saying goodbye to rex holmes.

When it first dawned on me that leaving Southern California actually meant, well, leaving Southern California, I was slouching in the dining room of The Press whisper-singing a song that I've heard Rex Holmes play more times than I can count.

They played it at the show at Border's, when we ordered cokes from the cafe and doctored them from hidden flasks. They played it in my living room, in the last of the great party houses of my twenties. They played it at the Knitting Factory and the Hi-Brow. Jerry played pieces of it sitting across a couch from me only weeks after we met, when he was still working out the lyrics. I've shared many 3:00 a.m. parking lot moments exchanging directions to the after-party with these five people, and they are the bee's knees, let me tell you--but it's time to do something else now.

So goodbye, post-bar drinks at Tracy's. Goodbye dancing in offstage shadows, rusty nails, the unhappy-marriage bicker-banter between songs. Play a show next time I'm in town, won't you?