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.

He Went to Work

As soon as he closed the door, I ran around the apartment opening drawers smelling everything. I know we rely on our eyes and ears and fingers for the present but smell connects us to the past. The blanket in the library: popcorn and deodorant - we used to watch movies on Sundays in the basement. The tennis shirt on the dryer: ick! sweat – he used to hang it on a table in the laundry room.

Every new drawer was a mountain of memories. His hairdryer. How many times did I stand in the doorframe of the bathroom watching him dry his hair? Surely I must’ve had something better to do. Towel around his waste, he’d run the dryer with the comb attachment straight back over his head. At the end, he’d either get a drink and sit watching tennis or he’d part his hair to the side and finish getting dressed.

My mother's dressing table didn’t have the curlers and alligator clips I expected. Instead, it was modernized to carry what she needs nowadays. Further evidence that the concrete foundations I set my world upon were made of dust and duct tape. That’s not a bad thing, just a disorienting part of growing up I guess.

Take the pots and pans we had when I was young. They felt eternal, like they were the only pots and pans we would ever own. I’m sure my parents have always bought new pans every few years but the years when I was young lasted forever! When I see new cookware in their kitchen, I have to remind myself that it's normal to replace old pots with new ones.

So lucky to have had dinner with him. If he died tomorrow, I had dinner with him tonight. There will always be questions that I want to ask him - I want to spend more time with him now than ever before. As I grow closer to his age, experiencing more of what he has experienced, any chance to ask questions and get answers is a gift from the heavens.

Smile, and know that you know nothing about the world. He’s laughing at himself as he answers your questions, knowing that he asked the same ones for the same silly reasons… Life is a crazy parade.

Three from Flight 27 (and San Francisco) part 2

The first time I ever road a motorbike was in 2007. Ilana and I were living in Ghana, working at an NGO when our Director told us about the “largest Film Festival in Sub-Saharan West-Africa,” FESPACO. We took a 20-hour bus from Accra to Ouagadougou and found a place to stay with some people we met in a taxi crossing the boarder into Burkina Faso. It sounds insane now, three years later, to say that we quite literally hopped on a bus in Ghana with no set plans or preparation for lodging or the road home, but that's pretty much exactly how it happened.

In addition to the amazing food (Burkina Faso is a former French Colony) everyone owned a two-wheeled something or other. Bicycles, mopeds, motorbikes, motorcycles… it was dizzying to watch the traffic race by, Muslim garb dancing behind the riders.

Naturally, I had to get my hands on one. We found someone to loan me his bike for a few days in exchange for an absurdly small fee. With a top speed of forty or fifty miles an hour and a marijuana leaf sticker pealing off the front, you’d never guess that it had the heart of a Harley. Riding the bike, we explored all that the Film Festival had to offer: Films (obviously) cafés, West-African grub, and an enormous crafts market. At every outlet, there was hundreds and hundreds of bikes parked next to each other. It was paradise surrounded by the Sahara.

One night, on our way home, we decided to ride around a lake near the house we were staying in. I opened the throttle as wide as I could - racing us through cool air from the lake. A boy riding a motorbike with his girlfriend’s arms locked around his waste at midnight next to a lake in West Africa.

In love?

Last Saturday, at 7:30 a.m., I held the front brake of a Suzuki such-and-such 250 and swung my leg over the saddle. It had started pouring the day before and wasn't going to stop anytime soon. Worse than the rain, the wind lurched up in gusts strong enough to knock over the porto-potty at one end of the vacant lot. Although waterproof rain-gear covered my entire body, the water quickly soaked my hands and feet and then climbed my arms and legs towards my chest. Whenever we were lined up, I hunched over the gas tank and touched the engine block with my gloved-hands to keep them from going numb. We rode for about four hours, barely going above ten or twelve mph, learning how to manipulate the clutch, throttle and brakes.

In love.

One thing I hate; one thing I love

I hate when a rockstar complains... about anything. Rumor has it, Neil Peart complains about shows, band members and his riding buddies throughout his three books about motorcycling, travel and music. Really? I mean, really? If you don't like it, don't do it! But to sit inside a 360° drum kit in front of thousands of fans and piss and moan about it? He wrote the lyrics for most of the songs the fans are singing along to.. and he's upset? What a douche.

I have a fantastic record player, as I've mentioned a few times. And I've got some fantastic records. One album that isn't so fantastic is one of my dad's old Howlin' Wolfe records. The music is amazing, but the record itself is in rough shape. As he and I were driving around San Diego last week, I told him he had played it out. He laughed and said, "Oh yeah, I played that one plenty of times. Plenty of times drunk, too." My dad is about as cool and collected as they come so the image of him stumbling over to the record player, attempting to massage the disc onto the plate, scraping the needle across the surface, and then stumbling back, closing his eyes, ripping air guitar moves, all at three a.m... it's priceless.

Three from Flight 27 (and San Francisco) part 1

Every Friday, junior year of high school, I drove straight home at three o’clock after a week of class, rehearsals, practices and nagging teachers. As soon as I turned the lock on the kitchen door, my dog would go nuclear and practically piss herself with anticipation of, well, going to the bathroom. I grabbed her leash, tossed my bag on the counter, and ran her around the block as fast as I could.

Coco inside, water-bowl filled, money in my pocket? Check, check and check. Diving back into the car, I blasted the radio and drove north on I-87. Usually, the traffic would back up miles before the Tapan Zee bridge and I’d have time to review whatever I was supposed to have practiced the week before – A Nirvana tune, a Chilli Peppers tune, a Police tune.

Finally, head bouncing with anticipation, I drove down my drum teacher's driveway, grabbed my sticks off the passenger seat and headed into his basement. The smell of stale cigarettes still comforts me years later. We would sit side by side, striking a drum pad to a metronome, perfecting technique and warming up for the main event: playing the kit along to rock and roll. His drums were loud and obnoxious and he had me playing with tree trunks to get all the power I could out of them.

Our lesson was supposed to last an hour but I usually stayed for two or three. He’d show me more tracks to learn and beats to play; we’d talk about drumming philosophy and try to justify our mutual obsession with the instrument.

Around six or seven o’clock, I would drive home with no traffic. The drive home only took about forty-five minutes. Anything I put in the CD player sounded amazing after my musical neurons had been ignited all afternoon but one time, the amazing happened. I started “Dark Side of the Moon” in my teacher’s driveway and as the closing heartbeat faded away, I pulled into my own driveway. I couldn’t move for a half hour. It was as though my life was choreographed and had an amazing soundtrack and all I had to do was keep playing, keep drumming and keep studying music.

Fast forward nine years and we are standing in the doorway of my apartment after our last show. It had been raining to that Eeyore point where everything indoors was damp and moldy. Any person you spoke to was wet, tired and grouchy. And the gig? The stage monitors were lousy (venue’s fault), I brought the wrong snare drum (my fault), and the room had barely enough people to cover the club’s overhead. You have to laugh as you say it out loud: We made $5.00 from the door that night. Our lead singer almost missed the show and I played like shit for no discernable reason. It was a rough night to say the least.

In love.