broke, but still not making friends

03-28-00

Hey, Liquid Plumr, I got your foaming pipe snake ri-i-i-ight here!

We're broke. Really. Today I took some CD's to the pawn shop and rolled a growlerful of pennies. It only came to eight bucks—how come a whole shitload of pennies is only eight bucks?

This whole broke thing sucks. There was too long a lapse between my freelance gigs. I'm leaving for Panama City tomorrow; that gig's paying me $400. I'm not taking enough hours at the vet, and now the shit (ha-ha) came down. Oops. All a big reminder that I need a new freaking job. I also have the recording gig coming up for another couple hundred, and I have a small savings account trapped in Michigan that I'll be cleaning out when I go up there next week.

And, John's going to send back the satellite dish he ordered, since the apartment complex screwed with us about putting it on the patio (can't have it on the grounds, but our patio faces the wrong direction and we can't get a signal.) We'll get our deposit back on that.

Meanwhile, we're living on rice and cheapo commissary chicken breasts. I did the Kraft dinner thing too much in college and I can't face it again. Lentils and saltines for me. I don't have to eat anything that's the same color as Winnie the Pooh.

If it gets THAT bad, and you know how bad I mean, I have this Christmas card someone sent me a while back with a bit of cash. He sent it when I was desperate to sell my plasma and couldn't because my veins were too small, and all of a sudden my grandmother decided to share her inheritance with her grandkids and I came through the fog. I saved that Christmas card, cash intact, and it has been my financial solace for over a year now. All I have to do is think about it—I've memorized the picture on the front, the little house in the snow with the light in the window—and I know that it's not THAT bad yet. I don't think the guy who sent it knows that what he gave me is so much better than the money. You know who you are.

I went to hear John's band play in Macon last Thursday night. All that shit about the kittens made me forget about it. The concert band doesn't play around here too often—they're too busy with small ensemble gigs and marching band crap—so I try to get to the concerts when they happen. It seems like the members of the band don't like playing in concert band very much, like they'd rather be playing bagpipes or something. Like the audience should be grateful that they showed up to play. Morons. That's just bizarre, but I'm told it's true.

For some reason, this other, slightly related thing just popped into my head. I was on the phone with Mom the other day and she was telling me about the musical that's put on by one of the colleges in my hometown. I guess the orchestra director had a hell of a time finding musicians to play in the pit. She asked high school kids to do it, and they wanted to be paid. My brother's been recruited, and he is being paid, because he's a freelance guitarist/pianist in the area, but he's only netting a token check, like $50 or something. We were floored. As Matt put it, "When I was in high school I would have paid them to let me play!" And we're professionals.

Needless to say, the kids aren't playing the gig. They've ruined their musical "careers" in that town, though, and they probably don't even realize it. Since there was such a fuss, the director decided to cover the parts with synthesizers. Once a production staff starts using electronics, they rarely go back to unreliable, expensive, decidedly less-than-perfect acoustic instruments with human (mistake-prone) performers. Stupid kids hacked one more chink in the armor of live performance. I can just hear them laughing away in band class, "Ha-ha-ha, they had to use keyboards!" Such irony.

Anyway, (fuck, how did I get so far with that tangent?) I went to the concert. They did the thing I hate, where the announcer-guy asks different people in the audience to stand. First it was people in the audience who aren't from middle Georgia. I hate standing, so I almost didn't. Then I realized people around me would think I was from middle Georgia, so I stood. John spotted me and I could almost hear him snicker.

Later, they asked family members of the performers to stand. That time I kept my ass in the chair. John burst out laughing and whispered something to the guy next to him. When he looked back at me, I was flipping him off from the balcony. He scratched his head with his middle finger before going back to acting like an adult.

Well, I'm kickin' this town tomorrow night, so this is probably the last entry you'll see until Sunday. I might do the paper journal thing and upload the separate entries when I get back, or you might just see a fat Greatest Hits entry on Sunday. And that entry might be the last for a week, since I'm leaving for MI on Monday. I'd update y'all from Mom and Dad's, but I'm still in the journal closet with them. Send laptop donation inquiries to the e-mail address below.

Hey, I'll try to update to my mailing list if I can, so if you're not on it, ya better get there. If you live in the Warner Robins area, please e-mail me privately and I'll send you the entries. The list is really for people I don't see every day.

Thanks, y'all—see you post-vacation!