ilyĀIMY.com

Monday morning, I fielded a couple of different phone calls from various doctors before being fully conscious and then had this problem.

Yep, there’s a freakin’ wasp on my D7 Battlecruiser.

It’s been a hard week. Sunday morning my mom had surgery for her broken wrist and I spent the day with her before heading over to Morsbergers to run my open mic. At 11am the next morning I got the call that she had been released from the hospital. That was news to me and I got moving fast to get my ass down to Largo, MD. Truth on the phone was not truth on the ground and by 4pm they were both telling me that they’d just signed for her release while simultaneously running an IV line. My instinct is kind patience, but I think of my father, throwing chairs at staff and doctors and wondering which method would’ve wasted less of my time today.

Monday night my mom was home and in pain. Tuesday an appointment with her primary, trying to get things straightened out for her post-surgery recovery. We’ve set up delivery of meals and nurse home care, and don’t really completely understand either. The former involves me running back and forth to the kitchens with slips of paper three times so that my mother can order her food for the upcoming week, the latter I’m to follow up with on Wednesday, because wound care, unwrapping this cocoon of cotton and woven fabric is … not something I want to attack … but is something that’s got to start happening within the next several days. 

And then I drive to Takoma Park to run the SPARK.

The week started getting better Wednesday night. Jesse Moody came over and played Live from the Lair. Getting him out of the bars and into my basement was just a beautiful thing. He lit up when he saw the Star Wars figures and knew his Spawn toys and we geeked out about guitars and songwriting and then he played beautiful and ferociously. Knowing that he knows his way around Elephant Joke and various songs… that a player that I admire that much was PAYING ATTENTION enough to know where the stops are… it meant a lot. I honestly had a fair amount of trouble keeping up with him on his own tunes. There was something in the funk that was hard for me to follow, but I don’t think I actively fucked anything up! And his fluidity on the ilyAIMY songs – just fantastic.

Wednesday, phone calls back and forth, they’ll call me but they don’t. I leave a message, they can’t give me the number of the nurse, he’ll call me. I don’t HAVE more information for my mother, but she’s more concerned that the meals don’t come at the same time every day and that they’re cold. For someone who literally Lived on graham crackers and ice cream for years it’s just low on my list to figure out. Getting the nurse there is the main concern.

I get back to my house to set up the Lair for Jesse Moody – and this is the highpoint of my week. He’s someone I’ve long been intimidated by, but a player that our whole community respects intensely, and to have him in the Lair ends up being glorious. We talk more about guitars and sound and songwriting than I expect, and though I’m disappointed by Live turnout, I couldn’t have asked for anything more from the PLAYING. 

Thursday I finally got back to the stuff I’d meant to do this past weekend and buckled down and DID MY TAXES. I was fortunate in that I’d actually done most of the work while sitting in the car traveling across the nation this past September. Though I hadn’t really stayed on top of it after that, I really only have October, November and December to sort out. I didn’t actually file but I got all the hard stuff done and uploaded, don’t owe too much, and am grateful to not be sending the Second Trump Ascendency much more money than I already have.

Ugh. The STA. Is it insane to think that all of this is happening with the Iran War happening in the background? The madness of a sitting president of the United States saying things like he’s going to “wipe out a civilization” tonight? Threatening plants and desalination plants? That throws a pall over everything. Like… what do me and my mother and my basement and my music matter as Trump throws us full-heartedly into the madness of a new, violent, chaos.

The instability of it all.