20_Wish Me Luck

Tonight, I embark on an epic adventure.  Sure, I'm only physically traveling to Station North, but that's not the point.  The point is that I'm going Off the Map in terms of things I've ever done before.  New bar?  No.  Strip club?  God no.  Something that doesn't involve alcohol on a Saturday night off?  Now you're just being silly.

I'm going to pitch a rock opera.

Now, I've written lots of music in my life time (some of it alright, even) and I've written lots of stories before, but I've never written a play, much less a rock opera.  Epic journey to uncharted territory indeed.

Tonight I'm off to the Baltimore Rock Opera Society's Pitch Party the Second.  While my initial pitch did not actually make it in to the round that will be judged at the party itself, I have been assured by the heads of the BROS that it won't be hard to find interested people at said party.

So off I go with little to no experience in the intended medium, to act like I know what I'm doing to people I've never even laid eyes on before, armed only with my own confidence and the fact that once I pay $10 at the door, the promise free beer.  Sounds like an epic quest to me.

Too bad I don't have a giant cardboard battleaxe or a viking helmet or something.  They love that kinda shit.

- Kid

19_Fall of Awesome

Hey!  Lady Trivia!  Are you watching this?  I'm blogging about you!  Yeah!  You!

We win.

So what's the title about anyway?  What is the Fall of Awesome?  This is!  And you can be a part of it too.  Yesterday, I woke up to the most pleasant surprise I've had in a good few weeks:  when I walked outside, I was not instantly hot.  After this summer, that was a wonderful thing.

So this fall, I've decided, will be the Fall of Awesome.  Every day I'm going to do one thing that I think is Awesome.  This could be running before work or doing laundry, or it could be catching up with an old friend I haven't seen or talked to in a while.

Which is sorta what I'm doing now.  Except Lady Trivia is busy blogging about me blogging about her, so we're not doing a lot of catching up at the moment.  So stop reading this and talk to me, dammit!

- Kid

18_Super Lyrics Time! (Part 1: The Fourth Wall)

These are some lyrics I wrote years ago for a song called "The Fourth Wall", which was part of a concept album I was working on:

"Your voice is fading
Drying like the ink that's on this page
As your memory bends at the corners
And doubles over
Into the double space"

They're pretty damn good, but the music never was.  The melody was cute, but it was a shameless attempt to copy Deathcab's Tiny Vessels.  (Still one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard, and worth trying to imitate, so give me some credit.)

I'm saying this because for a long time tonight, I stared at this page, writer's block consuming me.  (NOTE: You have to understand, the reason writers are so good at conveying emotion is because writer's block is the same problem that many non-writers have:  the inability to truly understand what it is you are really trying to say.  People do it every day, they sit and get angry or frustrated not because of something someone else has done, but because they don't know how to really put in to words what they are feeling.  Even if that something is a good thing.  Us writers, however, are used to it.  We're practiced at not having any idea of how to put into words what we are feeling.  So we are also practiced at breaking through those blocks.  Take that, world.)

And so, it took me a while to break through, until I remembered a conversation I had earlier tonight with one of my South African friends.  He broke up with his girlfriend (another close friend of mine down there) two months ago.  And I just found out about it tonight.

Faded voices.  Memories doubling over into the double space of long-distance communication.

That is how most of my information has come to me these days.  If not second-hand, than over the phone, or over the internet.  Rarely in person, rarely in a timely fashion.  My best friends have become voices on a phone, random oddly timed facebook chats, status updates and emoticon ridden texts.

I suppose it would be fine if it was good news, because there is no distance too great to stop good news from being awesome.  But bad news?  Quite the opposite.  Any distance, even arm's length, seems too great.

Strange that it seems like all the lyrics I wrote four years ago come back now to be relevant.  Maybe I was smarter back then.

- Kid

17_Give It Up Boy

I'm not one to get violent.  I'm not one to lose my cool.  I have before, many times, to my detriment and I learned that losing your cool is not conducive to anything, really.  I learned this in middle school and I've been pretty chill ever since.

So, having definitively realized that over $600 has been stolen from me this past Monday, I have been impressed with my temperament.  Not gonna lie.  Because all sorts of thoughts have crossed my mind.

But that's Baltimore.  We live in a city of disappointment, a city of devastation, a city of hoping for a better tomorrow that may or may not come.  We live in a city of anger.  As I work on my novel, I can't help but think about this fact.  We live in a city trapped in a cycle of anger, a city continuously wrapping itself around its worst parts.  A city unable to look past McCullough and Preston, Butcher's Hill,  Bel Air Eddison.  And those who I hate the most, those who could possibly drive me to violence, are those who fled a long time ago, sharing strange, tacit nods with each other as they understood the need to move North, as, a block South, a black family moved in.

The people who fled.

The people whose offspring flood the city now, but only on the weekends and only in certain neighborhoods.  Because you can't go anywhere else.  It's too dangerous.

And those in the county wonder why a person like my housemate would think it OK to rob me.  They don't want to admit that they did it first, robbing the city of any chance.  They don't want to admit that the anger started with them.

That's when I get violent, these days, when I think like this.  When I really look and see the ruin of this city and how it could become great, were only people to care about it anymore.  And although it's an old song but a good one, I can't help but love Straylight Run's "Hands In The Sky (Big Shot)" in times like these.  It encompasses it all.  The anger, the violence and, most importantly, the obviousness of the problem:  "Tear it out of these open pages" indeed.  It's all there, written clearly on the streets for anyone to read.

- Kid

16_Lifting Weights

Mark your calendars:  Thursday, July 26th, 2012 was the day that I, Kid Brother, signed up for a gym.  I've been involved in the Glitterati's cardio challenge this past week and a half and joining the gym seemed a good way to keep myself on track.  Plus, when you spend $70 ever thirty days on something, you tend to want to use it.

So the past few days I've been gyming hard, lifting weights and running on treadmills and such, trying to undo some of the damage I've done to myself over the past few years of relative inactivity.

And it feels great.  Well.  Sorta.  My legs and my lower back disagree with that statement, but I, in general, feel awesome.  At least I feel like I'm doing something.  Which is a big help.

And hey, if this schedule of willing myself out of bed at 9am continues, I might even find time during the day to get some writing done.  And that would be magnificent.

- Kid

15_Chronic City: Baltimore Edition

I just finished reading Johnathan Lethem's Chronic City and the timing couldn't have been more appropriate.  You see, in that book, among the various other happenings in Manhattan is The Tiger, a mythical beast that destroys buildings in the city seemingly at random.  As the story progresses, the buildings destroyed by the Tiger begin to directly effect the characters.

It seems like something out of a work of fiction, right?

I give you Light Street, just a block north of the Harbor.  A water mane burst yesterday, flooding all the important streets Downtown and making travel through the city almost impossible.  So was it just an accident, a random happenstance, or has the Tiger migrated South to Charm City?  We shall see...

- Kid

14_Plans

In one hour, my week begins.  I've come to see my life from a true bartender's perspective:  my weekend is Monday and Tuesday, my week begins after that.  Now that Josh is moving across country and I'm picking up almost every shift of Yonko's while he drives with Josh, I will be completely incomunicado for the next few weeks, spending my time off not being out at a bar, for fear of the Vietnam-esque flashbacks that that may bring on.  (Speaking of which, I just started Dennis Johnson's Tree Of Smoke and so far, so good.)

Last night, I tried to cram it in a bit, knowing that for the next six days I'd be chained behind the bar, more or less.  Janine and I ended up at Sticky Rice for some karaoke because we both wanted to see hot tattooed people, something you rarely see in Federal Hill.  This neighborhood is where conversations about punk music, anarchy and other generally alternative topics, come to die.  Not that I'm terribly into anarchy, but it is a nice break from the usual barely repressed NeoCon dialogue we get down here.

Hot tattooed people there were a plenty.  To the point where it was almost sensory overload.  We escaped to BAR for a nightcap.  Also, Janine totally won karaoke with a rather sultry rendition of "Black Velvet".  It was pretty hot, not gonna lie.

And so upon waking up today, a thought struck me.  If I'm going to go on vacation up to Philadelphia at the end of the month, once Yonko gets back, why not take the opportunity to see what the world of Philadelphia ink has to offer me?  So off it was to peroogle Philly tattoo artists.  So not only do I get to escape Baltimore, escape work and get to see some of my best friends (who I haven't seen in WAY too long, by the way), I get to get started on my long awaited sleeve on my left arm.  I.  Cannot.  Wait.  It's going to be amazing.

Pics, of course, will happen.

- Kid