It’s been a whirlwind for the past … several days? One of those strange whirlwinds where you’re getting enough sleep and food to function, but not enough to form solid memories or to have a solid grasp on TIME. All the way from last Thursday, running my open mic and coming home pleasantly exhausted, sore and aching, it seems I’ve been “ON” till this morning, and I’m only slowly coming back to myself.
A lot of this weekend is, in the parlance of Heather, past rob making sure that future rob is going to be okay, knowing that future rob, when he gets around to the present, isn’t going to be present ENOUGH to make good decisions in regards to video adapters and sound gear.
Thursday’s open mic, falling, as it did, on the first evening of fall, was beautiful. Crisp air swirling around us, people beginning to bundle in sweatshirts and flannel. Fantastic music. Stupidly, it was like my mind had channeled the rob of the coming weekend and somehow at the tail end of the night we all spent an absurd amount of time looking for my keys.
Fortunately my friend Kate found them RIGHT after I’d called Kristen to maybe drop off my extra keys… but not too late for me to call off my poor wife.
Friday morning, waking up, realizing our hot water had failed… (I’m also realizing that the days have run together enough that MAYBE this was Thursday morning? Maybe it was Friday morning?) … I’ve checked my text messages and yes, Friday morning I took a lukewarm shower and then went downstairs to fiddle with the hot water heater and came back a failure… saddened that I knew little about hot water heaters, gladdened that the theoretical purchase of this house has been good and slow and so I didn’t yet HAVE to know about hot water heaters! I called my landlord and fistbumped my wife, perhaps for the last time, saying “renters!”
As I waited for the landlord to come help us with our new hot water dearth, knowing that the next couple of days would be complicated and crazy, I spent time organizing all of my audio and video gear, testing all the connections, laying everything out and packing what I’d need for various events…
A couple of hours later me and Jack were lying in the detritus of the second-dankest corner of our basement looking at the pilot light and fiddling with the buttons and knobs and learning me good about hot water heaters… hot water restored just in time to roll on out to play our Baltimore Creative Alliance Sidewalk Serenade.
When we’d last played this, it was hot stinking summer and more than a half-dozen individual performances. We’d sold out in under a week and we raced from location to location to location setting up, playing, breaking down. It was a joy, but a brutal one and so this year it was both with burning embarassment AND a sense of relief that we realized we’d only sold ONE of our slots by the day of the serenades…
And yet, it was a gorgeous thing. On the sidewalk on the east side of Patterson Park in Baltimore, playing the sun down in Baltimore City to a dozen or so people gathered up and down the street…. we stopped by Ekiben on the way home and tortured ourselves with the delicious smells as we drove back to our house. A relaxed band dinner gathered around the table… just as the open mic was the perfect first evening of autumn, Friday was the perfect first full day of Fall.
