Bill Murray Can Crash Here

Don’t ask about the title to this blog.  It’ll be explained in a video that’ll come this way in the next few days.  In the interim, here’s the briefest of glimpses at Wednesday’s Orange County Fair show.  The guys put on a hell of show that night, as is to be expected of people possessing their collected level of talent.  It was all the fun it always is to document them.  I can’t say it enough, nothing better than documenting my friends doing what they love.

Some Thoughts on Life and Dogs….

I miss my dog, it’s been about four months since my sweet girl left this world.  Dogs are magical creatures, they can save your life, I know she, Snoopy, saved mine.  I got her for Christmas on December 23, 1995.  I was the odd kid out at that point in my life.  Twelve years old and not many friends.  Enter this sweet beagle puppy to lift my spirits and love me everyday for the next sixteen years.  She made it all OK, she made it OK that twelve year old girls were mean.  She changed my outlook on life.  

Over the the years she watched me leave and come home, first for boarding school, then for tour, then for a move to California, then for tour, then moving back to Atlanta, then back to California, then back to Atlanta, and finally back to California again.  There was more tour in the mix as well.  I could never take her with me to California because she was epileptic and we decided the move would be too hard on her.  But I always came back to her, until it was time for us to say goodbye on January 9, 2012.  She left a couple weeks later. 

My first experience with losing a dog happened when I was twenty years old, when we lost our 17 year old Shi-Tzu, Hoser.  He’d been  my first experience with a dog.  As Snoopy was mine, but also our family dog, Hoser was my sister’s but also our family dog.  Hoser opened the door to my lifelong affinity for dogs with under bites, as Snoopy made me love dogs with a little extra curves.   Losing a dog is very different from losing a person.  Time heals everything for sure, but for some reason losing a dog never seems to heal as much as losing people.  Maybe it’s because the love that comes from a dog seems unconditional.  Surely there are conditions, food being one of them.  But it just feels different.  I can’t explain it fully. 

In this time since I’ve lost these angels there have been others, who belong to the amazing people I’m fortunate enough to be surrounded by.  They help ease the pain and for them I’m grateful.  I’m not ready to get another dog, just not there yet, though I’m sure the time will come.  In the mean time, these wonderful creatures seem to sense that there’s something missing in my life, and they gravitate toward me.  Without them this time would be that much darker in my life.  For them and their owners, I am grateful.

Thoughts on Places Called Home

Some friends of mine are in Atlanta today.  I sent one of them with his insanely adorable dog to Piedmont Park, where I used to take my sweet girl, Snoopy.  Whenever I have friends pass through my first place called home on this insane journey we’re fortunate enough to walk, I get a little homesick.  See, Los Angeles is certainly a home to me, but Atlanta is where my soul lives.  I see the world differently being from the South, I know it, I don’t know how I know it, but I do.  I see the way I grew up, and it varies from that of the way my LA native friends did.  I miss the trees, the people, the culture, the history.  I miss that feeling on a humid Southern summer night.  Movies in the park with friends as the air envelops us and takes us back to childhood.  I miss my dog.

I returned from my holiday trip to Atlanta on January 9 of this year.  Shortly after that Snoopy told us it was time.  I wasn’t there, and I haven’t been since this happened.  Now I’m almost afraid to go home.  It’s as though I have a fear that it won’t fill that void that lives within me the way it always has.  

Though maybe there’s something to the mystic energy that lives there, maybe that’s where I’ll truly feel that she’ll never leave me.  I feel that from the people I’ve lost from that part of my life, their spirits live on in a way of life that has endured for centuries. I’m not talking about the bloody past that stains the Georgia clay, I’m talking about the understanding of family and friends.  That those bonds run deeper than any other, that we take care of each other, that we show up for each other.  That we laugh together and we grieve together.  That there is no joy or pain without food filled with emotion in conjunction with it.  That we are Southern.

Atlanta is changing, and yet, no matter how the metropolis grows, it’s still that beautiful soul filling Southern city that I call home.  I always eat at the same places, Manuel’s for the wings and friends, Fellini’s for the pizza and friends, Woody’s for the cheesesteaks and memories of father/daughter dates when I was a little girl, and Mellow Mushroom for the dogs (they loved the pizza crust).  I go to the same bars, Peachtree Tavern, Star Bar, Tin Roof Cantina, all owned by dear friends of mine.  I find myself in a comfortable rut there.  

It’s almost as though time stands still at home.  I used to think that was just because I didn’t live there anymore - but I experimented with that for much of 2011.  I moved back to Atlanta in December 2010, for just shy of a year.  Granted, I spent much of that year on tour or in Los Angeles for work, but for a few sweet moments it was still that place, frozen in time, where the air wraps around me and carries my soul to a place that only the South can take me - and for that time - I’m whole and I am home.

**This photo set is a collection of random images from trips home over the last two years.