|
theme by us |
I hope that deep inside you.. there’s a sweet eternal song.. i hope the words are pretty.. & that you’ll always sing along…
Ok now on to the Rock Boat update… im a little behind… too busy living life to write about it… but I guess that’s not necessarily a bad thing… so the night before my trip, Scott came and met me and we went to see the barettas play at the horseshoe… I miss carly, we don’t see each other enough… then I headed over to tonya’s to sleep for a couple hours before heading to the airport… we went super early to prep for the insane new security measures due to the underwear bomber… but it wasn’t actually as bad as I had anticipated… there was a secondary pat down… but it wasn’t as intense as everyone made it out to be and the line ups werent long, but I think we just lucked out with the timing…
Eventually we got on the boat… the weather in Tampa was pretty dismal… not dismal by Toronto comparison, but definitely not the kind of weather one hopes to find when heading out on a tropical getaway…luckily weather isnt really all that detrimental to fun-to-be-had on this ship… tonya had a game plan this year, having learned the hard way last year… Last year, our schedule was a bit off… the first night kicked off a sleepless week and though it was super fun what with harassing our sleeping roommates with stray band members and such… we missed out on a lot… we didn’t go to bed before 7 am any of the nights and it was a night longer last year… we would stay up all night, come to bed for a 2 hour power nap and then drag ourselves to the next event… we had an incredible time, but there were so many shows that we wanted to see that we missed… so many musicians that I didn’t develop an appreciation for until after the cruise… so this year I wanted to make sure that we didn’t fall into the same situation… and shockingly enough, we were really quite organized… we had down time and we managed to get to every event we wanted to… though im sure there was some incredible hidden gem songwriter that snuck under my radar and when I eventually get around to listening to the sampler they send out in advance…
We attended the artist vs artist trivia contest which was hilarious… and we went to karaoke hosted by someone and managed to get a couple songs in running between shows… went to the disco for a dance party when Will Hoge was hosting… hung out with Michael Tolcher on the first night… tonya and I were looking back on the first time we saw him, years ago opening for Maroon 5 when they were playing the Opera House… its been a very long time… back when Mission Responsible had a rap in the middle… haha… he played a couple really good shows, which also included breaking out some bling to cover Eminem’s Lose Yourself… I heard really good things about a band called The Bridges and made friends with their drummer Jeremy, who by the way is the cutest kid ever… we had a homeschooling deep south styles heart to heart… I didn’t get to see them play on their own, and im kind of sad I missed them, because everyone was raving about how good they were… but by far the artist that made the boat for me this year was Will Hoge… I had heard of him through Audrey and ilana who have been fans for a few years… and I knew one song… but I was absolutely floored by how impressive he is live… he has this incredible soulful rasp and I was really impressed… he was also involved in the songwriters panel which included Jim Bianco, Stephen Kellogg, Pat McGee and Marc Broussard… and it was such a cool experience to hear them talk candidly about the songwriting experiences and just interesting little anecdotes and the one thing I love the most about the Rock Boat is the collaborations… I love seeing these incredible talents admire each other and perform together… during the songwriting panel Will performed his song Baby Girl and it was really quite cute to listen to the other men in the panel gush about how much they love the song and how they sing it to their daughters (oh, yeah by the way, apparently musicians shoot sensitive sperm too, because they all seem to produce daughters with their teacher-wives)… it was such a wicked experience… to watch them jam, and talk about how they wish they had written each others songs… and where in some circumstances the lovefest, metaphorical ego felating may have come off as arrogant… this was so genuine, such heartfelt admiration all around that it was really quite cute… but it also lead to my newfound adoration for Will Hoge… which was increased when it turned out he was our neighbour, who would come into the hall half naked and yell at us for being noisy… but he also taught me the finer points of blackjack, once he saw my frustration with craps… which besides not having the slightest idea what the rules were, I was more put off of, because its apparently illegal to pull up a chair to a craps table… I liked blackjack way better… our dealer was from the ukraine and was incredibly interesting and will introduced me to the table as the meanest Canadian he knows… haha… hes fun and funny and insanely talented… I think everyone should check him out.. I find him very interesting… I think if I get married, I want it to be to someone like Will Hoge… incredible talented, scruffy… usually looks like he may smell like whiskey and sweat, and like he would probably fuck you with his cowboy boots on… that’s right, I said it…
Anyway, eventually we got off the boat… after trying to rescue the disaster we left our room in… we were legit the last people off the boat… some of the cruise employees left before we did… so we said goodbye to everyone and headed to our hotel… the big recovery day plan was to get to the hotel, get in bed the 4 of us… order way more food than we could ever imagine eating… maybe buy a cake… cuddle, recover and watch terrible Lifetime movies… so we get to the room, we decide on some food to order and start lounging… suddenly Audrey gasps… “is that a bug?”… I assume they are just overreacting… ive never been one to be afraid of bees or spiders and I don’t really have patience for it… but then ilana goes “is that another one?” and told me to come look… so I do… and I see a tiny speck.. and then I see another tiny speck… with legs… and then I go to the other bed and I see tiny specks there too… and then one tiny speck fucking jumped at my face… now I had heard that fleas jump, but I had always thought that to be a myth… its not a myth at all… this creature jumped at my face… so having been attacked by bird mites in the past (long story, but upon the death of a bird living in a tree attached to my house, its little disgusting birdy mites went on the hunt for the next living host to feed off of… which so happened to be me, bed ridden after surgery, being eaten alive by repulsive little vermin…which my mother thought was psychosomatic… ) anyway, little bugs that you can barely see yet feed on you give me the heebie jeebies… so we panic, throw all of our shit out of the room and call the front desk freaking out… they move us to a new room… the guy didn’t even want to help us move our bags because he said he was off work soon… they were all over my feet, in audrey’s socks… and when tonya was on the phone to Hotwire she discovered one attached to her boob and lost her mind… despite being awful, it was hilarious… I was stripping off all my clothes outside of the room which was like a villa set up, so we were outside… and tonya is weeping about how traumatized she is by bugs… it was quite the production, but I mean, come on! The front desk of the hotel told us the steps they take in dealing with a situation like this… well, if you have a fucking step system to deal with “these types of situations” then it clearly must happen pretty often… I had heard of flea bag motels, but I had never experienced one… especially in a hotel rated so well… it was such a bad vibe… but we managed to get the room cancelled and given nearly half price at the Intercontinental… the last day before our flight tonya and I decided to forego spending our last day, which happened to be the only sunny day florida had seen in weeks, in a movie theatre… haha… anyway, and that is about the extent of it for now… Will Hoge - Dirty Little War I will eventually catch up on updates, but in the meantime, here is a video from the weekend… shot the first night of the Rock Boat on the Lido deck (aka my favourite place on Earth)… This is Will Hoge… every time he opens his mouth, my heart aches…
Here in town you can tell he’s been down for a while… But, my God, it’s so beautiful when the boy smiles…
So January started off with the remainder of my time in NYC… it was reckless as usual and I’m sure i found myself wandering alone and staggering home at 8 am… I love it there… I feel for that city in the same way I feel about music… that sometimes, even when it’s bad, it’s so good that it makes my heartache… like i can actually feel my heart swelling on the verge of exploding from my chest, just thinking about it… So we rang in New Years at National Underground… seems fitting right? Haha… Had a DeGraw or two yell at me for talking to strangers, as usual and celebrated the kick off of 2011… A band called the Madison Square Gardeners played… they were awesome… there were a few too many Oasis covers, maybe we were actually ringing in 1997? I recognized the guitarist and couldn’t figure out why, then I realized it’s because he plays with my girl crush Serena Ryder… so that was pretty exciting…
  And I spent New Years Day eating chinese food and watching a Honeymooners marathon in Brooklyn.. until a car service charged me $30 to drive me to the cross-streets I had requested… but instead of taking me to the cross streets I requested in the financial district of Manhattan… he took me to the cross-streets i had requested in some random “Little (Insert Foreign Country Here) Town” part of a far end of the burrough… I lost my shit on him, refused to pay and grabbed a subway… It was like the Planes, Trains and Automobiles of walks of shame, but I made it home eventually.. Ilana’s doormen love when I come to visit.. I always wander in at some point, on a different day from when I left looking a wreck in an outfit that is never appropriate for the time of day that I make it home… Anyway the trip was fun as usual… i wanted to steal Joey’s dog Colonel, we went for a nice dinner and spent some catch-up time with Lefty and did the usual routine of drowning a trip-long hangover with Lifetime movies and Delivery.com…  Went back to work for a day and was tired and grumpy… Jessie walked up to me and sang “Step 1 open the box, step 2 put your ass on that box… I’m wise enough to know when a gift needs giving… IT’S MY FART IN A BOX!!!” and the nasty bitch had actually managed to capture the rankest fart imaginable in a tiny little gift box and opened it in my face… the entire showroom at work filled with the stench and I’m pretty sure that something must have died somewhere in her bowels to produce something that repulsive… but it did cheer me up… and then i headed to Tampa for Rock Boat!!   Tonya backed out of the trip to go back to school, so I flew out to Tampa to meet up with Audrey and Ilana… I always get searched at the airport… I always bring way too much stuff for the amount of time I’m gone… Rock Boat is understandable, because there are theme nights, and anyone knows me, knows that I can’t pass up an opportunity to play dress up… and also, keeping in mind that I know if I’m going to see Ilana, I have to pack with her wardrobe needs in mind too… so my suitcase is always busting and overweight, and smart cookie that i am, i realized that shoes are heavy, so I always load my carryon with more shoes than i will ever be able to wear, that way it lightens my check-in baggage load… it does however make me look awfully suspicious in the eyes of TSA… and when my duffle bag containing a book, a hat and 12 pairs of shoes pops up on the xray machine, I always get corralled off for secondary searches… I guess most people pack an extra outfit in case something goes wrong, but short of attacking someone with a heavy wedge heel, is it really necessary to search for traces of gun powder in my cowboy boot?!  Anyway, made it to the hotel to find Aud and Lan already plastered and we decided to walk to the grocery and liquor store… we didn’t realize that Tampa wasn’t much of a pedestrian-friendly place… we walked miles, considered hitchhiking but realized from the reaction of the drivers in passing cars to seeing 3 women walking alone at night, that it probably wasn;t the best idea… we made it eventually, took a shopping cart full of booze to eat our weight in Taco Bell where I made a friend who looked like Jacob from Twilight, before we headed back to the hotel to prep for the pre-party and begin our stealthy cruise booze smuggling techniques… Most of my friends go for filling the plastic rum-runner flasks with a funnel, whereas I like to be a little craftier, using 6 packs of pop/gatorade/water bottles, filling every other one with booze and leaving a couple controls, you know in case i’m forced to do a chug test by port security, and then i super-glue the lids back on… maybe a bit too much effort, but it makes me feel like a spy…   We headed to the Rock Boat pre-party at Gaspar’s Grotto… it was fun… saw Matt Hires (it was our one year anniversary afterall) and his drummer Bob, who he had arranged to be my Rock Boat boyfriend for this year… (the last RBBF i had turned out to be a dud… but that’s a whole other story, haha)… Back at the hotel Audrey made it her mission to track down pizza… Now, much like we didn’t realize that walking wasn’t customary in Tampa, we didn’t realize that pizza delivery was unheard of either… we got back to the hotel fairly early and assumed that being that Tampa is a city that I’ve heard of and not somewhere tiny backwoods, that it would be easy to order a pizza around midnight… Audrey learned the hard way that that was not so… I’m pretty sure, without exaggeration, that she called every single pizza place in the phone book… she tried bartering and begging, she tried haggling and cursing… “Is this delivery?” “Sorry the business is no longer in service.” “Oops, did I wake you?” “Yes” “oh… Do you have pizza?” and the one place that did delivered wouldn’t come to our area… “Do you deliver?” “We haven’t changed policies since you called 5 minutes ago.” “Oh, ha, I love you.” “I love you too.” “Goodnight.”   The cruise itself was fun… It’s all kind of a blur at this point… For those of you who are not familiar with the Rock Boat, it’s run by a company called Sixthman, who actually put on several music cruises and it’s basically my idea of a vacation, a music festival on a cruise ship.. We had good weather for the first time this year and ported in Cozumel, Mexico… this is my third time on the boat and they have all kind of blended into each other at this point but the highlights of this year include playing butt-darts with Bob (non-sexual, i swear ;) ), finally getting to hear Matt play some of my fave songs full band and watching him try to push an orange into a hula hoop using a banana on a string tied to his belt, getting to wear my sweet new penguin onesie for pajama night, doing everyone’s makeup and getting to wear the absolute best worst dress that my mom actually wore to a Christmas party in the 90s, for glam rock prom night, guarding Audrey’s ladybug wings on Halloween night, finding out that I am special enough to be the only non-band member to have been granted a nickname by Will Hoge (it’s Pearl, btw… and you don’t to know, it’s gross… lol), seeing needtobreathe play and actually paying attention because i love them, Amanda getting engaged, Audrey meeting her soulmate, Matt Wertz hijacking the Paula Abdul song during the Guilty Pleasures set… i dunno… it was fun… i’m at my happiest when i’m on that boat and severed from the rest of the world…                        Of course, the second I stepped off the boat and turned my phone back on I was inundated by a shit storm of bullshit that still doesn’t seem like it will ever end to the point that this was a real conversation… “They weren’t mean to me today.” “Who wasn’t?” “The internet.” and the rest of that day was pretty terrible and ended with me having a panic attack, buying a pack of cigarettes, weeping in the Tampa airport and being comforted by a long distance phone call that was really only made to me out of courtesy than genuinely caring, but it was still appreciated at the time…   Went to a few events with Jessie, one where I helped a celebrity chef roll cheese balls and he tried to make use drink something that had an oyster in it and legit looked like an abortion in a shot glass… Tonya and I went to see the Dukes of Hazzard in concert, because that was actually a thing and we like to go see pretty much any old man band that comes to town and we somehow managed to talk our way into being the youngest people backstage and got to meet them… then I discovered that the reason Tonya had wanted to go was because one of them played Superman’s dad or something on Smallville… she’s a dirty little Smallville trickster… had I known it was a Smallville ploy I wouldn’t have helped feed her addiction… she’s smart… but it was pretty hilarious… we stayed to hear them play the theme song and booked it..   It was a rough few weeks after that… I let some ridiculous rumours and just cruel smear campaign bother me for a bit, but then real life kicked in and things got a lot worse and a lot more realistic… one of my best friends Stephanie’s brother Andrew took his life and she had a lay-over in the city on her way back to England after the funeral in Newfoundland… it was so sad, my heart broke for her and I can’t even imagine how you cope with something that difficult… a guy I went to high school with who used to poke me on facebook every once in a while was stabbed to death in the middle of the road outside a bar downtown in our ritzy little town which was unbelievable… and then i got a call from my friend Martin… Martin was the high school love of my life… I adored him unconditionally and he became one of my best friends… his mom was like my second mom and she helped me through some of the harder times in my life and his little brother Matt was like my little brother… I used to catch him out getting in to trouble and take him home for a movie night to soften the blow so he wouldn’t get in too much trouble… he always called me his big sister and he was one of the sweetest, goofiest guys I knew… and on January 13th, his mother found him slumped over at his computer and he had overdosed… i went to the viewing which was surreal and i had nightmares afterwards because he looked like himself, like he might get up and laugh it off at any moment… January 17th is statistically the most depressing day of the year and after spending mine between a funeral and the cemetery, I’ll vouch for that… it was a hard day and my heart broke for Martin and Mary-Lou and what made it harder was knowing that I couldn’t do anything to fix it.. he was 23 and has a young son and it’s devastating to feel overwhelmed by hindsight and helpless…  I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately… I don’t know if I believe in signs from people who have passed or if I’m giving myself too much credit in thinking he would send me one… but I lost my mind the other night because forever ago I had accidentally saved my voicemail # under his contact profile on my phone but had deleted it and somewhere in getting a new phone and loading on an old backup it must have reloaded that as well… and twice in the past couple weeks, my voicemail has called me out of the blue so that his name and picture have shown up on my caller ID and my heart stopped… and then I started to feel guilty, that maybe he’s calling me out for being a terrible friend… for not following through on any of the promises I made.. I haven’t been able to go to his grave, it’s by work and every time I go to switch lanes to turn down the street of the cemetery, I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it… I haven’t gone to visit his mother like I promised, because i’m selfish and awkward… i know i won’t be able to keep it together when I see her and the last thing she should ever have to do is comfort me in this situation.. i haven’t gone to see Martin’s new baby even though I want to and i promised I would, because seeing him will make me sad… and I’d rather avoid feeling anything… because I am selfish… and because it will only make it harder for him and to have to deal with me acting a fool and treating him like he’s about to shatter… But maybe it was a sign… Matt calling me out on being an asshole and not following through on any of the things I’m supposed to.. maybe I should do something about that… I love you and miss you Matty… I hope you’ve finally found peace…   Will Hoge - Daydream Believer… Songwriter Storyteller Session - For What It’s Worth…
|
