Almost home. Sort of. Almost home, but headed West at 75mph through Western Pennsylvania with every sense wailing “but you’re going the wrong way!!!”. As we round Pittsburgh yet again, knowing that I’ve spent for too little time back home even as we speed further and further away from it, I console myself knowing that I’ll be sleeping in my own bed tomorrow night – even if tomorrow night will actually be Sunday morning.
That’s right, you’d BETTER! Brandon smiles knowingly at a friend who’s clearly saying “why are your friends such FREAKS!!?” The big ending jam at Eric Nassau’s house concert where we got to perform with Northern Skies (of Michigan) and the Lovely Eric Nassau himself. It turned into a thoroughly satisfying night with a warm fire outside and amazing food inside. A very full house – and a very nice house! Heather got to jam with Northern Lights (formerly Drake), and Eric’s bass player was nothing short of awe-inspiring.
I’m staring at the calendar, trying to imagine how I’m going to keep up with everything, and staring at the map, trying to will places closer together. I think all in all I’m just not dealing well with being a grown up. I was thinking about that as we were playing with / for college students last night, watching them in their initial attempts at balancing check books, getting rent paid while saving money for beer and groceries and pot and our CDs. It’s a complicated world.
After a long drive back from Columbus, OH we’re surprised by our friends’ in Pittsburgh’s (I know that’s mangled grammar, you know what I MEAN) new aquisition: kittens! One mom. One disinterested Other Party that looks like a skunk, and three absolutely insane kittens! With brains the size of walnuts…
For the last two nights we’ve been in California, PA – it used to be a really magical place for us, but it seems like the light’s slowly draining out of the town and we’ll probably fall in Love with someplace else soon. Heh – Findlay, OH seems really nice! It’s interesting how places slowly shift around us.
I know the joke that musicians tell one another: “You know why I Love playing college gigs?! I keep getting older but those college girls stay the same age!” But the towns change, age, shift – venues die or change over. We saw a LOT of that on the last tour – but it’s a cycle, and new places are being born or are being discovered, and as travelers we have no ownership. We’re merely visitors. Even the College Perk back home, for as much as we felt some sense of ownership of the place, we weren’t there – and it died while we were looking the other way. Java Mammas is close to mine, people ask all the time if I DO own it – but like a child, I’ve put a lot of structure in place, nurtured it, but frequently let it stand on its own feet, watch it stumble and stretch and sometimes I hear great things about how well it’s doing in my absence, and other times I hear it crying for me.
I hear Jozarts might shut down soon – and that makes me really sad. It’s a very unique place and I’m hoping to get up there and play another show there before it does. But I know that the owners are riding their bikes further and further afield, and it’s in a small town, and it was a LOT of fun for a long time, a labour of Love – and now maybe it’s time for Jay and Bish to ride off into the sunset.
Perhaps I’m romanticizing things a bit – but when handed the harsh cyclical reality of Life and death and the passage of time, it can only inspire optimism or fatalism, and I just don’t see the point of Living in the latter. I’m harshly aware of my own mortality. I’ve had lucky scrapes and terrifying brushes with death in the face of stupidity and malice, car crashes and handguns. Cancer’s there in my family and it’s the ugliest thing imaginable. But I can’t just look at all those horrors and decide that the hopelessness of it all makes it not worthwhile. It’s important to look at all those things and realize that time, through its scarcity, is the most valuable of all things.
A friend of mine is buying gold because he feels it’s the smartest of all investments, girding himself against an uncertain future. Lex Luther’s father told him that the wisest investment is land, because it’s the only thing they’re really not making any more (plus or minus global warming and floating Atlanti eventual expansion from our home planet)… but I think the smartest investment is time. Because they really AREN’T making THAT anymore. And once it’s spent, it stays spent. It’s something that can be saved, and invested, and any interest gained is never returned in like currency.
I’m flattered that we’re included on Jozarts’ wall of awesome along with Joanne Juskus and Dave Pahanish. Peter Wright running his Jozart Open Mic. Wednesday night we hit up one of our favourite open mics and ran across a friend of Heather’s, the fantabulous Joy Ike – performing at Jozart Studios’ open mic in California, PA. Joy Ike. Singer songwriter Amy Melissen performing at the Underground at California University of Pennsylvania and also throwing gang-sign at us. It’s just the way she rolls. She was hosting the night that we were the featured artist. It was great to see her and I’d forgotten how very Joni Mitchellish her voice was.
And so I try to enjoy myself. Little aches and pains won’t get me down, because eventually they’ll be BIG aches and pains, and time spent whining about the little ones will be wasted when the big ones come around. I’m looking forward to Christmas and plan to enjoy the music in the malls, and to evade the crushes of same. I try to maintain the thought that Christmas music on the radio before Thanksgiving just gives me more time to sing along, and that traffic jams just give me more time to appreciate the view.
After we played at the Underground at California University of Pennsylvania, we joined our friend Peter Wright (host of Jozart) at the Wood Street bar to play THEIR open mic. It was kind of nice to see Peter relax into just playing as opposed to the more stressful setting of hosting his own gig. It’s always nice to know that between Heather, our friends and fans, I’m generally always hitting bars with the hotties. Jade was our Pennsylvanian partner and I’m feeling guilty that apparently we gave her our cold.
