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woke up around 11am today. we were going to go to a local pizza place, but it was closed for lunch in the summer. gah. so we went to a local diner called the student prince. it wasn’t too exciting. rain was on and off today, so c-stone was fairly muddy all day. i bought a bunch of stuff today, and will be buying more tomorrow. as far as bands…saw a bluegrass thing called men and angels. it was okay, but not great or anything. at least they played traditional stuff and didn’t try do weird versions or something. saw most of a thing called the dark forest (a fairy tale) which was sort of a story set to song with some visuals. it was fair. saw bill mallonee. he was pretty good. then saw the lost dogs (mike roe, derri daugherty, terry taylor, and they had steve hindalong on percussion). man, those guys all have good voices and can play. they make a lot of the other bands seem like amateurs. in a horrible turn of events, we found out woven hand (a side project of david eugene edwards from 16 horsepower) cancelled. it was the band we were most looking forward to seeing the whole fest. *sigh* so i saw the first couple of songs of demon hunter, which didn’t impress me much. so i headed over to see reels of white softly flow. they were having technical difficulties so they didn’t start until like 1:15am, which was about the time they were supposed to be done. i stayed for about 30 minutes. it was pretty cool atmospheric space music kind of stuff, with lots of performance art and visual film and such going on. i was hoping scott hatch would show up at this c-stone, and i was happy to see him onstage with reels of white. so i should be able to hopefully see him tomorrow. i’ve been standing an insane amount more than i normally do and my feet are killing me. the rest of the title was a play on a country song, although perhaps one or both are actually true.

woke up around 11am today. rode into c-stone and randomly picked a band to watch which i ended up liking, called trauma. i picked up their ep. kind of metal-hardcore. then caught part of miranda stone, which was sort of the typical pissy female singer-songwriter stuff. yawn. next saw the urban hillbilly quartet, which was lame. next up was all things bright and beautiful, which is a new project by one of the guys from luxury. it was sort of radiohead/coldplay stuff. i’m not into that, but he has cool lyrics so i sort of dug it and bought the cd. his band was actually another band called nameless number head man. they played one of their own songs, sort of electronic atmospheric indie rock or something. i picked up their cd too. we left c-stone to go eat at the italian restaurant in macomb, but it’s closed july 1 through 5 — so instead we ate at the local mexican place. it was real mexican food, unlike diamond dave’s (bleh), so that was great. we then headed back to c-stone where i caught calibretto (fun as usual), travelogue (pretty cool live show…it’s one of the guys from house of wires, which is usually hit or miss with me, but i bought the new cd anyway), and promise ring (not impressed). caught the first part of as i lay daying, which also didn’t impress me. i’m just not excited by the current rash of hardcore/emo bands that have embraced death/black metal. then we headed over to see over the rhine. it started raining hard, and continued to stop and start doing that through the whole show. they were great live, as usual. i saw two people at over the rhine i hadn’t expected to see: tim allman, whose wife didn’t make it over from germany as planned so he came to c-stone and arrived today, and matt slocum, who was playing guitar and cello for over the rhine. we went back and talked with matt a bit, and tim followed linc and me back to the dorm to get a room for the night (the tent he had borrowed was evidently soaked when he went back to it). all in all, not a bad day. i see women now and then that look similar to tamara and i wish she were still around and could share in these experiences with me, but i guess wishful thinking and a couple of bucks could maybe get me a cheap beer.

got up late. took a shower and i headed out to c-stone for the r.m.c bbq. after waiting in line to get through the entrance, i ended up showing up around 1:30pm….30 minutes after it was over. there were still a few hanging out, so i stood around and mostly didn’t say anything. then they all left, and i was stuck talking to a weird guy. eventually we parted, and i walked over to get something to eat. but my dislike of large crowds and lots of activity (sort of feels like visual/auditory overload or something), mixed with the large number of cool-looking, attractive young ladies (keyword being “young”) made me decide to leave. i drove back to the dorm, where linc was still hanging out. neither of us had hardly any bands we knew we wanted to see today, so he decided to skip out. (plus it was raining this morning. although by the time i left it was no longer raining, and evidently it barely sprinkled at c-stone.) anyway, he hadn’t eaten either, so we decided to find a local place. we ended up going to the red ox, a steak/seafood/etc place. it was around 4pm and we were the only ones there. the waitress talked to us most of the time, so we got to learn a lot about good local places to eat, what there is to do around town, etc. she was born in poland, grew up in germany, and moved here about six years ago. our theories were that she was either a mail-order bride or was a mormon that married a morman man from here who was in germany on his mission trip, but we never asked so we don’t know what the truth was. she was an instructor at western illinois in sociology. (she has a masters, but was full-time.) after that we headed out to c-stone. i saw parts of a number of bands, but the only one i really thought was very good was a black/death metal band, which i think was called tantrum of the muse. i can’t really listen to cds of the stuff, but they’re enjoyable live. hopefully tomorrow will be a better day as far as bands go. in one of the merch tents there was a guy selling writings of 1st and 2nd century church fathers. i started talking to him and he’s an orthodox xian, and turns out he’s friends with beau branson from thymikon. we talked with him for awhile and i bought about eight of his reprints. so that was pretty cool. i think tamara would have enjoyed talking with him. and some of the talks this year are about kierkegaard and nietzsche which i’m sure she would have liked. i keep relating a lot of stuff at c-stone to tamara (bands, discussions, people i see and talk to)…i guess we had a pretty strong tie to c-stone. we first really talked there, we went to c-stone for our honeymoon, and we went together one other time too. plus i have the opportunity to see more people at c-stone than in my normal life that tamara fits in with as far as dressing style and such goes. oh well.
oh yeah…happy birthday to me. i’m now officially 35, and driving in other states with an expired driver’s license. aahhh, 35. living the glory days. could life possibly get any better than it’s been the last year or two? (that’s sarcasm.)