I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity. Edgar Allen Poe
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. - H. L. Mencken Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so -Bertrand Russell What I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are ... -James Branch Cabell
September 19, 2013 - 12:12 p.m. Two hours late. I better start writing. I blogged very late yesterday after school. Then I was very good and not only graded quizzes but entered the grades. What I did not do is prepare tomorrow's lesson. The first thing I'm going to do is literal equations and I can do that in my sleep. I don't know what follows that. I keep hoping I'll get the text book. How can they not have gotten me one yet. Don't you just have to request desk copies from the publisher? Isn't that automatic when a school assigns a book? We are making sales for them. If the book is not there tomorrow I'm going to contact the publisher myself and see if I can get something done. It isn't fair to the students that I can't assign problems from the text book I made them buy. I copy them from the old edition and hand them out. That's a pain in the neck and doesn't encourage the students to read the book. For dinner I made my weekly trip to Hog Pit USA for chicken fried steak. I'm addicted like an addict. Then I headed down to Joe's Pub to see Barnaby Bright. I was doing merch (you knew that without me telling you) so I had to get there early to set up. Turns out I couldn't set up that early. In fact I had to wait till Nathan and Becky were sound checking. It seems that you can't do the merch yourself at Joe's at it would require being in two places at once. Though not on merch duty I dragooned Chris isn't helping me. There was a bit of a dilemma with what to do with everything as the merch area is in the lobby and I didn't feel comfortable leaving it there unattended. That was solved when the merch person for the artist sharing the bill Jann Klose (Yan Close but no cigar) said she was staying out with the merch. She wasn't a friend or a fan of Jann, she was doing it as part of an internship working with his manager. I finished setting up shortly before the show started and sat at a table with friends of Nathan and Becky. Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to talk and get friendly. I had friends scattered throughout the audience. In addition to Chris there were Seth, Gene & Isabel who pretty much sat behind me, My favorite seats at Joe's, Bill from Outpost in the Burbs and Linda who described herself as Fred's Linda. Each of them has presented Barnaby Bright. I think Linda had them at a house concert. Now I'm not sure if she did. Lots of other people in the audience had. I hate that even with the new phone I can't take pics that satisfy me. Joe's Pub's sets are short but they managed to do some new songs which excited me. Chris was surprised that I didn't remember that they had done one of them at the Garden stage � in January 2012. Doesn't he know me? Two minutes after their set ended someone asked me what the name of their last song was and for the life of me I couldn't remember. Then he said "It was something about old coats." Then even I could get it as the first song on their latest album "The Longest Day" is "Old Coats." So am I out of things to say about Barnaby Bright? They appeal to the Bach part of my brain. It's folk music with large influences of jazz and rock. Becky and Nathan are two of the sweetest people in the world but much of their music is creepy. Murder and Mayhem are par for the course. I really need to introduce them to Laura Dunn. They are playing the west coast, if they hit Portland I'll make sure she knows about it. Nathan thinks his guitar is a percussion instrument. Linda said that Becky's voice sounded like Annie Haslam, my first musical crush. I don't actually hear that but I like Barnaby Bright with the same parts of my brain I like Annie's band Renaissance. Same mixture of instrumental and vocal virtuosity and ambitious songwriting. This was a full band show and that's always special. The cello adds a lot. There's always room for cello. I stole that from somebody at the ilyAIMY show last weekend, probably Kristen. My plan was to go to the lobby after their set, sell some CDs till things settled down and then go in to hear Jann who I had heard good things about. It didn't work out that way. Lots of people left and hung out in the lobby and I needed to be there the entire time. So instead of hearing Jann I was entertained by the delightful Heather, the grad student/intern that marched for Jann. I was immediately prejudiced towards her because she looks like Becca. She too is from Maryland and went to college in Baltimore like Carey did. And she writes YA novels like Carey. She was designed for me to like her. Most of the crowd already head the CDs but I made sales to Jann fans that didn't know them and sold posters ant t-shirts including the brand new one that just arrived. I felt very much like me, connected, the opposite of the alienation I experienced last week. People kept coming over to talk to me. Some were my friends that I knew and others knew of me. That's what happens when you talk a lot on Facebook. Me, Debra, Jann, Linda, Nathan, & Becky I got in some quality time with Becky and Nathan but remembered something that I wanted to talk about with them this morning. Of course I already forgot what that was. The song that Chris was surprised I forgot was about going in an alien spaceship so I had to tell Becky about the mother ship. I like the way I told her about it. I didn't ask, I just said, "So you know how there are times you feel you're from another planet." I like her far too much for her to not feel that sometimes. One day the mother ship will come and take us back to our home world. I've thought about that forever but refined the idea with Carey. It will pick us up at Falcon Ridge and Oliver Steck is the ship's captain. This should be obvious to you, at least if you know Ollie. You DO know you're from another planet, right? Heather is new to the City and lives in Brooklyn so I went home the way I could get her to the train she needed, the . So we took the to Canal where she could switch to the and I could switch to the . That's a lot of stops and not as fast as taking the would have been but it was late and felt better with the company and as a matter of fact so did I. I signed the Pro-Truth Pledge: please hold me accountable.
Memories: Not that Horrid Song - May 29, 2018
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