Ain't Karma Grand?

The following isn't true, but it makes me laugh to imagine something like it happening to someone.

I pulled up to the club on my Sportster, guitar strapped to my back. Outside, a gorgeous girl sauntered up to me before I'd cut the engine.

"I like your bike." she said, with a southern accent that would melt the honey out of a beehive. "Are you playing tonight?"

"Yyyyup."

"How's about taking me for a ride when you're done with the show?"

"I think that'd be just fine - I'll meet you right here in about an hour."

Now, I have rules about riding and going out. Actually just one rule: If I'm on two wheels, I'm not drinking anything, period. So I I hang out for a half-hour, hop up on the stage and plug in. Before the first song ended, a fat guy with an enormous cowboy hat yelled up at me:

"Why dunt you grab a beer en let someone else play, asshole!?!"

I replied to the crowd through the mic, "Well, you can't please them all, right?" A good chuckle, some applause here and there, but this guy wouldn't let it go:

"I dunt see you drinking none - what are you, some sort uh homo?"

"Wow, well, I guess we'll just move along to the next song then, shall we?"

And I played through the set with this guy yelling at me anytime I wasn't making noise. He was convinced that because I wasn't drinking like everyone else in the bar, I was "a bitch that ought to be stretched out on the subway tracks." It was painful as hell - every minute of the gig stretched on to an hour with this jerk-off screaming up at me.

After I packed up, I walked back outside and my southern bell was walking down the street towards me. Apparently she had missed the show - what luck! And better yet, she still wanted to go for a ride. So I started the bike, hopped on, and let her sit behind me, hands around my waist.

Then she said, "My brother is staying with me in the city for the weekend - I have to wait for him to come out of the bar so that I can tell him how to get home." About a minute later the douchebag from the show walks out of the door towards me. Perfect, I'm thinking. This is all I need - this guy is gonna ruin everything. But before I had a chance to say anything, she said to him, "Clarence, you walk on down the block and take the L-train to Lorimer. Walk three blocks to Jackson street and you'll know where you are. I'll see you in the morning."

He knew exactly who I was and I knew exactly who he was and neither of us said anything for a beat.

I shrugged and added, "Have a nice night on the subway, asshole!" and rode off.

Sankofa

Nostalgia: Pronunciation: \nä-ˈstal-jə, nə- also nȯ-, nō-; nə-ˈstäl-\

Function: noun

Etymology: New Latin, from Greek nostos return home + New Latin -algia; akin to Greek neisthai to return, Old English genesan to survive, Sanskrit nasate he approaches

Date: 1729

1 : the state of being homesick : homesickness 2 : a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also : something that evokes nostalgia

The danger of wistfully yearning for a return is that you might fool yourself into thinking that you can travel back in time and relive or (oh God no) change the past. Enter the most beautiful print the world has ever known.

It's hard to bring the magic of Dudley home with you. It's harder than working for your Cub Emblem or Senior Flag because once you leave the campus, your support system of leaders, staff, and campers isn't condensed into forty+ cabins surrounded by the Adirondaks. I spent last weekend cleaning up the Witherbee Theater. To say the building is sacred space is a gross understatement - it holds nearly everything wonderful I've done in the fourteen summers I've lived and worked in Westport, NY.

On my drive home, the nostalgia not just of past summers but of the past forty-eight hours is already eating at my heart! I wish I could go back to Friday night when I walked down the Dudley road and Davo drove up to me blasting some funk/horn tune out of his station wagon; when I met Matt Storey for the first time that evening. I wish I could go to Saturday afternoon when I vacuumed an entire summer's worth of grass out of the stairwell leading up to the office; when Ryan Joyce showed up for lunch. I wish I could go back to Saturday night when Ben Schloat surprised me by showing up for s'mores and a fire; when my sister and her girlfriend broke out guitars and screamed lyrics at the surrounding woods...

There isn't an easy answer, solution or magic machine that can let you go back. But there is an Adinkra symbol. I guess that'll have to do for the time being...

Re-Introduction

Apologies for my month-long vacation. I began working for a new website geared at revolutionizing the way kids access education. As a professional musician (am I a professional musician? Sometimes I am. Other times I'm a film editor. A lot of the time, I'm a program coordinator. A lot more of the time, I'm a manager for a band, albeit a defacto one.) I wrote mostly short paragraphs about pitfalls and triumphs in the music scene.

Now back to the show...

I work at a non-profit. I take in applications and forms and responses and I do things with them. Important things. Mind-altering things. Lemme ask you, the general public, a question: Do you live in two places simultaneously? When you get mail, do you have two addresses that each letter/pkge/magazine gets sent to? No?

Why in Christ's name would someone put down two email addresses on a form? Why? I want to know. I want to know right now. Why would they do this? Why would they do this to me? Someone tell me. What the fuck am I supposed to do with john.doe@gmail.com and jdoe@blowme.edu? If I were to put that into a field and try to use it in any sort of data analysis, the program would call me an asshole and crash.

I hate this shit.