Moving on Saturday. Moving back to La Grande. Reminds me of the last time I moved back to La Grande...

Circa 2002. The bulletin board in the green room of the EOU theatre department, where a couple dozen generations of dreamers and egotists and puritans and purists and empties and heavies have sat doing homework or running lines. As always this bulletin board was full of casting calls from student directors and postcard updates from past thespians who now wait tables in a big city somewhere. And on this day in or round 2002 it also contained a letter from one Gregory Fairweather, entitled "To the Spectral Collective". If only I could recite it. If only I had a copy of it. All I can to is regurgitate the inspiration it drenched me with. It said to me that we should be encouraged by what we are, not discouraged by what we are not. It said we are celebrationists of the finer things in life. Not finer in the superlative and comparative sense, but finer in the kiss your fingers smell the air after the rain sense. We lived in a small town that had some kind of magic. You probably can't make 100k a year living there. You probably can't be a rock star from there. But you can make enough for rent while making music that will change the world. Because for each person that sang along with a kooky jam by whomever the members of Freddy Hates were that night, and certainly for each member themselves, the world changed. And if it changed for one, it changed. There are many who don't see the value in the Valley. And that's ok, because the value is relative. It's silly to try to convince someone to move there when they're content elsewhere, but it's retarded for me to remain elsewhere when I'm consumed by the value of the Valley.