. i have never made the car moved that badly. stupid gray accords without lights on blending in with the road and the sky! god knows it's not my fault for being tired, nooo. i also need to pay a $25 parking ticket because apparently interim isn't enough of a holiday. grrr.

rachel, her friends, and i hung out awhile, and eventually chris showed up and we left to catch the bus. we were going to go the two-bus route and be dropped off right at the seattle center, but we decided to walk at denny. this is a fairly substantial walk. when we got inside, rachel and her friends immediately joined the modest mouse line, which was massive, while chris and i decided to seek greener pastures.

we found the comedy line. everyone was waiting for the 'mystery date,' which involves a super special secret comedian. whee. we picked some fabulous seats, nearly the center of the theater and only a few rows from the front. a male comedian whose name i forget came out and warmed us up and was moderately funny. then he introduced the mystery date: janeane garofalo! the theater erupted in applause. what a wonderful surprise! it's like expecting those crappy white 'mystery flavor' candies that are so popular with candy manufacturers lately and getting a piece of amazing chocolate. she made us laugh, she made us nod our heads in agreement, she made us happy to be so goddamn lucky to see her almost at random. after that, i was much more awake and in the proper mood to enjoy the rest of the day.

we took a long way over to the stadium entrance so we could catch sonic youth's set. i could hear kim gordon singing as we walked around to the entrance and felt exhilerated. they played a fabulous set, including some songs from the new album, but also several from daydream nation ("candle" and "kissability," as i recall), goo ("kool thing" and something else i forget), and "drunken butterfly" from dirty. "disconnection notice" was the encore. you could see their kids dancing on the side of the stage, it was cute. i am still in love with all of them, because they're just totally fucking awesome. i want to be like kim gordon when i'm older than my mom! wow.

we were going to try to see the shins, but their show started immediately after sonic youth's ended, and we were hungry pandas. we sat in the fountain for and gorged ourselves on ginger soy soba noodles, turkey on rye sandwiches, grapes, and brownies. mm. we ended up wandering a lot after that. we waited in line at the one reel film festival before giving up. i ran to the bathrooms in the seattle center and rachel and meghan got rid of matt to the everclear show. the rest of us hung out by jason webley's tree for awhile before decided to go to larry's market for something and waiting for the death cab for cutie show. larry's was out of chris's beloved afri, but i think we were all satisfied anyway.

in the arena, chris and i grabbed some nice seats just above the vip area to the right of the stage. rachel and meghan wanted floor seats because death cab is one of meghan's favorite bands. i enjoy them, but you can't dance to them beyond head-bopping or bouncing, so, in conjunction with my general physical tiredness, i determined sitting was the way to go. i wasn't expecting them to rock as hard as they did. they were so cute, and they rocked the fuck out (mike's acronym: rtfo!) onstage. they bounced around and had cute crowd banter and everything. very awesome.

all in all, yesterday was the day of all quality shows. and jason webley getting escorted off the grounds (which matt witnessed while waiting for us at the fountain) for sliding down the fountain. niiice. i know chris is angsty to rant about the spd, but, uh, that _is_ what webley was going for. heh. at least they didn't tazer the man.

today i am sad to be missing luna in favor of wilco, but i don't think i will regret it. if wilco does not make me enjoy myself, i can head over to key arena. yeah. thaaat's it. and maybe i will go to a comedy show and call it a day. and then that's all there is to be seen of bumbershoot. sigh.

i would've posted last night, but after leaving bumbershoot, i ended up at chris' house until after 1am, and by the time i got home, i was in no condition to write. still, this did not preclude me from staying up until about 3am, listening to music, downloading bops for the month of august, and talking to kevin.

we spent all day at bumbershoot yesterday. i am not doing all day again, i think, because that requires a lot of energy, and i just expended a whole lot of my reserve. i also got only maybe 5.5 hours of sleep.

chris got on the 74 near his house (several blocks before my stop), and by the time it got to me, it was full, and they wouldn't let anyone else on. great. so i got on the 70 going downtown and got off on fairview and harrison, which *looked* straight down at the key arena. by the time i got down the hill, though, i realized i would have to cross aurora (for the uninitiated, aurora is state highway 99, not exactly a country road, but practically a freeway), which required walking south several blocks to an appropriate crosswalk. i still had several more blocks to go before getting to the grounds, and then i had to zigzag through sluggish crowds going every whichway to get to the key arena and hustle through the maze to get to the entrance. WHEW. when i got there, i realized my bag o' lunch goodies wouldn't be allowed inside, so instead of being searched and asked to dump out my iced water bottle and trash my seven delicious homemade burritos, i plead with the security guy, who let me put it in "lost and found." thanks, cool security guy!

christine and her friends were waiting inside with chris, which was a pleasant surprise. her friends decided to sit in the stands, but chris, christine, and i all chose the floor. key arena is a sucktastic venue for bands like pedro the lion, though--he requires intimacy; key arena requires you to make the audience dance or it will be bored to tears--so both parties ended up leaving midway through the set. chris and i went to larry's market, where chris caffeinated with his long-lost beloved afri-cola (found in their walk-in cooler) and we prepared to become jason webley groupies until he was to go to ani difranco and i to blackalicious. this worked out well. we found christine at the webley street gathering and got our pictures taken with him. he had to run to get more cds, so we agreed to watch his stuff. i got in copious amounts of people-watching, which is always a plus. when everyone else left for ani, i stuck around and enjoyed another of his short sets in which we attempted to break the legal limit of 95db produced by a street crowd. jason alone yells "ARRRRR" louder than 90; we broke 100 as a group.

after this, my throat was very, very scratchy, and i went to blackalicious and called jenny, who was supposed to meet me there. she was in puyallap, so i was pretty much on my own. the show was fun. i got to dance (what key arena is tolerable for) and see about twenty kids get stoned in front of security guards who gave them stern looks but didn't escort anyone out that i could see. and the point of that was...? yeah. i decided to leave early because i was hungry and the ani show should've been over. of course, there was a massive crowd flooding out of the stadium, so it took awhile to meet up with people, but then...food. ahhh.

ed, chris, and i sat in the fountain to eat and there we witnessed one of the most fucked-up things i've ever seen in real life. some guy came into the fountain, where a bunch of kids are running around, and removed his shirt and shoes and stood there in his boxer briefs. chris says he immediately knew something was up with this guy. the guy started pulling his shorts off and exposing his ass and (presumably) genitalia--not to anyone; he looked pretty casual (in a fucked-up-on-drugs sort of way) about it. he did this a few times before the security guards showed up and tried to talk to him. when it was clear the guy wasn't interested in talking, the security guards shooed everyone else out of the fountain. then they tried again with the guy, who pulled out a pocket knife. guards backed off and called the cops. the guy threw his knife on the ground and the guards picked it up, then the guy started facing the fountain and stretched up against it, sometimes staring ruefully at the ground with a thumb at the edge of his shorts, like he was hanging onto a belt loop. the cops arrived and watched the guy for awhile. of course, the crowd's attention was mostly turned their dirction by this time. eventually, they got the guy to come over to them, and they tried to cuff him. he resisted and tried pulling at their shoulderpads or something, at which point the wrestled him to the ground, face-down, and fucking tazered him. he spasmed. there was a second tazering, then he must've been pretty well "under control" and four cops grabbed him by each limb and hauled him out of the fountain. the crowd cheered and some people booed. it was crazy. i was on the phone with jenny the whole time, who was trying to find us, but she missed all the commotion.

after that, we tried to find something to do before lou reed. we went to the one reel film festival line and decided we didn't care about what was showing next. we went to the comedy house and there was another line we decided we didn't care about. we left the grounds and went to larry's market again so ed could get a beverage and cash for the bus. i think chris got *another* afri-cola.

at this point, we were all pretty physically exhausted, so we decided to head to the stadium and just park ourselves in the stands. it's a long walk to the stadium, but it was ok. it started getting a little too chilly for comfort, though. i made some phone calls--to rachel ("bring a towel!"), to winnie ("guess who?" "i have no idea... umm... emily?! you sound different than i expected!"), and to my sister ("i walked to japantown today, this fucking rocks!"). i saw some guy wearing a tshirt whose main slogan was partially obscured by his jacket, but what i could see said "oat fetish." chris and i hypothesized what the shirt could really say. i once said, "boat fetish, but that would be really boring," to which chris replied, "yeah, 'put on that ferry costume for me, baby!'" hee! punny.

jenny and alex found us and we all made room for them to sit with us. lou reed started soon after that. he was, umm... silly. the noise was good and rocking, but oh. so... bad. the words. i mean. i like the velvet underground. i respect lou reed as an icon and a living legend and whatnot. but oh. it was so sad. he read his own modified version of poe's "the raven," which was very very wtf. then he sang a song with the worst couplet ever: "he sewed up his eyes/ and came on his thighs." OH. MY EARS. yeah. we left a little early to avoid crowds, and jenny drove us back to the udistrict.

i need to go downtown and pick up rachel and two of her friends i've never met from the greyhound terminal around 11. i think i am driving. i have never driven downtown before and am a little freaked at the prospect, but it will be faster than the stupid buses. we'll take them to the festival, anyway. we'll all have our fill of metro. today we're seeing sonic youth and death cab for cutie, with some possible side attractions of modest mouse, the shins, john wesley harding (if death cab fails to fill the space, which i suspect they will, since they're not exactly a danceable band and they're playing the fucking key arena), and some coemdy gold. hurrah for the weekend. hurrah for caffeine. hurrah for friends.