So – there is a deity, out there, hovering. He’s spitting on us. He’s doing worse than that. In fact, he might be a she. There’s a petty BITCH deity who’s really pissed off at us, and we’re not sure what we did, and we don’t know how we did it – but MAN, we’d Love to apologize, we’d Love to make ammends, we’d just like the pain to STOP.
See, in Greenville , my power inverter spewed smoke and the smell of burning and stopped working. Our last day in Wilmington , my amp spewed buzzing and stopped working. Our last day in Durham , I spewed phlegm, and essentially stopped working – and here in Maryland , my Saturn. well. it didn’t do much. It just stopped working. Very sad. Very frustrating. There wasn’t even a little coughing noise or anything. It just. Even the “fasten your seatbelt” pingy noise just sort of meekly faded away.
Now, fortunately, the car is going to Live at Sharif’s for awhile, and Sharif (he don’t like it) but he dropped us by the Sly Fox and we struggled through our gig. I don’t think we made a terribly good impression with the owner, between being late for the gig, and not REALLY knowing how to operate our borrowed amplifier. We meandered through a two hour set, and though we finished strong, the rest of the night was severely hampered by stress, lack of planning, and the fact that the pot-bellied-stove style heating implement next to us was issuing genyooowine wood smoke and I am NOT fully over my cold.
And, fortunately, my parents’ decided that this one gig, of all gigs, would be one that they would pop out for. I am fortunate. I’m not sure if, logistically, it wouldn’t have been smarter to just go home with Heather (she caught a ride back up to Owings Mills) (and yes, I KNOW that logically it’s ALWAYS best to go home with a woman like Heather) – but, I ended up going back to my parents’ house in Seabrook – and what followed was just one of the best visits I’ve ever had with my parents. I felt confident and competent with my musician Lifestyle, and talked a lot about that (and about how NO other nights were EVER as bad as this one had been) and talked about Life, the Universe, and Everything. We made our way back to Seabrook, where Rocket was sitting in the window like a Halloween decoration. We looked at pictures, briefly watched some Doctor Who, and generally, stayed up far too late being a relaxed semi-normal family unit. I borrowed a Tom Clancy novel from my mom and stayed up even LATER reading that.
When I stay at my parents’ house, I stay in a corner bedroom that is now, nominally, a “guest room”. However, it still bears the hidden trappings and colours of being my brother’s room – grey walls and a roll-top desk. Pilfered social studies books. However, underneath that “grown-up” grey paint, lay the orange walls and Saturn wallpaper from when the room was mine. I had train curtains my mom made me, George had Venetian blinds. Psh.
Lying in the futon, contemplating Tom Clancy’s all-too-real world of fictional terrorism – I have an emotional flashback to lying in my bed, under this window, looking at the orange-tinged sky and trying to figure out if the sky was just so bright from street lamps reflecting off the clouds? Or were they doubly bright tonight from the added illumination, double reflection, special refraction of snow-covered ground? The chill filtering down through the window, pushing my toes out through the comforter and testing the air. Sure enough, I was NOT going to school tomorrow.
