The last two nights have been rough. Great shows. Maybe rough BECAUSE they were so good? I just felt raw, like everything was on the surface – which frankly is the kind of performer I like to see, and is the kind of performer I once was and strive to be. It can be distracting, but it’s cathartic and it’s REAL and it’s TRUE. But it can be hard.
Last night I think it was a combination of really, really old friends and being brutally honest – and finally bringing “In the Water” back to the set with the addition of the knowledge that the little girl in the song was held captive for 10 years with two other girls, repeatedly raped by her captor, had multiple abortions and eventually bore him a child – only to eventually escape in 2013 to find that her mother has died after being convinced that her daughter was dead…. I can’t write that song. I don’t know that anyone should.
I remember contacting Heather after realizing who and what Amanda Berry was – the little girl from the song is 28 years old now. I can’t imagine how you create a “normal” Life for yourself at this point. Even trying to contemplate it screws with my mental equilibrium.
I do believe in evil. We Live in a world that has a substantial amount of it simply dripping from peoples’ souls. There are so many good people, but there is so much EVIL. And people can be given excuses. People can purport to be insane, mental imbalances exist – but I don’t know that they counteract the fact of evil. I don’t believe that insanity excuses these acts. And I often can’t imagine how someone who carries out an inherently evil act while under the effect of mental aberration could then be cured of that aberration and then not be driven mad with the knowledge of what they’d done. It’s a catch 22.
I’m hard on my race I guess, and I’m not going to type much further on the subject. I probably hold some unpopular views, and I acknowledge that the world would NOT be made a better place by having a rob in charge. I think I’m just reading too much about the horrible things people do to people. And we’ve been playing great shows, but they’ve been raw – and everything, absolutely EVERYTHING, has been right there on the surface.
a weasel in the wind on the water taxi in Seattle, WA. On the way out I only caught a couple of glimpses of these guys, but on the way back we spotted a little nest of them. After we’d gotten off the water taxi, in the stillness that followed, we could hear them barking off in the distance. a big ass seagull!
After Seattle we hightailed it down to Olympia, WA for another house concert, finishing out the last of our fundraiser obligations from Another Life / Another Live. The farm, Lazy Evaluation Ranch, was more of a sprawling home with eclectic pets than an actual farm, but it’s beautiful as only a working farm can be (because they do milk and get eggs from their eclectic pets).
, I’m making friends with Soupnose. Later we got to sing to both of them, and then we watched our friend Corvi milking Soupnose right into a couple of waiting cat’s mouths (sorry, no video) and STILL later, one of the pot luck items was cheese… of Soupnose! She is DELICIOUS. We were told that we didn’t want any of Tess’ and that she was very, very strongly flavoured. Go fig. The rugged beauty of the Pacific NW at Lazy Evaluation Ranch in Olympia, WA. And here we suddenly encountered the joy of the Wooly Bears! Tesseract! Kristen makes goat noises. Heather makes goat noises. Another emotional, but very fun house concert – Olympia, WA.
