The Ol' Grip 'n' Grin

Mr. & Mrs. Big Dipper Ice Cream and Family

Please allow a brother to pause briefly in the workplace saga so I can tell y'all about going to a wedding in scenic and wondrous Missoula, MT last weekend.

Due to my status as a green-eared grunt at my workplace, it was harder than shit to get just three days off from work to go to this wedding. Factor in a 16-18 hour drive each way, and I'm left with one motherfucker of a whirlwind trip. Which is why I couldn't even stop to shoot el shit with Nate Tatertot in Sheridan, WY, although he'll be happy to know that I did look him up in the phone book there.

The wedding was tits on toast. Nonesuch a fete has transpired in which the celebrants displayed such mastery of their respective crafts. Sure, you get a lot of the traditional wedding bullshit like the Conversation Shoppers (a term I've given to those people that, in an effort to avoid being seen standing alone at a wedding, will make small talk with you while they furtively look around the crowd for a better conversational opportunity) and so forth, but you'll find that at any wedding, really.

So it was good to catch up with acquaintances from yesteryear (with that homoerotic intro to Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz" ["Ready Steve? Andy? Okay!"] stuck in my head the entire time acting as kind of a distracting soundtrack). Poor Glenda had to do several hours' worth of glad-handing and small-talk with total strangers (including two ex-girlfriends), but she performed most admirably and is to be commended for such prolonged acts of the ol' Grip-n-Grin.

Ah, but one thing you don't find at every wedding is a motherfucking goddamn Grilled Cheese Sandwiches reunion! Yeah, this is a band started by me, Smetanka, and former girlfriend Amanda back in the 9-5! I think in that seven years, we practiced maybe five times and our output over that timespan is a walloping six songs, a mere two of which we were able to remember at the wedding. I think Disgruntled Nation/Sasshole guitarist Dave Parsons remembered more Grilled Cheese song detail than any of us three, hollering out reminders from the audience: "Yale, actually, you start that one with a ba-dump-bump." Good times, god dammit.

Also, it's looking like my days of libatory greatness are all but over! Fuck, I used to be able to put back at least 12-14 beers on a drinking night, 15 or more if I was at a wedding. Now, two beers and I'm looking at a fucking hangover! That's the thing about drinking; if you let up on your drinking regularity, you can never get it back! Well, I guess it's time to retire my drinking jersey and just become a commentator.

The day prior to the wedding found us hiking and canoeing at Holland Lake, which just may be the most beautiful place I've ever been. It was here that I realized that when you're communing with nature's grandeur in a place as striking as Holland Lake, it's pretty fucking annoying to hear the roar of jet-skis in the backdrop.

That night we interfaced with w/ Rustink Smetanka and he showed us the video he made for a Volumen song that made all other videos seem really stupid by comparison. Then later we went to a Vietnamese joint and compared tales of co-habitational bliss over bowls of Pho. Also, much to my surprise, Rustink has started to speak unfavorably of the new pattern of urban growth that is occurring so rampantly on Reserve St. in Missoula, a topic near to my heart lately. He mentioned that he imagined Denver as being like a bunch of Reserve Streets thrown together, and I'm afraid he'd be right about that. He also mentioned that Bozeman, MT has declared a moratorium on further big-box-style retail development. I'll have to research that further, but if that is the case, I think that is the smartest decision a city could possibly make, especially a city like Bozeman that's probably gonna see a lot of growth in the near future. I can't think of a single long-term benefit of that style of development. Sure, it's nice to save four bucks on a hair dryer at Wal-Mart, but the long-term costs of having Wal-Mart dominate the retail sector of a city are immense and in many cases, will be very difficult to repair. Plus, Wal-Marts are disgusting inside and out, so the less of them on the urban landscape, the better off we'll all be. Please put down your Fiddle Faddle and go read the Clusterfuck Manifesto for a much more succinct account of this shit.

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Please enjoy some new Royalty-Free Band Names courtesy of Ron Lewis and Amy Meister-Stetson. Ron breaks it down by genre for you, and some of those had me chortling aloud. Ron's got a real keen sense of the trends of band nomenclature nowadays. Amy's are a reference to Missoula playboy Rick Tabish, who got wrapped up in a very sordid Vegas murder/sex tryst/silver heist debacle a few years back that would have made for a terrific episode of Simon & Simon.

...and I wonder if Ron knows that Shades of Reality was a actual band in Missoula in the mid-90s?

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Songs I Could Listen To Twelve Times Daily For The Remainder of My Time On Earth:

Geraldine Fibbers- You Doo Right
Minutemen- Beacon Sighted Through Fog
Jesus Lizard- Thumbscrews
Mudhoney- You Make Me Die (BBC Sessions version only)
Damon Che- Oh Susanna

...fuck, there's like 744 more songs that I could listen to every day, but there's a small statistical sampling anyway.

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