What is a gourd, you ask? What a great question! A gourd is a type of winter squash that grows on a vine. Most gourds are not edible, for the fact that they are not bred for flavor but for decorative purposes. Birdhouse gourds are the same, but…

Water signs: Use this to fuel your passions… Air signs: It’s ok to not know everything… Earth signs: You may feel an uprush… Fire signs: ‘not right now’ needn’t be a ‘not ever again.’

I was a bit dumbstruck. Not mentioned once in any of the meetings was another fairly well-known local band (the one with that song that literally tells the listener to move to this town)…

The Bremerton City Council votes to temporarily remove oral public comment… Bainbridge works on their sticky comprehensive plan update… Plus new tenants at the old poulsbohemian building, ferry stuff in the state legislature, designated parking space for people living in their cars in Poulsbo, annual 15K for artists on Bainbridge, Seahawks for sale, and the next no kings rally this month.

Midway between the Pale Rye Wheat Lager and the Roggenbock, I was starting to forget about hot dogs and the economy when the brewery’s owner/brewer/boss lady/former-battleship-captain/badass Linda Sweet comes into the taproom looking like she is midway through a list of a million things she needs to get done today. We high-five to Seven Years and I cut straight to the chase:  ‘What’s the deal with all the rye beers?’ I ask.

Charmingly, in my mind, almost none of Linda’s wild life story can be found online. But it’s all laid out in the memoir in the kind of bare, brutal, humorous honesty that comes with looking back over the decades of one’s life. It almost reads like a diary. “I go from a tap-dancing vagina and a teenage wookie to a swimming nun. That’s entertainment, right?” she quips in the book, in a chapter about an organized swim routine she worked for a Mel Brooks’ comedy…

It’s where you spend your attention. It’s who you show up for. It’s whether you learn what’s happening in time to matter, instead of finding out after it’s already hurt somebody. A lot of modern life trains us to live somewhere else. National headlines, algorithm drama, constant urgency. We get pulled into stories that feel big, but do not actually touch our hands…

MAN, THEY GOT ME IN THIS DADGUM CHAIR. It wouldn’t be so bad, not like when I was out on the streets–no, man, back then there weren’t no straps, no ties keeping me stuck in this chair. Hell, was it a chair? I haven’t been to the dentist in some few decades, I suppose, not since long before the first time they came and raided my tent…

As mentioned previously, while a bargain crate is a lovable container, those crates not segregated by price – or barely even by category – open up more possibilities for the digger to be spoken to based on cover art, album title, or artist name. Two out of three of those communications happened as I – while listening to either Workingman’s Dead or American Beauty (I tend forget which tracks are on which) on the store’s nice and loud sound system – flipped through Port Orchard’s Vinyl Injection selection.