Hiya!! Miss me much? (Of course you did, why else would you be here?) I didn't have much to say most of last week then I was down to Chi on Fri then up to Minne on Sat for Frank Turner shows and the LONGEST SLOWEST wee hours drive ever back from Minneapolis to Madison due to the dense fog advisory blanketing pretty well the entire route..... Definitely sections where fog was so thick you couldn't read the signs even when they were literally directly above you.... It was not my favorite highway driving ever.... Not the worst I've driven through, those stories involve ice and snow and spinning out off the highway or having a semi jack knife or go off the road in the lane next to me just a couple car lengths behind me or the time a car next to me auto ignited or the time a drunk driver who ended up wrecking himself and dying along with another car narrowly missed hitting me only because I had pulled over right before he went careening past me due to my passenger front tire shredded out randomly just outside Detroit as I was coming back from Quebec City. So not even in my top five worst highway drives, but still this most recent dense fog drive was not a drive I enjoyed. My hands ached after I got back from the Sun morning drive which never happens even on significantly longer drives through mountains, and after dropping Crissy off it, was late/early enough Sarah was up told me I could come pickup Miss Waffles in an hour at 8ish. 

But, here we are survived and no close encounters of the deer kind emerging suddenly out of the fog and most of the aches from the tension on that drive with almost no visibility AFTER  I had spent so many hours dancing and jumping on a cement floor are gone. All except the gods awful shin splints, weirdly the shin I didn't fracture on a carousel then spiral refracture doing grande pliés en seconde before it fully healed feels worse today than the one I would EXPECT to be achey full of shin splints from standing/dancing/jumping on cement for so long. Anyone who owns an indoor standing room gen ad venue and has cement for the floor instead of sprung wood floors is an absolute fucking sadist.... Especially if they book punk, hip hop, or any acts where fans are inclined to jump repeatedly as part of their joy in the music..... Seriously, at least put in laminate if not a properly sprung ballroom wood floor -- cement is just brutal AF on the audience.... Last time I had shin splints this painful was when the only practice room for an Irish hard shoe performance was a cement floor as was the performance itself.... Shin splints weren't an issue after the Aragon Ballroom show, but was DEFINITELY a problem after the Uptown Theatre show -- on Sunday I could hardly walk til I massaged them poured healing energy into my poor shins then slept for like 10 hours straight. They're still painful today, but I was still able to take the dog on a walk all the long way around the block this morning. (Recovering dancer problems -- as a rule, if we decide we're going to do something or it has to be done, we continue through the "it's only a flesh wound" physical pain no matter how extreme it is and how much a sane person would say, "actually, no. Don't go back to advanced ballet three days after fracturing three toes including your big toe because a solid wood liquor cabinet was accidentally dropped on it." Dancers are a different breed of masochists.... Even recovering dancers.)

Frank Turner shows will forever and always be one of my favorite happiest of happy places!!! I always feel my most joyously free unmasked at his shows with the mix of honesty and non judgement, no matter how difficult the truths most people don't want to hear or how lanky limbed exuberant the physical expression of joy. He's not a scene where anybody tries to play it cool, he literally had everyone in the punk rock circle pit who wanted to be then took a waltz step breather and had everyone's inner child be arms up spinning ballerinas, including him, all during his song I Wanna Dance. He says the only two rules at his shows are "don't be a dick" and "if you know any of the words to any of my songs, you have to sing them with me as loud as you can, it's cathartic for both of us that way." I love a lot of genres of music, and like kids I love them all differently, but as a recovering emo punk Warped Tour scene kid, there's something extra special for me being in a crowd (especially in the circle of the mosh pit) at the "smart kids punk existentialist songwriter" Frank shows dancing, jumping, and shout-singing my heart out. He always speaks the hard truths and doesn't sugar coat them but he's also an incorrigible optimist that if we start with honesty about where we ARE we can always choose to do/be better than we have let ourselves be. Both individually and as social collectives. 

Anyway, I'm an old old fan of his dating back to the release of Love, Ire, & Song so I rather forget sometimes how intelligent you have to be to understand his lyrics and get the allusions he's making. But still he's me favorite punk existential songwriter and I will always have a soft spot for this modern incarnation of Kit Marlowe. And unless I have other plans made before his shows are announced, he is forever and always at the top of my list of "if you're driveably close, I will come see you" and he's never done anything in all these years I've adored his music and what he has to say to make me ever question that or rank him lower on the list. Not once in like closing in on 20 years of being a fan of him and his music. Though my argument to Crissy (who does NOT like punk or metal or most rock music) to get her to come with me for her first Frank concert back when it was just him and his acoustic guitar remains one of the funniest ever, "But he's from England, who KNOWS when he'll be back in the area?!" Given he plays shows in the area at least once if not multiple times a year every year except when the pandemic completely curtailed touring. I didn't SAY it would be a long wait, but my phrasing asking who knows when he'll be back IMPLIED an unlikelihood that never existed. But also, one show and she was hooked on his shows so yeah.

He hand picks the openers and they were all really good. I'd seen Amigo the Devil before, and enjoy their songs/shows a lot, so knew that scene what I was getting into. But this was my first introduction to Bridge City Sinners and they blew my mind with how good they are!!! Like, my favorite new to me music discovery in a long time. They're like this weird genre defying gothic punk bluegrass fusion who sing murder ballads and songs about witchcraft vengeance and the devil and I just adore all of them!!! Upright bass, electric banjo, singer on electric banjo ukulele, fiddle player (Luke is effing AMAZING in his own right, and I say that as someone who has a lot of experience and opinions about good fiddle vs meh fiddle) and guitar. Anyway, Bridge City Sinners are my newest to me musical obsession and you should check them out. They're absolutely incredible and they fill for me the musical hole of needing a quirky genre defying dark witchy band specializing in murder ballads I've been looking to fill since all that mess over the last almost six years now that I've written enough about and nobody but me seems to care about changing from the current status quo so I need to accept and let it go.  Anyway, I've been looking for something to fill that musical hole, especially on certain days when the witch winds rise. Bridge City Sinners are much darker, MUCH darker, definitely acoustic-folk-metal with some jazz/swing/bluegrass elements, if you had to try to define genres. But Bridge City Sinners are soooo good! They delight me so much to have discovered them!!!!

Anyway. I have some things to get done at work and even though I have some more to write about (including a realization I had this morning and also I should share the more recent Astro Poets because after that one not so clear week because week by week they're getting brighter and brighter again linked and clear cut for Libra and Pisces again.)  I'll have to write another post later.

Also, my sister and brother-in-law have a good deal to use their points to fly me out for a visit June 9 (or 10) thru June 21 or so. Which, I'm still concerned about my cat's health and the off gassing of their renovation making me sick, but also, weather and solar weather have had me migraine-y here anyway. I think part of my sister wanting to get me out there asap this summer, enough to use their accrued points to fly me via Madison even not a cheaper route (like Milwaukee), is because even though she consciously doesn't believe in it she wants me to grid and protect the home for the kiddos' sake now they're back in their own house again after all the renovations.  I have to make sure that my parents can watch the dog AND that I can have someone to water all my plants for me until I get back -- and I'll be honest the plants are the big concern for me.... Maybe I'll need to rustle up some rain, but not too much or too severe, for at least the weekend I'd be gone. I dunno. On verra.

Anyway. I need to finish this deposit and get some more headway on the rsvp contract audits I'm doing right now at work. But I will write more later about what I realized this morning and also those recent weeks of astro poets including this week.