Man, it gets cold out here at night, even in August. This place needs windows. I don’t mean the open kind … I mean the kind that close. You know … with glass and everything.
Yes, I’m still sleeping out here in the shack that stands crookedly in the courtyard of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our lowly squathouse here in upstate New York. This kind of reminds me of the old days, when we had that two-room lean-to in Sri Lanka. What was that like? Well, it was a lot like this. Except warmer. Ah, things were different then. A stiff wind would blow the whole house down, for one thing. And the air was filled with song. (I won’t say which song, but frankly, it wasn’t one of my personal favorites.)
I’ve taken this opportunity to redecorate in here, you know … put up a little wall paper. Very little. Because of our lack of budget, of course, I have to use existing materials. But you make the best of what you have, right? And what I have is old set lists and some second hand school paste. Now the place is plastered in the things, and you can see the clumsily scrawled repertoire of a hundred poor-paying gigs going back decades. So now every time I turn my head, even when I’m doing my neck stretches, I have to ask myself, “Did we REALLY play Neil Young’s Lookout, Joe at the Metro in 1992?” or “Why would we follow Sensory Man with Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner?” Truly questions for the ages.
Okay, well the wind is kicking up a bit, and my little shack is swaying from side to side, making the set lists flap like little white flags nailed to the wall. It’s almost as if the place is hoping to surrender to our extreme weather. I’m going to pack up my ripped up duffel and scurry back into the relative safety of the Hammer Mill. Hopefully Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is not running one of those land drone experiments of his. Last week he was running some dog-like autonomous robot around the ground floor, programming it to shoot deadly lasers at anything that moved. Frankly I’m surprised I didn’t have more company out here in the shack.
Hmmmmm. Good Old Boys Roundup. Haven’t played that one since our Middlebury College gig in ’93. Time to revisit.