Never been one to let the carrier drop

Okay, so I have to comment on my open mic experience, since it was such a large thing for me.

I got there at about 6:10 – Esen had already signed us up for 8:40, so that left me with two and a half hours of fear.. 😉 Esen’s SO, Thor, was there, and we talked about algorythms until 7.. [does anyone know a really graceful way to count the number of bits that are turned on in a arbitrarily large register?] when people started playing. There were a variety of acts of all quality levels.. two particular ones stand out as being truly great.. there was a guy who played Hendrix like Hendrix.. he rocked the house quite nicely, I’m sad I didn’t get his name. And then there was a woman who did a little couple of little blues songs with pretty good piano accompniment.. (walking bass line) and a voice that _would not STOP_. There was also a guy who sang a great song about Washington D.C. and its lack of representation, which was also good.. and a guy who morphed ‘ground control to major tom’ to be a song about Beans the Dog, who ran away.. I can’t describe the song, but it was clever and funny. Hm. Other things that stand out in my mind? A singer/songwriter who did ‘my girl’, which made me decide I have to add some motown to my mix.. maybe ‘what becomes of the brokenhearted’ since I love the Funk Brothers / Standing In The Shadows of Motown remix of it so much… though, a lot of what I love about it there is the phat choir breakdown, and lacking eight voices to do 8-part harmony, that’s not going to be happening for me any time soon.

But anyhoo…

We talked about electronic voting machines and other machinations. Mike showed up. I drank a irish coffee.. [very, very tasty and definately helped me be a little less terrified].

Before we knew it it was 8:40 and me + Patti were ascending the stage. ‘Winter’ went as smooth as a baby’s bottom.. well, so I’m told. I don’t remember anything but the sustain pedal trying to run away from me, and looking up a few times..

‘Sounds of Silence’ got some serious applause, although maybe they were applauding that we were done. I tried to do some fancy fingering for the solo, and slipped up on my timing a couple of times. But I don’t think anyone who didn’t know what i was trying to do could have known that I had screwed up. ANyway, I got through it without anything too dischordant happening. One guy even gave me a thumbs up as I was leaving the bar, which made me feel really good..

So that’s it. My virginity is gone 😉 And I want to go back and do it again. Maybe not there. Maybe I’ll just do a couple of my guitar songs down on the corner. Who knows. But while it was pretty terrifying, it was also pretty cool. And I know that I can overcome the terror, and I know that overcoming the terror will be good for me.

o/~ Strum your guitar, sing it kid.. just write about your feelings, not the things you never did.. inexperience – it once accursed me – but your youth is no handicap, it’s waht makes you thirsty… o/~

[and then afterwords, Esen and Thor came over and we played and sang and talked and had a good time.. then I talked to another cool amazon employee on Brig, and did a RFS transmission for them..

And now I’m going to sleep. My box has all the kernals upgraded appropriately. For those who are curious, I downloaded the mass.tgz that the attacker used. It lives at www.sheer.us/owned/

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