i really wanted to be back so i could keep my foot in the door of my old life.

after seven years i had carved out a little niche for myself at topanga days. i felt like i belonged there. played a good amount of music with a bunch of great people. drank a lot of free keg beer behind the main stage. always ran into a hundred people i knew and loved and we hung out after the bands’ sets behind the community house. and i never paid an admission fee. it felt like our own private three day music festival. it was a great feeling, and i really didn’t want to let all that time and all those memories slip quietly into the good ole days without a fight. not yet.

what i learned, though, was that those days … they’re already slipping. my time in topanga canyon with jess and darb and brendan and tim o and sean and renee and maestro and cameron and robin and bella and jane and dina and scotty and greg and cindy and lucy and liz and doug and lisa and lance and ian and naomi and virginia and chin and farrug and bc and sally and on and on … it’s time that happened already. beautiful time that i’ll always have with me. but time i know i need to stop trying to hold on to. because it moves away. i moved away. and things change. people get born and people get dead and people move away and life becomes something different.

we used to leave the festival and gather at darby’s with the grill and the tecate’s and the porch picking and the shit talking and the horseshoes and the dogs and the love and the laughter and we’d go long into the night and we’d do it again the next day and the next and then on and on throughout the summer. and it felt like it would never end … why the hell would it?

i remember one really special little run we had. it was probably three or four summers ago now … me and darby and lance and the maestro dave dale and robin and several other cats from froggy’s got deeply into darts. deeply. into. darts. i don’t know, something just kind of clicked. the universe aligned, and we spent every single night for at least two straight weeks at froggy’s playing darts into the wee hours after the bar closed. the air was warm and the light bites were cold and the windows were opened and the breeze came through and you could hear the coyotes and feel the ocean not too far off and we put music on and got high on the patio and played darts like our lives depended on it and we felt no fucking pain.

one night, well into a session, maestro stopped us all and said, rather solemnly, that we should take a moment and acknowledge what was happening. he said, ‘this is a really, really special thing that’s happening. you know it? and no one really knows why it is, or even what it is, but we all feel it. but it won’t last forever. so let’s just make sure we acknowledge it.’ i remember thinking that i couldn’t believe what he said could be true. that it would ever end. it just all felt too perfect.

but, of course, maestro was right. it did end. just slid away, gently, taking all of the endless summer nights with it.

one trip does not a tradition make, of course. but you gotta start somewhere.

the dingus is a hell of a hula hooper. she carries a portable hula hoop in the trunk of her car.

me and big o …

makenzie …

brendan actually rigged a pulley system to transport beer from the bar to his booth. that’s an irishman with some serious initiative …

our rehearsal was watching tim write up the set list five minutes before the gig.

sean is a guy you’d want in a fox hole with you, because he’s got ice in his veins and can sing really well for when times get slow. it gets lonely in a fox hole.

sean and renee …

brendan …

tim o …

christopher drank all day. much later that night nader, jess, chris and i found our way to abuelitas. chris was completely shit faced. i asked him what he wanted from the bar, and he said, ‘well, i guess a gin and tonic.’ so i ordered one. and sexy jessica the bartender made him a huge one in a pint glass. when our jess saw chris drinking it, she said, ‘oh, good, you got chris a water!’ i said, ‘no, baby, that’s a gin and tonic.’ chicks. always trying to keep us from drinking ourselves to death.

ironically, here’s dingus earlier in the day buying chris beer after beer while volunteering at the bar …

crazy beautiful steve …

semmels …

old bull …

carrie …

brothers duggans …

rose con tia …

the lovely beta farruggia …

whiskey …

moose …

skillet …

captain moonlight …

scotty and doug …

i love this man. carrie’s dad. drives the best grill on the west coast. seen here with the lovely lisa, who i also love. carrie gave her dad a present for his birthday while i was standing next to him at the grill. it was a photo album. on the second page was a photo from the last topanga days of carrie’s dad at the grill. yours truly was standing right next to him. deja vu all over again …

don’t look back …

courtesy of the good folks at four eyed robot:

welcome to church …