Today is our 12 year anniversary. We watched a nature documentary late into the night. We had great coffee this morning and visited a farmers market. We’re driving four hours to a town we’ve been once before where we’re playing a house concert and we’re driving into the setting sun the whole way. I’m solving sound crises remotely and just head-butted Heather because it’s a way that I deal with frustrations. We’re listening to Sublime and singing, beat boxing and meowing scales. All in all, it’s not a bad way to spend our 12 year anniversary.
I’m approaching 40 years old and I’ve been spending plenty of time thinking ‘is this what I was expecting’? I imagine plenty of people approach landmark years like that. For years I’ve been Living without a five-year plan. My five-year plan ended out about five years ago and … well… it’s not that everything’s the way I want it, but it’s sort of like most of my Life is now “just like that, but harder”. You know… I’m doing what I want to be doing and I tend to slowly get paid more for doing it – so in theory if I keep doing it enough I’ll end up getting paid enough.
In theory.
Mo Willems.
In practice 2014 is the Year of the Plan. I think it’s about time. And I’m the Man. The Man with the Plan. Heather can have a plan too. And together we’ll probably merge those plans. But I think a major part of that plan is “I like what we’re doing. Let’s do it some more!”.
Not a BAD plan.
Yesterday afternoon we played a college in Waltham, MA and we’d PLANNED to then go see some friends play music. We never have a night off. We’re rarely in Boston. We’re never in Boston on a Friday with the night off – and we have LOTS of friends in the area that we’d Love to go see play. And so we started mining schedules…. No-one… and I mean NO-ONE seemed to be playing in Boston last night. So we started checking venues that we knew. Heather has an amazing list of them memorized, and I’ve got a killer database of them on my laptop. Slowly we worked through the calendars. The Burren was advertising a “great cover band”. Plenty of bars were advertising groups we weren’t interested in. One bar we were SURE would hit it out of the park was having a one-night-only-special NIGHT OF COMEDIANS.
Sigh.
And that’s the problem with plans.
So we hopped in the car and skipped down and stayed in one of our new favourite towns – Amherst, MA. We watched David Attenborough chat about spiders and sex and silk as is his wont. We listened to funk music and I played bass along with whatever was coming out of our friend Josh’s playlist. We watched the first third of Star Wars: Uncut and then we went to BED.
I know it ain’t rock star… but you know what? It’s US. And it’s not too bad.
For dinner we met up with our friend Josh at Mission Cantina in Amherst, MA and had really great Mexican food. Above…. yeeeeah… it wasn’t soup. Josh Loves maps. Even though these are his housemates, I like his ability to point random things out in the world. He apparently has a degree in some form of city planning that involves lots of map making…looking over his shoulder at what he’s working on is an education on cartography as applied to global warming and water levels.. If you don’t know what it is, this doesn’t matter to you. If you DO know what it is… it says everything. Thanks Josh for being ready to bring the pain.
