Olivia Pepper gave me a haircut on a bench in a small park in Austin, Texas. The park was filled with strange birdfeeders that looked like Scandanavian condominiums. A random man walked by and saw what was apparently the first outdoor haircut he had ever seen and shouted, jokingly, “Hey! I’m next!” […]

My friend Dave Depper has contributed a lot of good to my life, like the one time that me and him played an informal set at the Roadside Attraction in Portland that consisted of nearly half the songs from the White Album, done spontaneously as best we could from memory, switching off between guitar and […]

We play music.
We live to play music.
We play music to live.
And we are so blessed. We drive in a Pontiac Montana, a mini-van that is literally the size of Montana. We sleep in abandoned mansions, with refrigerators full of food. We have the coordinates to the mansions sent to us ahead of […]

I had never been to Idaho before, so I was surprised when—three songs into my set at Pengilly’s Saloon in Boise—the bartender walked up and put a napkin in front of me that someone at a back table had given him. The napkin said, “Request: ‘Wrecking Ball.’” I’m of the disposition (I like to call […]

Let me describe to you my medical condition:
I am only satisfied with myself when I am moving along briskly. When I sit still for a few hours, the darkness seeps in. I think about mistakes. I think about a girl I love who doesn’t want to talk to me. I think about how scary […]

Our second trip to California came less than two weeks after the first. A quirk of scheduling had us going back down to Davis and Santa Cruz after just a short stay in Portland. And yet still, even those few days that we were back home were hard to deal with. (We were like the […]

Has anyone ever thought this:
Clouds are so quiet.
You know?
I mean, clouds, right? They’re like an enormous species of graceful, legless white buffalo that migrate all across the world. They’re like a family of acrobats, tossing each other across the sky, catching each other in a soft embrace, subsuming each other and spitting out offspring […]

Alaska is a large elephant’s head mounted on the rear wall of the smoky pool hall of Canada, something the United States won in a raffle and decided to stick somewhere inconspicuous for awhile. It’s a symbol of our wild and fancy past, when we would get drunk and buy a bunch of land.
Alaska is […]

When you’re going to New York City and you call friends to see if you can stay with them, there’s always that point—about seven seconds into your telephone conversation—where they all say the same thing. Not the exact same words, necessarily, but the same essential thing. The tone of their voice changes from frivolous to […]

To what extent does being a writer prevent someone from experiencing and enjoying the world? Often the traits that lead to being a good writer—ability to listen, attention to detail, sober-mindedness—are the very same traits that lead to not having a good time at all. I think about this a lot. And the thinking about […]