December 04, 2005

1:09 a.m.

After Bridgewater

The gig was okay, better in some ways than in others. I made surprisingly few mistakes considering we haven't been playing that much. One of the volunteers, a woman whose name we were all chagrined to not remember, who is a huge fan and a very sweet person, was talking to us in the "greenroom" which was the minister's office, before the show started. Carol was trying to make funny comments which weren't quite hitting the mark, because she had a back spasm this morning and had to take a muscle relaxant, so her brain was pretty soft. I heard her floundering a little, so I put my arm around her and explained to the nameless woman why Carol was being so inarticulate. She quickly replied, "Oh! That's okay; before I left home I shot back two Slippery Nipples, and my husband had to drive me here!" It turns out that a Slippery Nipple is made of Kahlua and Drambuie (and I may have spelled that wrong, being so out of the world of liquor). So every time I saw her throughout the evening I had to try very hard not to think about her Slippery Nipples.

Other than that it was a rather uneventful evening. We didn't sell much, but we got an encore and a bunch of gushing responses. We dusted off our five Christmas carols, as 'tis the season. Overall I'm not the least bit interested in hearing carols yet this year. Usually it's begun by Hallowe'en, but something's different this year. When I encounter one on the radio I turn it off.

I have no romance in my life. Even my touring is no longer romantic. I'm reading Sherlock Holmes, for heaven's sake. Who could be less romantic that he?

Oh, here's something that might be construed as creepy. Years ago, when I lived here before, and broke up with the bipolar ex boyfriend who killed himself later, there was a night when he came back to this apartment, drunk and roaring, and cut his wrist outside my front apartment door. He didn't have keys any more, thank God, but he was out there puking and bleeding at midnight and I had to call 911. Anyway, the next day I pulled up the carpet pieces on the top three stairs and threw them away, and had to scrub the blood and ick smears that went down the stairway walls where they'd carried him down in a chair contraption because he was too drunk to walk. Last week I took the garbage out the front stairs, and when I came back up I noticed I missed a couple of spots just outside the top door. That was in 1997! And there's still some remnant of him there!

I sat looking at it, trying to figure out if I felt wigged out by it, or haunted, or what. Not so much; maybe not at all. A little disgusted. But, you know, sometimes you miss a spot. I'll get to it this week. It's not very noticeable, obviously, and it's not going to spread. And Ed is gone. In a Buddhist sense it has no meaning at all; it's just there, and I can clean it off.

And now it's 1:26am, and I have to go to bed, and all further knitting will have to wait until tomorrow.