The town is gray and brown. Melting icebergs line the streets. It’s nippy out still, enough to make you wish you had a pair of gloves on.

I’ve been in town since Friday, enjoying the salty confines of “Ryno’s Misty Emporium of Culture Critique, Fantasy Baseball and Pirate Tales.” The game we often play is, “Aaron Draplin’s, ‘What I’d Throw Out First, If I Was Running The Joint.’ Wishing Game.”

Items that would go in the dump, right away, if power was relinquished to the DDC Dept. of Urban Living would be…

01. The “Zaxxon Video Game” Board Game. Still shrinkwrapped in plastic, uh, in “mint condition.” Zaxxon as a board game? Sacrilegious.
02. Any sort of “sports-related Bobblehead item.” Good bye.
03. The little “Mer-man” figurine that looks down on you while you are showering up/washing the balls in the shower. Creepy. Where does he get this stuff?
04. Any and all “Kung Fu/Shaolin This/Shaolin That” VHS movies. Pipe dreams. False gods.
05. Any/all Coheed and Cambria discs, records, 17-sided dies, promo flats, maps of silent earth and any ripped iTunes. The worst of the worst. C’mon, lip rings? Go figure: Turds.

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We spent the weekend up in Duluth freezing. It turned out to be a “rescue mission” of sorts, as we hit up all antique boutiques and bookstores mining out the items we “couldn’t leave behind.”

I managed to ferret out a number of vintage memo books, which will make amazing additions to my growing collection back in Portland. Love the old-timer memo books.

Duluth always surprises me. The lure of the open waters, the grit, the freighters, the brick wall advertisements of yesteryear…much discussion took place in Kurtie’s little Ford Focus detailing just what it would be like to live there, how one would battle winter, how one might make a living and well, if you’d go crazy or not tucked away in that little town.

Special thanks to the downtown Best Western for putting us up, as well as “Joe’s Diner” for allowing me a good place to drop my digiElph, somewhat safely to their tiled, digiElph-friendly floors. The s400’s first drop, some 5200 photos into it’s long, long life span.

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I’m ready to settle a new acoustic, so Kurtie and I have been around town a couple times seeing what Minne has to offer in the “old, expensive wood.” Category.

Spent a little time at Willie’s Guitars in St. Paul playing this, this and this..

The old Gibsons, albeit the prettiest of the lot, sounded the flattest. The new Martins have a good feel to them, but I’m definitely not down with the triangular necks on a couple of them. The Taylors have a crisp, pretty sound, that is almost too, uh, “crisp.” (A little to “More Than Words” for this motherfucker.) Just kickin’ the tires, getting a feel of what’s out there.

I want to buy something new. It just feels a little weird playing something so broken in, by someone else. It’s their wear-n-tear, not mine, and well, unlike a thrift store pair of jears, it doesn’t feel right to me. I want to be the owner of that “nick in the headstock” or, that “memorable scratch on the sidewall.” Etc.

“Don’t pass up the old wood,” said Molly Maher of the acoustic guitar section, “It gets better and better with age.” Or, well, something to that effect.”

My focus is getting better and better as I zero in for the kill. I will have to wait to get back to Portland to settle something, as, that good ol’ “lack of sales tax” is a “seductive lure back to Oregon soil” involving any sort of purchase of this scale.

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I fly back to Portland tomorrow night the 9th, getting in real late. Hope those cabs are still running out to the airport.