I’m tired tonight. Friday night we had a band practice, Saturday night we had a pretty massive gig. Sunday night I was at a showcase for hours and tonight was my open mic. I think my ears are tired.
In school we’d have “rest periods” where we’d sit and stare at a white wall, just to cleanse the palette of your eyes. In hindsight I realize this is sort of an art pun – but truly, there were just times when your perception was so saturated that you needed to clear it out. You start by seeing after images on the white and then they slowly fade out and you can see just the blankness of it all, and then you start hyper-observing and you start noting the tint of the light and the gradation of the white, the blues in the shadows and the myriad hues on this supposedly blank surface. Eventually you realize you’ve cleared out your buffer and you can see clearly again…but it takes some time.
I feel like I need to do that with my ears. I’ll probably sleep with earplugs in tonight, which isn’t always the best thing… and then THAT makes you hyper-aware of the sounds your body makes, every breath and gurgle and beat.
But yeah, I feel I need some silence. We Live in a noisy world. Even the white noise of the humidifier is painful right now. Too much texture. It’s like manila paper. Just too coarse. And so I shut that off. And now the computer’s fan is present, whirring and humming. I can hear the drives. At least the keyboard doesn’t really bother me. It’s immediate, it’s an answer to my body, but that ingratiatingly grating little tune the machine plays when I plug in a new card – that is just like broken glass along my skin.
Don’t get me wrong. Practice on Friday was wonderful. Good bonding, good playing. The gig on Saturday was marvelous right up until it wasn’t and even THAT was kind of fun – the sound system died and since it wasn’t my gear I wasn’t overwhelmed by the need to fix it or the worry of how to replace it, we could just play acoustic – and then when the sound engineer got the monitors back but not the mains – we could just slapdash flip the monitors around and not WORRY about it. Sunday was Lovely. Met some new songwriters and felt good about myself in their midst knowing I’m doing what I Love to do and even though they’re great, I’m a different KIND of great. And the open mic tonight – it was sparse, but the featured artist, Conor Brendan, was stunning and there was a lot of great talent and I had a good time…
But yeah.
Shh.
I’m ready for some quiet.
