Time slows and speeds up at random. Images of the past flash before my eyes. Faces, unfamiliar and familiar, banter.
I have a new friend, Anna Oxygen, who gave me a ride from Olympia earlier today and serenaded me with sweet cover versions while I was feeling sleepy and hungover in her apartment. She dances on stage to electro-pop and entreats the crowd to do the same, believes in an astral plane, has cute pets, and straddles the Olympia/Seattle divide unnervingly. She recounts the story of Calvin’s crash night for me because she was part of that tour - and I didn’t realise that Calvin was referringly directly to that evening when he told the story of the gas pump handle left in the side of the van door for 20 minutes at Yeah! fest. She wears a tuxedo imprinted on a T-shirt that she picked up from a thrift store four days earlier, because it smells like someone she might want to make out with.
Today is mellow and sad, after the news of Johnny Ramone - and also leaving Olympia without a goodbye. Al Larsen promises to send an edited version of the album. Fin Fabulous is safely tucked up in Nikki and Jay T’s papoose. Calvin is still Calvin. I decide someone needs to become obsessed with Tobi Vail, and that someone needs to understand context. I have drunk too much coffee and beer, once more. Not enough fruit, and too much garlic.

See a silver-haired Kathleen Wilson, and she instructs us fiercely not to go out on Capitol Hill without her.
“Don’t be cranky,” I chide.
“I’m not cranky,” she shoots back. “Just jealous.”
I like Kathleen a lot.

The evening is spent in a haze of merriment and snappy comebacks with Anna and Eric and Kelly and Jennifer Maerz - who is indeed both cute and smart and likes a handful of alcohol like I’d been warned a few years back, but never witnessed really before. My stomach is rumbling. Eric and Rhea have some very cute cats.