My fingers are freezing. We haven’t seen the sun in what seems like weeks and my body’sgot the lethargy of slow, sluggish, glutinous, cold blood. It stiffens every part of me, simply slowing every physical action. I feel like I need a transfusion through a hot water heater, oil heat steaming my blood to workable temperatures. I can feel it in my fingers, creaking and slow.
This isn’t to say last night wasn’t the best sleep I’ve had in forever. It’s not to say that I didn’t have a delicious, hot shower this morning (with spider voyeur to keep me on my toes). And this certainly isn’t to say that our brief stay in California didn’t almost hark back to our first couple of times there, enjoying our friends in a slightly more relaxed way.
It’s just to say that it’s really fucking cold.
Saturday, after having gotten next to no sleep thanks to an insane, sex-crazed kitten – we drove to Findlay, OH to a venue that’s become one of my favourites. Coffee Amici is filled with people, eager to see what we’ve brought them. We were charming and intense and, minus my stumbling approach to Baliset (come ON rob, get my act together!), absolutely “on”. I Love that room and Love the audience. We played hard, got some of the best pizza ever from the place down the street, retired to our hotel and relaxed eagerly into slumber.
For about 30 seconds. That’s when we met the college football team from Atlanta, GA. They were running somewhere. Or from something. They were angry about something. Or perhaps just horny. They had a lot to say about one another’s sexuality, apparently deeply divided between the “flaming homos” and the “fucking faggots”. It was a charming group. Heather scolded them, management scolded them, they treated the place like a dorm, yelling in the halls till I lost consciousness around 5am or so. They started again (perhaps they were STILL going?) at around 10am. It took all the usual joy out of the delicious delicacy of staying at a hotel. We had beds, we had great showers, we had a TV with Star Wars AND Lost Boys on it… but we didn’t have the necessary silences.
Needless to say, Sunday morning came far too soon. We struggled with the continued grey, pummeled by cold, eastern rains all the way from Northern Ohio to Western Pennsylvania. We flipped through radio stations and watched the geese and made a couple of stops before finally pulling into California, PA. We ate a great dinner (thank you Jade, burgermeister extraordinaire) and promptly fell asleep on any horizontal surface we could find. Jade has a somehow-secluded corner of her apartment building which rarely sees too much disturbance – and she keeps the place in womb-like warmth. Sleep came quick and deep, but we could only take an hour nap before running next door to the Wood Street Bar.
The Wood Street show made me feel a little guilty. On the edge of exhaustion, with mostly the typical disinterested bar crowd for the majority of the night, I should’ve still given my all for the couple of people that WERE there to see us. I sort of felt demoralized and mostly just went through the motions – playing, but not performing. There were bursts here and there, but it’s so hard for me to maintain the energy required, especially working through a four hour bar-gig, which it just feels like the majority doesn’t care you’re there!
We got our third or fourth wind at the very end of the night when a couple of fans came in from a heavy metal show they’d been playing at. They’d made sure their own show ended early enough that they could come see us. We pushed hard to give them a fabulous ending of the night and Heather blew me away, finding some reserve of energy that sent her exploding into “Steel”, “We Can Work It Out” and “Love a Girl”. It was like watching a very carefully controlled explosion unfold in hi-def slow-motion. She was monstrous.
Break down took forever. The short drive up the hill to Peter’s house felt like it took forever… Despite that I still stayed up with Peter for another hour or so, chatting and picking at his guitars. It was nice to be nails-off naked, simply relaxing on such an easy instrument as his Parkwood. There’s probably something to be said for having something at the house strung with light strings with ultra-easy action, simply to dream on. Slowly I wound down and I may be freezing right now, but last night was the best sleep I’ve had in forever. Thank you sweet sweet unconsciousness.
