activities of daily living

What does a rock festival look like where no one cares about the music? Barley Legal, the twenty-fifth birthday party for Redhook brewery in Woodinville is a pretty close approximation. The stage was surrounded by a doughnut-shaped hillside, which is where pretty much everyone has set up camp. I, and my group, are officially Part of the Problem. I'm not sure why we're there, other than to sit in chairs on the grass on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Not that there's anything wrong with this, but it made for an odd spectacle. For most of the day, bands play to the empty donut hole. A few devoted fans get up close and personal with the Ruby Doe's hardcore thrashings and a few photographers contort themselves in anticipation of capturing the most artistic images of Slender Means. Eventually, the emcee's pleadings attract a few people to approach the stage to make the trip worth Harvey Danger's time. We stay for most of the set, but by nightfall it's cold and we retreat to our car as the band is singing songs in French.

As we gathered up our items and discussed later plans to meet an in-town out-of-town friend, I managed to steer the group clear of an all dancing agenda by suggesting that we start somewhere free (the Bus Stop), which had a DJ and the possibility of dancers. This didn't really pan out, and we ended up migrating up Pine in favor of Linda's, a stop at Frites and contemplation of some sort of underwear party at Sugar. Happily, no one wanted to pay for the privilege of drinking immodestly; so we went to Havana, where people were sort of making dance movements, until fatigue set in.



And just as I'd gotten used to the eternal sunshine of summer, my plans to read the David Foster Wallace essay about Roger Federer [nytimes¹] in the park were foiled by sunset and the near-immediate cessation of comfortable temperatures. This is entirely my own fault for accidentlly wearing shorts out of the house to run a couple of errands.

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1. you might think that the reading experience would be nicer in print with the footnotes at the bottom of the page, but they don't always line up such that the number and the note aren't always on the same page. Thus, flipping from even to odd page often induces a brief moment of panic over the possibility that a cue was missed.