comfort monster

Creature comforts are starting to escape me.

I went over to a friend’s place after work on Thursday, and with enough good food and surprisingly good cheap Moldovan wine, was thoroughly convinced I was not up for an hour’s bike ride home just to turn around and come back for work the next morning.

Hopping couches for so many years has made me incredibly lazy at night, especially if I’ve been drinking.

A sensible person might have been thrilled at the chance of something a bit more modern for a night.  I fell asleep in far less clothing than usual, knowing there was functional plumbing just outside my door.

… Sheesh, I’ve been trying to finish this post all day.  The deep and embracing underground party scene in this city has been absorbing me all day, as well as band practice and the ensuing fun.  Long story short:

As I was saying…

I woke up at my friend’s place at 3am completely awake and unreasonably irritated.  I stayed angry at nothing in particular for a whole hour.  No specific target, just angry at being awake, and too angry at being awake to fall back asleep.  The fact of the matter was that I was comfortable.  I was bored with how comfortable I was and this annoyed me.  There was no movement, there was no cold, no fear of the unknown.  Just comfort.  Ridiculous, purely ridiculous anger.  Privileged ruggedness.  Silly but lovely in its sincerity.

carrying my home on the subway

I found an abandoned doll house on Monday, took it out to dinner with friends on the way back home.  I apparently made quite an entrance with the house and the bird decoration I’d picked off the ground and pinned to my head.  This also made for a fun trip on the subway.  The house was so big I had to carry it in front of my face, hands shoved through the bottom floor windows and tunnel vision out of the second floor balcony.  Gorgeous, handmade wooden contraption.  I’ll probably fill it with a string of lights and use it as a lamp, then try to find a good home for it when I leave town.

The weekend as a whole was filled with band practices and hiding from the cold.  Last night I spent the whole day working on either firewood collection or horn parts with my new section-mate.  I didn’t make it to practice with another band or a recording session here, but I sure did move a lot of wood from one spot to another.

I wonder if, just as I’ve become enchanted with manual labour, somewhere a construction worker is picking up a saxophone and discovering the joy of music.

I barely left the neighborhood all weekend, barely left the property for an entire day.  This year I’ve been trying to learn how to take better care of myself, which sometimes means saying no to perfectly reasonable invitations, or being the one who goes to bed early when a party’s raging upstairs.

fruits of labour

Head cold.  Squeezed all my creative juices to the sides of my brain, where they were held captive until sometime this morning.

Thursday night I was asked to do sound for a show at my favourite venue in town.  As usual, a planned hour or two there turns into a marathon of good bourbon and dancing with Europeans and South Americans.  At least this time I got paid.

When I was done with my responsibilities, I sat down at the bar and started giving a liquor tutorial to a guy plotting his next drink.  I got him to try the slivovica – a necessary first at that bar.  His friend was sitting on the other side of me and took an instant interest in my hands.  What I had thought filthy and cracked and just waiting for infection all week, they instead found… sexy.  Yes, that was the word.  I told them about the work I had been doing, discovering meanwhile that I had bicep muscles worth noting for the first time ever, and they admitted that my pantsuit had been the topic of their conversation for some time before I even sat down.  In fact, I was bought several drinks by handsome patrons of the bar throughout the evening…  Not what I was expecting wearing the same old smelly outfit I’d been using as a snot rag all week.

I spent Friday – the warmest day this year by far – both up on the roof and down in the bowels of the building where I’ve been working.  Lots of sneezing and sniffling until I finally got to call it a day around sunset.

Fortunately, I was able to do take a hot shower and do some laundry before a very squatter-tastic weekend of fire heat and marshmallows toasted on the ends of kitchen knives by candlelight.  I felt like a child in our makeshift little tarp and sofa fort.  It’s on barebones days like these where I feel the luckiest.

water water everywhere

It’s after midnight and I feel more full of energy than I should.  I woke up early (which for me is anytime before 9am), made a long bike commute on my squirrel of a bicycle, put in a full day of manual labour at the century-old public bath turned venue where I’ve been doing odd jobs since the new year, and finished the night loading and sawing firewood on the boat.  My pinstripe pantsuit is covered in dust, cement, and bits of wood.  My oxblood boots are sawdust tan, my hair full of bits of the vaulted ceiling I hunched under all afternoon.  Even so, after a much needed hot shower, I am gleefully awake.  There’s a joy to physical work I’ve missed since I “retired” from pedicabbing.

My recent nautical adventures reaffirm this pesky yearning for physical work.  I remember the last time I live/worked on a ship, a fantastic recreation of a 15th century caravel, and on my last day there I was swabbing the deck and furious with myself for having no bigger aspirations than competently cleaning someone else’s ship.  I wanted to be performing, not mopping a relic.

Now it’s four and a half years later – finally I’m playing music for a living, and what do I find myself doing in my spare time but maintenance on an old building?  Where do I find myself but gravitating toward the water again?

Tonight I was invited to a presentation by an artist who lived aboard a ship lodged in the ice in the arctic circle.  Hearing about ship life and the little games you play to keep yourselves sane and amused made me awful nostalgic.  Above all else, I left the theatre with an absurd craving for a milk shake.  On my first sailing expedition, when we finally landed in Hawaii after a month without land, there was no desire bigger among the crew than ice cream.  So, I dragged my friend (a sound artist I met on the amtrak ride out here) on a quest for vegan milkshakes.  I lazily took the subway back under the same body of water I’d sped up last night with my new friends in the power boat, only to be coaxed out to a bar by some bike messengers who were equally embarrassed about being on the train with their bikes.  Sometimes the world is just too charming to let a girl make it home with any sort of punctuality.

Same old story…

Too busy living life to write about it.

All good intentions toward blogging went out the window when I returned to my present boat home after a successful band practice and banter at the bar only to be whisked away on a speed boat by the crew.  The skyline glowed in the cold as we headed north, the only traffic on the water.  We dined on an epic little sailing vessel with a bunch of salty artists – our neighbors, only a short boat ride away.  My old tall ship tales paled in comparison to theirs, but I told them enthusiastically anyway, plied by wine and aged cheese.

My fingers are growing too cold to type, yet I was reminded tonight how special are the few who choose a boat for a home in this climate.

Any thoughts besides awe at my own distractions will have to wait.

Valentine to Myself

Happy Valentine’s Day.  I am writing this to an empty audience.

I’m on a date with myself today, and my bouquet of flowers is a fresh blog, hand delivered to myself.  It’s my first time, so I’m being gentle.

Tomorrow there will be more, and for many days to come.

Today I took all my travel belongings across two boroughs on a tiny bicycle, moved onto a giant boat, shoveled snow in the bright sunlight and practiced my sax all day, sat by an antique stove with a glass of bourbon, and consummated my blog.

Tomorrow there will be more, and for many days to come.

No one could have made a gesture as romantic and simple as the one I made to myself by spending the day alone doing my art.  I am relishing in my past adventures and gearing up for the next ones.

Tomorrow there will be more, and for many days to come.