therewasaboundarytousthen.blogspot.com/
…because most of time, Tumblr is just too fucking retarded when it comes to simple things like formatting posts, adding pics and adding a title to a post you want to add a photo to.
please shut your GODDAMNED mouth
A girl named Tara sat at a table over from me and talked loudly about her day in a college art class, her roommate’s boyfriend and her lack of a job. I know her name was Tara because when she was talking to someone on the phone, she said, “I love my name….Tara is a fucking GREAT name….you don’t think Tara is sexy?”.
My guess is that she was 20 but she acted like she was 14. She didn’t seem very bright but what could I possibly know with such a brief introduction visit to her world.
Admittedly, I thought she was adorable and I hated myself for thinking so.
She must have sat and talked at that table for an entire 30 minutes and there were brief bits and moments that made me feel like ripping my own head off my shoulders.
She seemed to be completely oblivious to anyone else in the cafe and talked as loudly and openly as she wanted to, which maybe isn’t a bad thing to most people but I absolutely hate it. Enjoy your fucking conversation with whatever dumbshit is stupid enough to hang out with your obnoxious and clueless ass but don’t force me to eavesdrop into your creepy conversations, especially when I’m there, trying to get my own shit done.
As she left, she looked over at me, smiled nicely and said, “I love your tattoos. Who did them?”.
I wasn’t about to give her the names of the various tattooers who put their marks on my skin. What was the point? She didn’t REALLY give a shit about my tattoos.
”God”, I responded. “God tattooed me”.
Her dumb response: “Oh, really? KEWL!”.
April 4th
I woke up to strange noises happening outside. I got up to look and was blown away (almost literally) by what I saw. Rain was coming down so heavily, you could barely see 10 feet ahead of you and the wind looked violent and vengeful. Like it had come to Nashville to tear it a whole new batch of assholes. I checked the weather app on my phone: Severe rain/winds, floods and tornado warnings.
TORNADO WARNINGS!
I showered and had just gotten dressed, thinking I’d brave the storm and find some food, when Teresa texted me this little doozy: ‘GET IN THE BASEMENT’. I thought she might have just been messing around so i replied with, ‘seriously?’ for which she replied, ‘yes! get in the basement and shut the door behind you’.
Holy shit. Am I in danger here, i wondered? I mean, Teresa lives here. Wouldn’t she know? I tried thinking back on the last time I had been in a tornado. Oh, that’s right. I hadn’t been.
Fuck.
I walked over to the basement door, opened it and peered down into the dark abyss that it resembled. At that moment, all the power went out. The whole neighborhood, hell, most of Nashville had no electricity.
Fuck this.
I put on my jacket (AKA my trusty hoodie), grabbed my keys, went outside and ran to my car. Once inside I could feel the rain pounding against the car and the intense wind attempting to push it over. I have to admit, it was a little hairy but I decided to tempt fate. I drove into town and hoped that my new favorite 24 hour cafe had power.
It did.
Along the way to Coco Cafe, I saw various trees toppled over and a few roofs that had been caved in or had been completely separated from the rest of whatever building they were on top of. Traffic signals and street lights were out and everyone was driving like an asshole. I got to the cafe and hunkered down there for the rest of the day and until show time.
Eventually, the storm let up and everything was back to normal. Well, not everything. Power was still out throughout much of the city and when I got to the Little Hamilton space, I was greeted by Teresa and Sully, some of the nice locals including the people from the great band Chicken Little (who i played with a couple of years back at Gilman and who might just be the most adorable band ever) and a candle-lit venue.
A nice little crowd appeared out of seemingly nowhere and threw money into the donation box. We performers played completely acoustically and in mostly darkness, surrounded only by a half-circle of tea candles and nothing else.
It was an amazing little show and it gave me new-found hope for the younger, underground music/art/politics scene and made (makes) me wish I had a small space of my own again, one that was supported and maintained by the music, the arts and lively discussions. I’m always looking for little, out of the way buildings, warehouses, garages and storefronts, that I could turn into a community-minded spot for people who still give a shit about such things. Maybe I really do need to move out of Sac to find such a place. I know that it takes hard work, diligence and a good deal of money to get something like that going but I know it would be worth it to try and make happen, in Sacramento or anywhere.
April 3rd
I didn’t have a gig on this day and i had nowhere in particular to be or do, so I took my time driving back to Nashville. I decided to find a cafe with wi-fi somewhere and sit and figure out what to do next. Again, it was either use Teresa’s open-ended flight home or try and scrape a few gigs together before heading back to California. I decided to go with trying to play more shows and posted on Facebook, asking people for booking help in cities in between Nashville and Denver. Amazingly, people got right on it and within a few days, pick-up shows had come together.
Teresa rallied and got me a pickup gig for April 4th, in Nashville, at an underground collective called Little Hamilton.
Riley, my singer-songwriter buddy in St. Louis, hooked me up with a show on April 6th at an art space there called Lemp Arts Centre and an April 7th show at The Sideshow in Columbia, Missouri.
Ven, another former Sacramento and singer-songwriter pal hooked me up with a basement show in Kansas City on April 8th.
Bob, a longtime old punk rock friend from the old Outhouse/Lawrence, Kansas days booked me at the Booby Trap bar he does sound at, in Topeka.
Damian, my buddy in Colorado Springs, who books at the great Triple Nickel there, scrounged me up a gig, as well.
It had all come together so quickly, I was starting to feel like I was forgetting something, maybe a show someone else had offered and I say ‘yes’ to already.
These gigs were all last minute and getting the word out about them, meant bombardment bulletins on Facebook and MySpace, at this point. And that’s what we all did, basically. All I needed was to make enough money to get to the next town and If I could get gas money and sell some merch, I would be ok. Not great but ok. Problem about the merch was, I had sent off all my vinyl and most of my CDs so I burned more copies of my Homegrown Series CDs. At $5 a pop, you can’t go wrong with those babies, right?
After a couple of hours of bad coffee (Starbucks) and computer head from staring at the Internet, I took off back to Nashville and Teresa and Sully’s place.
It was nice to be hopeful about something again.
