We have a weekend of driving with a little bit of playing. Not the ideal proportions at all. We’re just south of Pittsburgh, halfway through a drive to Toledo as we make the best of how the dice have fallen. A weekend of music in Indiana with nothing on the way out and a deadline on the way back. I don’t think it’s completely unprecedented, but it’s not something that’s happened much, and certainly not in a long, long time. I hate weekend warrioring. It worries me whence it happens that it lessens me some how. Learn me some lessons about lessening myself as I worry about being a weekend warrior.
Oh.
And I’m really quite sleepy, and really quite over-caffeinated to boot.
Heather’s middle kid is about to leave for his first year in college and we’ve spent much of the drive so far reminiscing about our own freshman years… Heather remembers her’s quite fondly…. I remember mine almost not at all. I remember my opening interactions with my roommates, one fresh from a veritable cult of anti-technology dealing with the culture-shock of Baltimore City, the other from a medical family obsessed with making 16×16 pixel portraits and illustrations of the donated dead up at Hopkins.
Most of my freshman year was spent obsessively pursuing Audrey and getting kicked out of the photo department. Flailing frantically and finding my way, picking myself up and hoping for that first kiss, growing increasingly enamoured with just playing bass and making up recording techniques with my boombox and listening to Candlebox (my roommate didn’t get this), Cypress Hill (my roommate hated this), Indigo Girls (my roommate was okay with this) and weirdly, Yanni (my roommate didn’t know what to make of this). I woke up every morning to static because that’s what Rama liked and he was a morning person who muttered and sang in his sleep. I went to bed every night to the distant wail of sirens and light rail trains.
I remember one class, a teacher who’d moved to the city late and had only been in town for 48 hours and had gotten lost on the way to the school that morning. She’d spent the day before taking snapshots of the monuments in the city and had made a slideshow for us to talking about phallic art. Lights down, she strode angrily from corner to corner of the room clicking through photographs : *click* [the Washington Monument] “Penis!” *click* [Christopher Columbus Monument] “Penis!!!” *click* [a sculpture of a very young little girl splashing in a fountain with a white obelisk rearing behind her] “I mean – this is our forefather’s idea of a good time, right? THROBBING ERECTIONS AND TWELVE YEAR OLDS!!!! What is WRONG with this CITY?!?!? PENIS!!!”
And so… school had started off right from the get-go in a frantic scrabble of hormones, erect penises and teachers who were more frustrated artists than they were educators. It took me a while to figure that out. Maryland Institute, College of Art. The comma in the middle was the source of much controversy as was the swoosh under the logo. A strange oasis in the middle of a strange city. Very passionate, very expensive, very exclusive. But my memories of that first year? Very patchy.
Heather and I compared bug stories (we’ve heard all of one another’s bug stories) and coffeehouses (we’ve heard all of one another’s coffeehouse stories), classes, dorms, movies and explorations.
We’re passing into West Virginia. More than halfway there. Visiting, actually, a roommate from college. Memories of my time with HIM are more concrete. Role playing games. Forays into Photoshop. Being slapped with ham. Heather’s heard all my slapped-with-ham stories.
Ah… college.
Meanwhile – on the road to Toledo : we’re heading into town right after some pretty ferocious storms and we’re getting updates on local roads and / or “moats”. The rest stop we just dropped in at apparently JUST got power back, but the air is sticky and nasty as if nothing ever happened. Thick and 99 in the shade.
Driving along we passed “Ohio Levelmen” or something like that – a big yellow pickup racing along with a big trailer, nominally keeping to their lane, they’ve swerved across the road a couple of times and the driver’s reclined alllll the way with one foot out the window and at least one hand scrolling through his phone. The passenger’s also reclined and snoozing, dreads flapping in the wind.
T’was a relaxed truck.
I hope they get to where they’re going.
What a strange contrasting set of weekends. Maybe if it’d have had the continuity of travel betwixt the two I wouldn’t be falling quite so deep into the trap of comparing the two, but last weekend in Western Maryland and this weekend in Indiana really couldn’t have been more different.
Western Maryland, relatively short trip, a hotel stay that smelled of dog and was simply a place to lay our heads, two gigs where our hopes of playing to people we knew were almost completely dashed as we got more and more out-of-town apologies. Perfect weather. Perfect sound.
Indiana, where we stayed with good friends, and got to make time to hang out and chat and (as Susan would say) gab and gab and gab… where the weather was grueling, heat indices over a hundred degrees, playing outdoors as our callouses went soft and our bodies sweated and strained… a comedy of errors that wasn’t funny but people driving for hours to come see us, fans that we haven’t seen in years converging to make us feel Loved, even if each hug was an exercise in finding the least-gross surface areas of human flesh.
Oh, and unlike the hotel room that smelled like dog, we stayed with cats, rats and dogs who were all friendly and strangely, wonderfully odorless.
Today we drive alllll the way home from Bloomington, IN. A drive that we’re not looking forward to, but a drive that slowly resolved into necessity as gigs crowded on one side and band schedule crowded on the other.
We’re caffeinated, gassed-up and going. I’m feeling pleasantly-exhausted and grateful that Heather is the driving machine that she is. Kristen’s doing math in the back. I’m writing up in the front. Heather’s drivin’ drivin’ pointing out birds and the roadside landscape slowly consumed by the voracious, verdant greenery of Indiana’s hungry vegetation.
Two days of relentless sunshine and two nights of pounding thunderstorms have resolved into a perfect driving day of low-hanging clouds. Keep the glare off all day. If all goes according to plan, we’ll be rolling into Baltimore with the sun going down behind us.
Drivin’ drivin’.
An ex-girlfriend dropped me a line last night. A legend from the past that Heather remembers as a striding, leather-clad goddess with flaming red hair and matching motorcycle. She’s not wrong. It’s good to hear from her and the realization that 20 years has passed since we last spoke is somewhat horrifying. I’m grateful for phone numbers that don’t change because there are very few relationships that I regret, and very few Loves from years passed that I don’t wish I was in better touch with. I’m pretty happy in Life. I want them to be happy too. I worry that the only person who remembers our time together fondly is me.
It’s good to hear from her, even though it sounds as if her dog is really, really dumb.
In other news, Idiot Brindle is my new band, and “derp derp” will be our first single. “Try To Bite The Ceiling” however, is a phrase the might find it’s way into an ilyAIMY song cause damn there’s a lot to unpack there.
