AtomJohnson Blog

The night after seeing Jason Wilber perform in the Wild Sage Common House, we got to see him perform for a sold out Red Rocks amphitheater alongside the legendary John Prine.  The weather in Morrison, CO broke just long enough for us to see the show under starry skies rather than umbrellas.  What a blessing to have a music venue like that so close to where we live.

Last night had a little bit of everything…there was a private house concert with John Prine’s guitarist, a world-class ping pong match, and an impromptu dance party.

My neighbors Jim and Linda have been running a house concert series in our Common House called The Wild Stage Concert Series.  I’m not sure where they get all of their connections, but they pull in some amazing talent.  Last night they arranged for John Prine’s guitarist, Jason Wilber, to perform a show in our Common House the night before Jess and I (and several others) see him on the big stage at Red Rocks.  I’ve been seeing Jason play guitar with John Prine since 1999 when I saw them perform with Iris Dement at the Old Town School of Folk in Chicago.  Since then I’ve had the privilege of seeing them perform several more times throughout the country.  A John Prine show is one of those that I simply will not pass up if I can at all help it.

Here is a video of Jason performing on WNKU’s Studio 89 stage…

For someone who has been performing all over the world in front of enormous audiences for 20 years, Jason Wilber is amazingly down-to-earth and about as friendly as you would expect someone from the small coal mining town of Bruceville, Indiana to be.  His music and storytelling style have obviously been shaped by performing for so long with one of the greatest songwriters of our time.  My favorite had to be the song titled The Last Meeting Of The Quakertown Optimist Club.  Jason wrote this song after reading the following article:

Optimists Club Calls It Quits
It’s a glum day for optimists. After 24 years of community service, the Quakertown Optimists Club is calling it quits. They’re holding their last meeting on Thursday, citing declining interest.

“I feel sad,” club president Bernard Kensky said.

Kensky said that fewer club members were taking part in sporting and scholastic activities for children, and fewer kids were getting involved in club events. The group worked with schools to hold essay, spelling and public speaking contests for students, sponsored a youth bowling league and organized golf tournaments and football and basketball events. A bicycle derby sponsored by the club and the Quakertown police department drew only 12 children last year, down from previous attendance of 50 to 70 children, Kensky said.

The Optimist Club is an international organization that formed in 1920. The Quakertown chapter started in 1980 with 35 members, but dropped to 15 members this year.

After the show several of us topped off our beers and headed down to the basement to enjoy the newly installed ping pong table.  The pool table that was donated to us last year saw very little action and was recently sold to make room for Wild Sage’s fastest growing sport.  I will say that we are a long way from being able to challenge other new urban neighborhoods to a ping pong tournament.  Our hopes of a serious, focused practice session was interrupted by Jess’s fashion show from the donation table and quickly dissolved into us slamming the ball at each other with as much power as we could muster.

I had a hunch that the only way to get our focus back would be to return to my house and make bourbon and ginger ale cocktails.  Once again I was way off on this one.  The night continued to spin out of control as Jess, Anne and I had a good old fashioned dance off.  After about an hour of dancing there was still no clear winner of the dance competition, but the bourbon was taking its toll.  We issued last call, walked Anne halfway home and headed off to sleep off a condition that I’ve come to call The Bourbons.

I loves me some classic country music.  When I was living in Virginia, I passed up the opportunity to see Loretta Lynn, the original Coal Miner’s Daughter.  Fearing that I had passed up my last chance to ever see her perform live, I made a vow that night that I would do whatever was required to right this wrong.

A few weeks ago I saw an ad for Loretta Lynn performing live at The Paramount Theater.  Being a man of my word, I logged on to the secure order form for The Paramount and ordered up two tickets, fourth row, orchestra left.

I fulfilled that promise to myself on Wednesday night as I witnessed near perfection in classic country style.  Despite the giant turquoise sequined dress, there is nothing pretentious about Loretta Lynn.  Her presence on stage makes the entire audience feel as if they’ve just been invited into her living room for a casual visit.  Her opening acts were her son, daughter and granddaughter performing country covers and marketing her new cookbook.  In between songs she speaks whatever is on her mind and apologizes for her half done makeup and drippy nostrils.

The biggest impression that I walked away with though is that this woman can sing like no other.  Even at her age she has some of the strongest pipes I’ve ever heard.  She’ll be touring through December, so check out her tour page and if she is coming near you, I would not miss it…I’m not sure you’ll have too many more opportunities.

It has been the rainiest Spring that I’ve ever, ever, ever seen in my 3 years here in Colorado.  Every time I open the forecast it looks something like:

As an eternal optimist, I must find the silver lining on all of these thunder clouds.  Last Sunday night that silver lining turned into this:

My friends Hersch and Kate are starting a local mountain bike touring operation cleverly called Boulder Bike Tours.  They’ve asked me to help them out with their website and photography.  I can think of worse assignments.

Knowing my history of mountain biking with cameras, you might think it unwise to head out on my bike with the nicest piece of equipment that I own…and I’m not sure I can argue.  I put my insurance agent on speed dial and accepted the assignment.

Here are some of the shots we came away with after last Sunday’s photo shoot at Marshall Mesa and Dowdy Draw.

“Stuff” keeps coming into my life, but never seems to leave.  Like food, I wish it all had an expiration date.  Unlike food though, I might actually pay attention to the expiration date on my stuff.  After the “stuff” has expired you would be required to sell it, give it away, or responsibly dispose of it.

Lately I have really been trying to simplify and declutter my life.  I feel like I am at capacity.  I have closets, cabinets, bins, drawers, shelves and floors full of “stuff”.  When we had the fires in North Boulder a few months ago, I was forced to evaluate what I would keep if I could only fill up the back of my Civic and leave it all behind.  While a fire would have been terrible, the idea of moving on with just that duffle bag full of my belongings in some ways felt very liberating.

I remember being the most at ease in life when I had the least stuff.  The two times that stand out most are when I was on my cross country bicycle tour and was living out of a single duffle bag that I had to pull behind my bike and then when I first moved to Colorado and only had a bicycle, bed, and computer for work.  Everything else was on a truck somewhere between here and there.  Then the boxes showed up and it went from this:

to this….

to this…

One of my favorite writings on simplicity is Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.  In the book, Thoreau writes of his experiment in simple living where he moves into the woods into a house he builds himself on the shores of Walden Pond and earns a living by the labor of his own hands.  He writes of the purpose of this experiment that, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”  The passage that resonates most with me is:

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.

In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

I’m not implying that I’ll be moving into the woods and building my own house, but I am making a serious effort to continue the process of simplifying my life.  If I one day end up in a house on a serene pond in the middle of the woods, I guess worse things have happened.  For now though, I am asking myself some serious questions about what I “need”.  This contemplation led me to a serious first round of clutter clearing over the past several weeks.  My neighbor allowed me to store everything in her basement until I found a way to get rid of it.  So, I’ve been hauling armful after armful of books, electronics, kitchenware, clothing, knick-knacks and doo-dads over to her house for temporary storage.

Last weekend I was finally able to pass all of it on by participating in my first ever Garage Sale.  Jess and I hauled all of our excess stuff out to her brother’s house in Thorton, CO for their annual community garage sale extravaganza.  After sorting, organizing and contemplating prices for most of the night, we retired to the back yard and finished our last beers around Tyler and Kristen’s new flame proof patio table.

Just a few hours later the onslaught began.  It was no sooner than we opened the garage doors that people in fanny packs, visors and sunscreen began lowering our carefully contemplated prices and hauling away our stuff for pennies on the dollar.  By the end of the day we had moved everything down to $1, then to $.25, and finally we had our annual, “if you can haul it, you can have it” sale.  Ironically, the Simplify Your Life book was not purchased.

Last summer my brother introduced me to one of the best and most unique bands around.  Ghostland Observatory are two guys who met through an Austin Chronicle ad and describe themselves not as a band, but “and agreement between two friends to create something that not only heals their beat-driven hearts, but pleases their rock n’ roll souls”.

Ever since receiving their live DVD concert for Christmas, I have yearned to see a show.  I was out of town last year when they came to The Fox here in Boulder, so I jumped on the chance to get tickets for their recent show at The Gothic in Denver.

Anne, Jess and I stopped at Efrain’s for dinner on our way down to the show.  Efrain’s has become my go-to place for delicious Mexican and dangerous margaritas.  Their premium margarita is 3/4 tequila and you are limited to two per visit.  Their Efrain burrito is 9.25 out of 10 on their heat scale and is described as “a real manly meal which includes a variety of our our delectables rolled into a large flour tortialla and smothered with who knows what”.  It is the only menu description I’ve read with the words “decision”, “chance”, “trust”, and “no exchanges, exceptions or refunds”.  Needless to say, it is the only thing that I order when I go there.

The Ghostland Observatory show was stellar.  I was so excited to see them that after I dropped the girls off and parked, I left my ticket in the car.  I ran back to the car to discover that I had left my driver side door wide open.  I never cease to surprise myself.  Ghostland Observatory seem to have spent all of their DVD profits on lasers.  I have never seen anything quite like it.  If I’m allowed to complain about one thing, it would be that the amazing laser light show took away from the main reason I wanted to see Ghostland…the dancing.  As you can see in this video, the lead singer is the product of a carefully sequenced DNA recombination between Mick Jagger, Freddy Mercury and Chief Noc-a-homa.

I have yet to spend a sunny Memorial Day weekend here in Boulder.  Last year I remember wandering around the rainy Boulder Creek Festival helping Jess organize the Duck Race and this year it was Deja Vu all over again.  Anne and I manned the Duck Race fundraising booth for a few hours and sold all of about 9 tickets.  Between the rain and the economy, the Duck Race is not having its most stellar year.

This year though I ran in my first Memorial Race for humans.  The Bolder Boulder is one of the largest 10Ks in the country with over 50,000 runners.  Having not trained a bit for the race, I was pretty happy with my time of 48 minutes.  The problem now is that every year I will want to beat that.  It was a great race though.   There were bands and entertainers every mile.  I had several opportunities to enjoy beer and/or donuts from supporters trying to help out.

After the race Ronnie met myself, Anne and Jess at the stadium to watch the pro race and the Memorial Day festivities.  This year one of the Kenyan runners set the course record with a time of 27-something.  It was absolutely insane to watch him run on the jumbotron.  I’m not sure I could run that fast for 100 yards, much less 6 miles.  After the pro race they honored our veterans with paratroopers from each branch of service, a 21 gun salute, taps and a flyover by three fighter jets.  The moment that it ended, the skies opened up and it began to pour rain.  The timing could not have been better.

Thank you Alexa for sending me this hilarious video.  I’ve now watched it four times in a row, but must get back to work now….

Ronnie and Anne have proven themselves in the art of Sangria and the science of burgers, corn and potatoes.  Jess has nearly perfected the technique of pouring up a fresh glass of Sangria.  My only feedback would be to not unscrew the spout all the way so that the Sangria shoots horizontally out of the tank….unless of course this is the effect you’re going for.

Thanks you two for a great dinner!  Next time I will take the tin foil off the corn before eating it…