This 9/11 Post is not about 9/11.

Driving across Illinois to reach our friend Susan’s, there’s absolutely a billion places to stop and take a photo, but today’s not that day.

Okay. scratch that. We’re ahead of schedule and we absolutely CAN check out this music shop. It turns out to be a bigger deal than we’d suspected and we enjoy checking out room after room of strange finds, ranging from reel-to-reel machines and recordings, to memorabilia, to broken accordions and the husks of old electronics, all the way up to some pretty cool guitars that I avoided coveting solely through the measurements of free space in the car. Swing City Music was a friendly place to kill some time, and Heather bought new brushes! (Heather, give me my old brushes back!)

9/11. It still seems inappropriate to be thinking about a gig for the night, but you can’t set the date aside forever. Waking up in Belleville, IL at our friend Susan’s house, the clouds are low and glowering and 9/11 could be far from my mind if it wasn’t for social media and our parents. My mom was retelling the story of me trying to call home during the attacks, the cellphone signal dropping as all lines simply jammed. I wonder how much better our infrastructure would cope now. Of course, now the infrastructure would be weaponized as well.

One of the items on the shelves of Swing City in Collinsville, IL : Sound Spheres. It’s time to look them up! Huh. They are EXACTLY what they sound like! Expensive spherical speakers designed to through sound evenly out to a 360 degree area around them.

Watching the television in horror in the cafe on the first floor of my office at the time. Driving home after an all-nighter working with Japan because I just wanted to go HOME. Listening to the radio. Smoke rising on the horizon to my right as I drove back to Maryland. Eventually I hear that’s the Pentagon. Burning.

Listening.

I’m listening to WT Davidson’s tune “Gee, I’m Glad I Worried About That” and thinking… yeah, maybe I should hush my mind and have breakfast instead.

Today’s a day of “tips and tails” until we head into Saint Louis to eat a- I mean PLAY AT Evangeline’s. Little tidbits of work.

We get to Evangeline’s in Saint Louis with plenty of time to ea- I mean set up and play, and I walk around the block to relax and kill some time. We are heralded appropriately.

Ha, and then I was interrupted by folk fires from back home. A desperate series of emails and prodding instructions for one of my orgs that SHOULD’VE been taken care of weeks, if not months, ago. It’s one of the myriad instances where it’s not my work to be done, but unless I step in and BUG people it doesn’t GET done. I feel bad that sometimes the job of an Executive Director isn’t simply execution, but harassing others to execute. It makes me suspicious that maybe our roles should be reversed, with me bring the Feisty Board Member and others actually getting the paid position, buuuut… that’s not how this part of my income mosaic works.

In any case, we finally made our way into Saint Louis to play the show. Evangeline’s was dead until our fans started rolling in, and the venue’s unique setup of piping the music from the stage out to the street brought a couple of other people in too. The food was delicious, and though I felt strangely out of practice (too much time on the computer, too much time in the car, not enough time behind my guitar) we had a great time and I’m once again reminded how we’ve woven ourselves into distant peoples’ Lives.

It’s a beautiful thing.

ilyAIMY performing at Evangeline’s.

By now it’s Saturday morning, and I’m glancing at the coffee maker. Are you done yet? ARE YOU DONE YET? My stomach has been cantankerous the entire time we’ve been out and that is getting OLD (or maybe it’s just ME that’s getting old) – and of course effects my sleep as well. I’m up early simply trying to maintain a schedule, enjoying the gentle susurrus of fans and coffee burblings, but my stomach churns a little at the prospect of it all.

Bread. Bread and celery for the rest of the trip? Boof.