Exhausted and smelling of smoke. I hate ending the night that way, but it’s an all too familiar way to end the night. Again, I’m very thankful for the notion of a campground with a shower, because it’s sometimes agony to spend the night in my skin, covered with the smells of my occupation.
A lot of offers tonight. A lot of small drugs out here. Heather says there’s a stereotype about Indiana meth labs, and it really does seem the thing to do. Young and old, male or female, that offer to smoke up is omnipresent. Stories of where to go to get tipped in joints, that sort of thing.
But we are well-received most everywhere we go. Why that doesn’t translate into everyone buying a CD, I don’t know. I wonder if we’d be better off doing our 3 song for $3 deals. We’d move more product, perhaps – perhaps we should have them along… just one more thing to carry.
Heather’s begun work on a journalist piece. I like the thinking, like the writing that’s going into it. It helps that we’re communicating over it. It reminds me of our golden moments – when we’re truly working as a team, collaborating and swapping thoughts. We don’t do that enough these days.
Later that morning…
The rain hit us at around 6.30am. The time change and the late open mics have got us a little bit disoriented, so it may have been earlier, or it may have been a bit later. In any case, long before we wanted to be up, with the noise of storm, we were up.
Heather had long ago intimated that perhaps the worst thing in the world is packing up a tent in the rain. I’m going to disagree with her on that point – but since she did most of the work, and I’m really comparing it to being in a car accident, you can be assured it’s still not a pleasurable activity.
We DO get rains like this in Maryland. But generally, our weather has the sense not to exhaust itself in such a long-winded spate of sky sourced spittle, and isn’t quite so mindedly malicious.
Malicious as in it didn’t REALLY pick up until Heather and I decided we really couldn’t wait any longer, and we NEEDED to make a bathroom run. We might have been okay, except we said it out loud. Whatever vicious gods are in charge of making musicians moist and miserable, immediately turned their full attention on us, and it POURED.
And it didn’t pour nice rain. It didn’t pour temperate rain, or even excitingly mixed rain, perhaps sprinkled with a touch of frog. It rained freezing, cold, arctic temperature rain. Struggling with the zipper to reseal the tent had me shivering uncontrollably, to the point that the last several inches were a shaking struggle.
The woman in the office just laughed at me when I appeared in the doorway. I muttered something about “veteran woodsman, I swear”, threw our world into a waiting dryer, and stood myself in front a fan… shaking.
It is time for hot, hot food. There’s a magnificent Indian buffet waiting for us. Imagine that. An Indian buffet in Indianapolis, Indiana. Zop.