Late Road Installment #1

howdy ho. as mr. hanky would say. so i have been meaning to type up this road entry for a few days. I left MI last MOnday, Labor Day for the show at Point Park in downtown Pittsburgh. I bought a pair of cheap shades at the rest area cos it was sunny up until that point. well... after 4 days of rain and some cold later, I am in Maine. i didnt leave my "place" today. my friend has lived out here for years and this is a most welcome visit (for me) and i seldom leave her place when I come here. I usually just relax, watch tv (i don't have cable at home). today i watched the williams sisters win another grand slam title, and a great match as the men's Open final, Juan Martin Del Potro a 20 year-old, knocked off the best player in tennis history roger federer. It was a great match.

the shows have been spotty, but i have enjoyed the trip so far. i left my guitar stand in NYC, but plan to swing through on Weds and pick it up on the way to NJ. I'm also going to get to hang out with my estranged producer john (PJ as I call him). he's been a busy guy and i want to hear what he thinks of what we recorded since he left detroit a couple of months ago.

So between my shows in pittsburgh and east stroudsburg, pa, i stopped in at this little restaurant in the middle of nowhere. i was gassing up and saw it across the street and thought I needed something light. so I drove across the street and got a little chicken salad and a coffee (i usually only drink coffee in the morning and with an egg type breakfast t dish). so i got there apparently pretty close to when they were gonna close, and the place was pretty em,pty to begin with. the girl behind the bar counter was cool. and i was just happy to watch some sports on cable. and we got to talking:

she told me that when she was with her ex-husband they lived in the midwest. in southern indiana. there was no work in PA so they moved to where the work was, and they fell in Indiana. she told me that in southern indiana there is TONS of drugs. drug trafficking, and everyone uses. she said crystal meth was the drug of choice in this area. I then told her about my incident in kokomo, indiana last year (refer to journal entry monday, October 20th, 2008). I told her how an Indiana cop once told me that there was tons of drugs in kokomo (maybe that's why the beach boys wrote that song about it). and i didn't believe him at the time, but what this girl was telling me just seemed a lot more real. she said her ex was engulfed, and was just throwing everything away for the stuff.

then when i was served my chicken salad, the guy who made it came out and told me to let him know how it tastes, cos this was his first time making the chicken salad. i was a bit confused, but i could tell that it was made from scratch, cos of the texture and the time it took for them to serve me and this was something good in my mind. so he went on to explain that he's not usually a cook. he's a steel worker, and he had been laid off. poor guy. everyone there was really nice and i couldn't help but instantly think of the parallel between pittsburgh (and PA) and people of Detroit and Michigan. i was listening to them just kind of disclose a lot of their personal stories to a complete stranger, and it was like they didn't care, like they were talking to an old friend. I usually don't appreciate when strangers disclose personal information to me, but this wasn't disruptive. like i said it had the tone of someone just chatting up with someone they might feel comfortable with.

there was a 3rd guy working there. i don't know if he was a cook or what, but he was telling me a story about his ex-wife. I looked down the counter, and was watching him poor himself a HUGE cup of coffee, and he was emptying several creams and several sugars into it, the wrappers surrounding the cup on the counter. I asked him, how about some coffee with your cream. he chuckled, and told me this paraphrased response: "I used to drink my coffee completely black, and I used to say, 'i like my coffee like I like my women, strong and black' as a joke. then i found out that's the way my ex-wife likes her men, strong and black, and now she's married to the strong black guy that she was cheating on me with. so now i'll never drink plain black coffee again." as comfortable as he was in telling me that, and as funny he was in telling the story, i couldn't help but smile. he then told me that now this man and his ex-wife live together with his kids. this man treats his kids right, and that's all that matters, he said. he also went on to say that he has befriended this man, for the reason that he's great to his kids, and also because he can relate to the man, since he thinks his ex-wife is cheating again on this new guy and he knows what it's like to be in those shoes.

i thought, that takes a certain type of man. this guy sleeps with your wife while you are married, and now they're together and your marriage is over, and yet you found the bright side of it. its hard not to think highly of a man with that type of philosophy.

so all the people I met that night at this little restaurant (i can't remember the name) had their own stories, and i thought they all kind of had unique stories and have experienced things that some and none can relate to, so I thought I'd share them with you.

i get to meet a lot of interesting people on the road. that's have the enjoyment for me, well at least 49%. i really love playing music.

I also got the chance to hang out briefly with a girl that I have not seen almost since high school. she goes down as one of the only girls that i ever blew off, as I usually am the one to get the brush off in a romantic dating scenario. we dated back in high school, and i was older, so I was going to college and she was staying in high school obviously, and I said basically we've had a nice summer, i'm going to college, let's just leave it at that. and at the time, of course, i did the less than nice thing, and she handled it well, just took it for what it was, and that was that. furthermore, i wrote a song somewhat inspired by that whole scenario, but you might not ever know it. it's on Time Is Right album, the 1st CD i ever recorded, when I was a senior in college.

anyway we had lunch in NYC, where she lives and works, we caught up a bit. and it was really warm. it was really nice. Now she's married by the way, so let me get that out of the way. but even though we basically had seen each other once or twice in the past ten years (none of them recently) it was kind of like just catching up with an old friend but there was still the sarcasm, the fun and no awkwardness at all. and the sushi was good.

so i'm in Maine now, and leaving tomorrow. did a lot of e-mailing this week for booking for next year, and hoping that i can surpass this year and set new goals for 2010.

i hope to visit googies lounge again on my way to NJ from Mass on weds to pick up the guitar stand I left at the club. fucking hate forgetting SHIT. see it makes me so mad, that I use all CAPS sometimes!

i need some gelato to calm down...

have a good week.