a sound of sweetness with no equal

good morning ~

(click the link / bad photo of a hummingbird to listen)

My Big Breaka sound of sweetness with no equal

today’s track is some live rehearsal audio for these LA shows - straight from da board!

speaking of LA - last night’s giggle with Dustin Wong was so sick, so nourishing. got one more while I’m out here - dublab on Saturday afternoon, here’s all the info you need if you wanna attend or stream it :)

made a huge shows announcement today - the first ever coast-to-coast USA Ben Seretan tour will be happening this summer, out to Pickathon and back - - peep the flyer:

fifteen cities! one big fest! mostly power trio gigs but some solo vibers as well! really happy to get to hug so many of you, come on out

Walking down the street early morning - had to move the car to avoid getting a ticket - and even on the gloomiest of inversion layer mornings the jasmine growing from the fences of the apartment complexes knocks you over with a punishing nostalgic haymaker of swooning flowery perfume. Ah! Such abundance! Was it always such? Surely an Orange County teenager such as I distracted as I was by a punishing horniness and an unending desire to play music as loudly as possible was not parking my Saturn sedan on the side of Pacific Coast Highway to admire the electric purple blush of the jacaranda (see how the petals make beautiful even the most homely of vehicles, a bean-ish Previa adorned and delightful). Stop and flower smell, never! We have cigarettes to steal and walkie talkies to ignore at our job at the hardware store. Plus we don't have smartphones yet, how could we identify the bloom?

We took my sister and her boyfriend out for Pho (wall decal reads "in a relationship WITH PHO") and then we returned to my father's cul de sac under cover of night. My wife looks over conspiratorially - hey, go grab me some lemons, she says. The citrus hangs luxuriously just over the fence a few houses down from my dad's, but in my view it's a little far up the tree to be called fair game, exactly. But I realized something very important in that moment, a profound lesson about this new enterprise of marriage we're in the middle of: when your sweetie asks you to steal her some lemons you simply must do so. And you must do so with enthusiasm. Because why the fuck else would you persist in partnership with your beloved? You must accept the dare, you must grab the brass ring, you must live up to the terrifying challenge of their esteem. The leaves rustled, the boughs bent, I dumped six fragrant orbs into her lap. When life gives you lemons? Fuck, I wish life gave me lemons way more often! When wife asks for lemons, you let her make marmalade!

(my dad plugged this newsletter in his extremely touching wedding party toast - Mark, if this is how you find out about the fruit theft and if it causes you any problems, I apologize. I sincerely hope the ring cameras and the facebook groups of the neighborhood will leave our small transgression alone.)

We cut through the canyon to get to the beach and when the green brown smell of the sun warmed brush wafted in with the first briny sprays of the huge eyeball of the Pacific I just started hooting and hollering, gulping deep pulls of it deep into my lungs - why can't they make a vape that smells like that? Ocean remembrance, sea body smallness, canyon cutter, these are the names of a flavor I would savor. No other way to describe it, as we tooted around town my poor wife was subjected to continual lore drops. This is where my friend used to live, that's the shopping mall where I touched a boob for the first time ever, this is the part of the freeway where one time they stopped all flow for a construction project and after a while I shut my car off entirely and put my two feet on the roadway. It was a profound moment of realization, both that I was definitely about to miss curfew and that every place I've ever driven over was a real place, worked on by the actual hands of my fellow people, my brothers in hi-vis vests. Grooves in the asphalt, that's where the rain and the motor oil goes, may we not spin out in the half inch of rain expected this month. You can do anything you want in this world, you can walk on the freeway whenever the notion strikes you, and that we all don't perpetually disrupt the order of our world is a fascinating miracle. These are the types of things my wife hears me go on and on about. And these are the things in which my wife remains interested. In fact, she grows more deeply invested as the lore expands and grows. Oh, isn't that the place you and Tat used to go? She asks me, correctly and touchingly. We remain each other's grad students, experts in a topic only casually studied by anyone else.

Wife lore is one thing - I pore over her volumes of minutia, an arcane wizard locked high in a tower - but wife joy is now my true animating principle. You simply love to see it! If you see a frog, you gotta let her know about it. If there's a critter roaming around near her garden or a rare - or really any kind of - bird alighted on something nearby, give her a shout. "Ooo, little guy!" is your likely reward, a sound of sweetness with no equal. She wants to touch the plants. She wants to hold her phone up like a Star Trek tricorder and read aloud the common and latin names of whatever things grows before her. "This one is also called a num num!" That's so cool, sweetie, that's so awesome. She goes straight for the tide pools amid the magnificence of the beach. Giant waves? Who cares! It's about little guys, motherfucker! Check out these crabs! The yuccas and the agaves seem to be blooming for us this week, the bounty of the county, their preposterously proportioned tendrils shooting out athletically, like asparagus but more so. And on the way down to the beach among a generous tumbling of hyper orange nasturtium - already pretty great - we see a hummingbird flitting systematically from dip to dip, we try as we can to photograph, to bottle some of the joy, the awe, the wonder, the simple pleasure of happiness that bubbles up inside of us. The world is impossibly alive and full of flowers, may you know them, name them, wear them in your hair.

But what about you? Whose lore are you studying? Whose joy do you love to see? What smells are you allowing yourself to luxuriate within?