For the Fourth of July we joined up with Brennan, Tori and Jackson to walk on down to the Catonsville parade. I purposely tripped over something to make everyone smile. Nice picture, yes? I suffer for my art. 
Brennan Kuhns of Petal Blight shows proper enthusiasm for the Catonsville July Fourth Parade!
I try to remain an optimist. Maybe it’s in direct opposition to how I hear things, how I interpret the uberscenario that is my Life and environment – maybe it’s more correct to say I’m cynical about cynicism. When I hear of wrong-doing, most of the time I try to give the accused the benefit of the doubt. It seems all too easy to demonize and anonymously target people in our world today – and half the time the person doing the finger-pointing is partly to blame, dead wrong or making shit up.
I don’t understand it any better this year – but apparently we have some sort of Catonsville Pterosaur of Patritism that rides through the parade on the back of a van, flapping its wings for America. Another inexplicable feature of the Catonsville July 4th Parade… some sort of … Chaos altar or something? I’m not sure WHAT’S going on there…
And so when there’s an accident on the road, while the other drivers are fuming at the idiot who crashed their car on what appears to be an ideal driving day, with not a cloud in the sky and sunlight eliminating every possible hazard, I try to keep in mind that there are a million little things that can go wrong. There are blowouts and mechanical failures not just in our cars but in our bodies – and whoever’s causing my delay, whether it’s theirfault or not it’s still dafe to say that they’re having a MUCH worse day than I am.
And of course, what parade would be complete without a local Corvette club for Jade?
A float from one of the local Catonsville elementary schools that was using different chairs to show the defining elements of the last couple of decades. 70s? Tie dye. The 80s: Pac Man. The 90s are shown to be a decade of dollars and cents, economic prosperity and the consumption of coffee. The double oughts are exemplified by the war – and 2010 is given over to social media. I’d be VERY curious to see if this is the kids’ ideas or the teachers….
So – we’re an hour behind schedule and facing tolls that we’d planned to avoid and we’re thankful for our fancy Android phone for alerting us to the fact that I-83 is closed ahead… and closed quite thoroughly… and we’re glad for Kristen’s iPhone because she was able to check directions on what part of our route while my phone looked for other possible traffic alerts, and we’re thankful for Heather’s GPS for knitting all of this together…
…And I try not to think that the accident that’s got the road closed ahead was PROBABLY caused by someone fiddling with their Android or their iPhone or their GPS. I try to give them the benefit of the doubt. I try to look at the bright side. But really our travel time to Delmar, NY has dramatically increased and I’ve already got to pee.
Joy Ike and her sister, Peace, performing at the Bethesda Fine Arts Market in Bethesda, MD. I’d never seen her sister perform before, and the two of them combined were amazingly powerful. Peace is one HELL of a drummer. I got to run sound for them and I was more than happy to do so if only cause it gave me an excuse to pay special close attention to two beautiful women. Jim Bunch’s latest project, Cooking With Gas, performing at the Bethesda Farmer’s Market, around the corner from the Bethesda Fine Arts Market. Which is not to be mistaken for the Bethesda Fine Arts Festival, which shouldn’t be confused with the Bethesda… something else… I mean, we’ve played about a half-dozen different events all in the same couple of square blocks in Bethesda, MD, each of which bring us back every year, it all gets mixed up in my head. Whatever – Jim Bunch’s group is pretty awesome and a lot of fun – and it was good to see them outside of my open mic, if only so I could get some better ideas of how to mic Jim’s washtub bass!
Tool and the Mountain Goats accompany us as we make our way through Pennsylvania. I’d almost entirely forgotten about the song “The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out Of Denton” and it is our pleasure to sing it like a damned anthem.
We’re on our way to Falcon Ridge. I’m looking at the itinerary and the schedule and the check-in details and the workshops that’ll be running and the performers that will be performing. There are plenty of things that I’m excited to poke my head into. I know there aren’t likely to be any breakthrough moments: no-one’s going to say something that’s going to make me turn to Heather with light in my eyes saying “We’d NEVER thought of that! THAT’S a gamechanger in our career!!!”, but I’m excited for the moments of inspiration. And there may well be many moments that send me scurrying for my notebook to capture some fleeting thought – and there will be business cards and postcards and phone numbers and emails exchanged aplenty.
Things like this, NACA, Kerrville, the Lizard Lounge… Hell, the whole town of Boston really… I network all the time: The open mics put me at the centre of a web of local performers and put me on the radar for traveling acts – but these are the people who go out, do things, have done things… these are the road warriors – and some of them are bringing their war all the way from Russia. It’s a chance to catch up with people from all over the world all in one place, before we cross paths one at a time out and about. I’d like to think we’ll bond over the shared difficulties of camping, the uncomfortable stickiness of the temperature, the vagaries of the weather.
I’m terrible at bonding, but I’ll do my best!
The low mountains of Eastern Pennsylvania loom ahead of us and soon we’ll turn north towards upstate New York. It’s not an area I’ve spent much time in. I hear I’m in for a good time accented with stunning natural beauty. I’m sort of imagining it’ll look a lot like Connecticut. Don’t worry. I’ll take lots of pictures.
[note – as I wrote it above, I’d thought to myself “I wonder if that’s the first time I’ve written the word “pee” in the Journal – doing a search I see that I use the word “pee” way more often than I thought I did. 23 times in 2859 pages…. With this Journal entry I’llaverage one usage of the word “pee” once every 120 pages – though this little note will change that number significantly – up to once every 109. Sorry, read an interesting article about statistics, language usage and financial predictions that I thought was fascinating and now I’m thinking about how many times I use which words… On the other hand I average the word “crap” once every 57 pages, mostly in reference to visual entertainment]
Drive up was awful. Well, not TOO awful, but it’s always awful when you hit the traffic difficulties early in your ride. It screws with your projections, fucks with your timetable, smacks you right at the beginning of the ride and dampens your spirits for the remainder of it. It stretches the latter part of your trip into the danger zone of rush hour and generally damages morale.
Fortunately the 83 closure was the only spot of nastiness we really hit and the rest of the ride was uneventful. We arrived at Kristen’s Dad’s house, had a wonderful dinner at the local Italian place and walked across the street to have ice cream from the place that Kristen grew up getting ice cream at. Even I had a chocolate scoop in a sugar cone and for once my stomach didn’t seem to rebel. It was heaven, though my body’s acceptance of what is usually the massively disruptive presence of dairy is almost a disappointment: We’re about to be in the realm of portapots for the next 4 days or so and giving myself a good excuse to REALLY use a bathroom one last time….
We wandered around the neighbourhood, admiring houses, and got back and into our beds at a thoroughly respectable hour in preparation for Falcon Ridge…
Part of our preparation for Falcon Ridge has been making sure we’ve got all the appropriate gear. Gear comes in boxes. Boxes attract cats. This is Orion’s new faaavourite.
