"we'll sing ben harper songs to stay awake."

the other night we went to an open mic night at the university of oregon campus. mainly to see elijah play his songs, but that wasn't the real treat. the real treat was a guy named caleb. he was the star of the night. he was african american and wore gap cloths. he played a beautiful guitar. his first appearence was when a kid was in the middle of his set, and realized that he couldn't play the pete yorn song that he wanted to. so he randomly called caleb up (based soley on the fact that he had a guitar case at his feet, they had never met) and taught him how to play the song. it was four chords the whole way through, verse and chorus, but was still a good song. caleb played it well, and everyone cheered. toward the end of the night, caleb got up to play his two songs. i must say that they were incredible. both origionals with very skilled guitar playing and song arrangement. one was about a close friend that had fallen away from god(yes, we discoverd that he is a christian), and the second about a hypothetical road trip to seattle. that one was my favorite. his lyricism was most fantastic, and in my opinion very meaningful. somewhere in the bridge he sang, "we'll sing ben harper songs to stay awake" (this comes into play during the next set). he was encored into playing one more song. it was a jazz song. he scatted, enough said. it was wonderful, but he wasn't quite done.

the last act of the night was a girl. a pretty girl. she sang ben harper covers(irony). the best part though was that she, like the pete yorn coverer, forgot the guitar part to her second song, and of courst, caleb knew the part. so the night ended with her beautiful voice, and calebs beautiful guitar in one fantastic flourish of beauty. a fabulous night, but there is one more twist in this tale.

after everything was said and done, i shook calebs hand and congratulated him on a night of beautiful music, signed his email list and proceded to leave. it was at about this point that ben, who was with the ebc crew, pointed out that two weeks ago, we played halo with caleb. we had half met him at a halo party. this kid plays halo, moreover, he played halo with us and i hadn't even realized it.

haha, life is amazing, and i feel like an inadequate writer.

peace out.