jacquesdemolay

Damn it's hot in this city. Had a cookout yesterday for the 4th, only about half of us were American, but everybody still had a good time. Lots of Australians for some reason, don't know why. Had a really strange experience recently. I met this girl, a friend of friend, had the normal conversation with her that you have when you meet other forigners, where are you from, what brings you here, etc. It turns out that she and I are from the same small town in Washington. Now my parents and I moved to Cleveland in '81 and her parents moved there in '84, so we were never there at the same time, but this really is a pretty small town, so to meet someone else from there was a first for me, and to have it happen on the other side of the world is really strange. It turns out that our parents have almost all the same friends as well, although the Jewish connection means that that's one of the less surprising parts of the story. Also, when I was living there my dad was a firefighter, and you can probably guess what her dad does. It was already so weird, but then I asked her what she was doing here, she told me that she was volunteering on a kibbutz, and of course that kibbutz was Yotvata, where I lived for a year. Just too fucking weird.

Things are otherwise basically fine, no major changes anyway. I will leave you with this, one of the best examples of delta blues ever. Death Letter by Son House, about a man who's wife dies unexpectedly. This is another man who truely understood the blues. There are a couple clips of him explaining what the blues is in the movie Black Snake Moan, which is an excellent film, sort of a blues song in movie form. If you haven't seen it I would suggest you do so right away.