static and sound

We're tired as she gives me a ride home, and I've turned down a movie-and-dinner because I'm just too tired, but I take a walk and think briefly about doing something creative but end up reading for awhile, drinking some tea, and falling asleep on the couch at 9:30. Such is the swinging Clevelandian lifestyle.

A well-played poorly-umped softball game was a loss for the team but a gain in morale, music on Sunday morning was loud and full of life, with all those guitars and people who can sing and who get along well together. Before the congregants straggle in for the early service, we finish practicing and start messing around with samba rhythms and funk jams thanks to one of the most amazing bassists I know and a drummer with a great sense of humor who spent much of life in the southern hemisphere and can play anything, and his sisters who sing so well, and maybe it's the amazing properties of the SG, or just playing a lot more, but it glides so effortlessly beneath my hands, chicken-scratching and tremolo picking up and down the fretboard and letting the tones ring out and space for the rhythm to breathe. We sound great, and I'm euphoric.

After that we have our first band practice/hanging out time, driving down into the Flats to an old warehouse-turned-apartment building overlooking the river next to a swinger's club, and mess around with the embryonic bits of song, getting the hang of playing with each other, attempting to work through 'Gut Feeling' and realizing we're missing a chord until the neighbor switches off the Sam Cooke and decides to school us by playing it through the wall. It's not as soundproofed as it feels in there, so insulated and dark like a womb, and we play for awhile, listen to a bunch of songs by X and part ways a few hours later because there's still some day left and I've got seeds to sow and a garden to look at and I wander through Clevelandia down to the beach and to the abandoned church with my phone and a big plastic cup for mulberries. The solitude feels strangely essential. Two years after everything went wrong, it's beginning to feel right again.

connections and dissections

I sat across a table last night with a cup of yerba mate tea and a growling stomach because it's more datelike when someone else pays and I'm not one to take advantage of gender dynamics like that, and it's a coffeeshop so I don't want want bakery when mine is better or an overpriced salad and as we talk I'm noticing a tendency to zone out into smile/nods, because we've covered all this ground before and I want to talk about something else, but I'm not sure what or if I'm just being moody and unreasonable or if I'm just spoiled by my morning coffee and snark partners in peonage and have become too accustomed to a certain level of most-encompassing discourse. And I'm not sure where he's at either, because we're not kids anymore, and usually the lines are laid out more firmly: platonic or not so much.


I drive home, coming up the stairs I realize I'm so glad to be alone now, wondering how this happened as I scoop some leftovers out of the fridge to nuke in the microwave and make myself some tea and wait for the neighbors to stop by with house keys and cat-watching details. There are other things I'm thinking about, spinstery things like my garden plot and the cats that will be taking up residence this weekend and what I want to make next on the pottery wheel and how I need to start taking these little scattered bits and get my guitar out and see if I can write something I'd want to listen to. It might be that this is easier and safer. 

It's not that I'm antisocial at all, I hosted dinner on Monday night and when the Queen of the Bondo and her husband came over, we hung out for a bit in the living room talking about books and cities and such, but then I cherish this space of solitude that's my own domain and wonder if that makes me selfish or self-preserving or a little bit of both.