Smoldering fire receives puff of air

I finally moved into my new place (Tamara's awesome little house in North Portland). My VERY OWN place for TEN MONTHS.

I've been feeling detached musically for a while this summer... since I returned from Europe. My biology teaching job has been sucking up my whole life recently. I'm happy to let it have, say, 80% of my life, but it's been 100%. Yet the biology has been sucking me in with a passion - there's a fire there too, with new projects starting up on elephants, sea turtles, California condors, all very cool and very important - but I have had an unearthly feeling sometimes of feeling Brazil sliding away. The horrifically high airfares to Salvador and Rio have also been very depressing. It's three times more expensive to get there; and three times more expensive to live there, too. When will I ever be able to get back there again?

I feel sometimes like: I'm not really a drummer... it's sliding away... my big experiment is ending.

Last week though I finally got caught up on my work.I wandered home thinking "Wow, what should I do tonight? I don't have to work!" It took me a while to realize "I could play..." Just play. Not lead a rehearsal, not teach beginners, not race to a show, not have to show people stuff.

Just play music by myself just for fun.

There was suddenly an extraordinary sensation of something opening, like a flower blooming, or like a fire almost smothered that suddenly has received a puff of air, and flares to life again.

I haven't been able to "just play" in ... how long? I can't remember the last time I had time to practice ANYTHING. Months and months. Now I might have the time; and now, finally, I have the space - my new house. My rent has more than doubled but I am making the investment so I could have practice space at last. (well, and kitty space too.)

I want one more year of being able to practice hard, every day, a couple hours. I want to dive back into it and grab hold again. I'm not done yet.

Tonight I invited a bunch of friends to come jam at the Last Thursday street fair on Alberta Street. After a brief confusion with one of my groups about the concept of a street jam (I thought they were telling me I couldn't go jam with my friends! Which would have been insta-rebellion for me! I was working myself into a puffed-up maverick rebel mode over it, I'll jam with whoever I want to jam with, etc. But it turned out to be just a mixup) - Anyway, I went ahead and invited some folks, and a little bunch of Gatas and Lions showed up.

And we played completely random stuff, laughing and messing up, sounding like shit, even losing the 1, getting crossed sometimes, missing calls and cues, ... and other times coming together. Ben doing his usual flashes of random inspiration and doing repique calls on the timbal, guiding us through random shit - hey! suddenly we're doing an enredo and Ben's singing all the words! Have no idea what it is! Wonder where the breaks go! Ben & I suddenly getting an identical brainwave to revive the old VamoLa "Em cima" break (fun to watch the Gatas and Lions folks gradually clue in to how that one worked, with Ben & me giving gigantic STOP PLAYING STOP STOP STOP signals to various players at random times and GO GO GO signals to other player and everyone fumbling it hilariously. But by about the 5th time through we had it together!). Mehmet suddenly remembering the Rhythm of the Saints intro and off we went on that, me yelling in his ear "HOW DOES IT GO AGAIN? I JUST FORGOT WHAT YOU JUST HUMMED TO ME" and him yelling back "IT'LL COME TO YOU" and he was right, it did.

Ben being completely brilliant on timbal, Pat getting the whole crowd dancing, Mehmet ripping into the samba-reggae repinique runs like I have never heard. Fucking around and messing up. Little crowds gathered, little crowds became big crowds, and by the end we had a huge mob. Samba dancers had popped up from the crowd out of the blue, and at the end half the crowd was throwing themselves into the samba-reggae dance moves. The cops finally had to come shut us down.

"Look," said Mehmet as we were packing up, "Somebody gave me this flyer for this gig and asked us to come play. Should we just go and pretend we're an actual group?"

Yup. Now that's the way it should be.