I’m nervous. We’re playing the Eddie’s Attic Acoustic Shootout tonight, and I’m nervous. I think that all of our support may have dissolved under the pressure of having to get tickets ahead of time, and I’m nervous that I’ll freeze up and forget lots of lyrics and I’m nervous that I’ll slip and fall right off the stage.
It’s happened before.
These things are always full of statements like “it doesn’t matter if you win, you’ve got to be great to get THIS far!!!”, but single round elimination is frightening, and I don’t want to “die” in the first round… and I DON’T want to have to compete against Porterdavis (and that’s only the one competitor I KNOW about). Sigh.
There’s this totally false feeling that someday we’ll hit a contest that can make us or break us, and though I know that’s completely untrue, I still would like to WIN something this year – which will require a lot of practice on my part. My voice could go a long way, I’m sure… well, I’d like to THINK it could… and my guitar-playing… well, I could use a lot more knowledge plugged directly into my finger-tips. Sigh.
In any case, I’m hungry, too – and there’s grey light filtering round, and… and… and… ten days.
Yesterday, Heather and I got up really early – the unheard of hour of 7.30am. Three hours before our alarm was set to go off. We didn’t have anything else to do, so we packed up and moved on out. It was all the more shocking because Heather and Al and I (Al and his wife Amy own the Asian Pacific Cafe and put us up for our time in New Orleans this time around) had been talking long into the night about his Other Life as a merchant seaman… and profession only known to me through books and occassional references in the introduction to folk songs – usually comparing one’s father or dead husband to the ever-restless sea or something.
In any case, after having stayed up so late hearing tales of foreign shores in Al’s sprawling, fish-decorated home, I was really surprised to willingly greet the daylight a couple of hours later.
Perhaps it was the luck and the look of the lizard? My morning lizard had returned for me. It was a Lovely greeting.
So we got on the road and drove and drove and drove arriving in Atlanta last night. Amy’s sister, Natalie, took us out for an INCREDIBLE pizza dinner (some of the left-overs of which I’m eyeballing RIGHT NOW) and then we sunk into the couches and cushions of her Lovely, air-conditioned apartment for some movies and Animal Planet. Tis a good Life…
So – I know that that was more of a diary entry than anything INTERESTING, but my mind has been hobbled by hunger, and my skill with words devastated by a morning diet of DAWN OF WAR in which my stalwart forces were efficiently ground to a bloody pulp by overwhelming ork forces…. sigh. It’s just past noon and it’s already been a rough day.
