My eyes itch and my arm hurts. I can’t bend here or there. I’m sore and stiff and today’s been all day in an office chair watching emails and texts and messages roll in. I slowly update this, delete that, respond to that. Treading water on the digital surf.
This weekend was more playing than driving, but not by much.
This whole past week has been awesome, but a lot of work, and alas, it hath culminated in injury.
Let us state that the week begun on Tuesday with the marvelous eve of my wonderful, some would say legendary, SPARK open mic. I’ve already written about Chris Compton’s feature and that though it was a slow night population-wise, it kind of spread out. We got to have a relaxed night and I didn’t really get to go home any earlier, but the music was just so good I’m not going to complain.
Of course, on the drive home I must admit I WAS thinking an awful lot about how I was going to simply have to turn around and do the drive again the next day… but that’s such a WEDNESDAY problem.
Wednesday I, indeed, turned back around and drove down to Washington DC for my featured artist slot at Hellbender Brewing’s Open Mic. I don’t book things solo very often, but betwixt this and the Local Cream Showcase I guess I’m building the confidence to maybe do a little bit more. I just don’t enjoy playing solo as much… or… well… that’s not really true. Performing solo is a lot more INTENSE. The circuit between me and myself and my words and my guitar is not interrupted by Rowan or Heather or Kristen. I’m not playing off of anyone else. I’m 100% inside my own skull and that can take me places that I don’t always want to go.
Newsflash – my songs don’t always come out of POSITIVE places: most of them are COPING mechanisms. And though I enjoy exorcising those demons again and again, especially while playing alone, I find myself reliving some of those stories and experiences more intently than I do when I’m sharing the stage with others.
And it shows. Clifton, the host, had been talking me up quite a bit with a number of performers who admitted to figuring it was “just talk” or hyperbole – but I could tell from the room that I was owning it – frankly in a way that sometimes ilyAIMY doesn’t do. Perhaps the diffusion goes both ways? I got gratifying “holy shit” and gasps and other satisfying responses to my playing. Safety Bear called it “blistering”.
I accept these accolades.
The drive home was stupid. Five cop cars and not an officer to help direct traffic around the accident right on top of the ramp to the Beltway? Two ambulances rendered unimportant by the presence of a row of filled body bags. Two fire engines. Lines of cars. There’s no world in which anyone should be going fast enough on New Hampshire Avenue to result in that kind of carnage. It gives me dark thoughts on the long drive back up I-95.
Saturday dawned, and I was there to see it.
We performed down in Solomons, MD as the opening act on the main stage of the Annmarie Sculpture Gardens’ ArtsFest which was almost two hours south of Baltimore. A 10am load-in meant an 8am departure time. An 8am departure time meant a 6am wake-the-fuck-up time. Not because it takes me 2 hours to get ready, but because my stomach has taken to fighting me in the morning hours. Going anyplace before noon just requires… calming time.
And so it was that we played a great set and were off the stage at a very, very cool arts festival before 12.30 in the afternoon, which gave us the opportunity to explore the grounds. Hundreds of artisan booths, 4 other performance spaces (not stages per se), and probably literally miles of trails (I couldn’t find any hard numbers on this, but my pedometer says we walked 5.5 miles and I KNOW we didn’t cover every corner of the grounds). I wish THEY had a faerie festival!
We got to wander for another couple of hours before driving ANOTHER couple of hours up to Rockville for a gig at 7 Locks, getting home later than we’d like, since Sunday we had an 11am load-in much closer to home, but still before noon.
*thunk*
Sunday dawned rainily but fortunately I was NOT awake to see it! We were pretty punchy for our show at Little Market Cafe. There were definitely days when we could’ve done 5 hours of driving and 5 hours of gigging one day and not think twice about playing another 3 hours the next day, but those days were not this weekend and we were … beyond punchy. We were sassy. We were… indeed… quite loose. With our tongues. And our playing.
Joey joined us and together, the looseness, the sass and indeed the punchiness served us well. We had an awesome time, playing to the slowly warming courtyard. Weirdly, one of Heather’s kids happened to be wandering town with his friends and we closed out the show playing our little hearts out to them. You always want to still be cool enough for teenagers to care, and we succeeded mightily, but while Heather and Kristen got to go home and STAY home, I got to go home, take a 20 minute nap, pack up and get on down for my Morsbergers open mic.
I’ve got almost no complaints. The list was awesome. The night was full, and full of really fantastic performances. I had my awesome Tim-style cheesesteak and me and Juels played well together, even when I was singing about eating his fingers.
The only part I regret is stepping backwards off the stage, getting my toe caught in the cuff of my jeans, stumbling through a chair, getting tangled in someone’s little spidery phone tripod, slamming my arm into a table and hitting the floor hard, wrenching my ankle, knee, shoulder, wrist and elbow in the process.
Yeah.
I regret that a lot.
I’ve spent plenty of time with ice on my joints since The Incident and though I think I’ll probably Live another day, my elbow’s pretty swollen and I’m regretting my decisions as they relate to pants.
Like.
If I’d been running sound naked this just wouldn’t have happened.
Sigh.
More Vitamin I please.
