Shriekers and Crooners

Irish children rank slightly under French children in their cuteness and complete indecipherability. I do not know what the little blondehaired boy said to me after his mother swooped him up from his mission to accompany my father on the keyboards but I know he was damned adorable. Children are usually a very enthusiastic audience, bopping along and having no qualms about singing even the most idiotic of lyrics right along with us, but sometimes there's that hellspawn kid who sets his sights on making your night shitty.

Usually you can spot this kid early on- he is antsy and loud and he has usually made a sibling cry with a swift kick to the shin before the gig even starts, but sometimes a regular normal looking kid will turn into a professional heckler out of nowhere and start screaming something incoherent about monkeys. Little kids are like HVI in that once one is infected with obnoxiousness the rest soon follow even if they know it's absolutely not in their best interest. So now you have 2, 5, and then 20 kids screaming something incoherent about monkeys and laughing riotously and around this time one of them has the brilliant revelation that, why just talk when we can bash things? Things to bash include: chairs, table, expensive furniture, priceless heirloom instruments, glasses, and eachother. If they all just beat eachother senseless in some kiddie moshpit that would be fine by me; In fact I'd be the first one to crowdsurf their cute little button faces into the ground, but of course there is always some amount of entropy in the flock so when 19 of them are busy spinning in circles with their arms smacking into eachother one of them is most surely standing behind me right this very moment about to grab onto my skirt and reveal the reason I don't have pantyline showing. Perfect.

This gig was outside and was actually very pleasant, lovely barbq, sunny sky for the first time we've been over here... whoever settled Ireland must have really had that whole brooding thing down pat, or had some kind of skin condition which prohibited exposure to decent weather conditions.

Halfway through the gig some woman came up and requested that my dad and brother accompany her on some stevie wonder song. this should have come as a welcome break but i was completely unprofessionally and irrationally pissed off by this, what i felt to be an intrusion on my microphone. Of course she had a beautiful strong voice and great mic technique and I tried to think of ways to orchestrate having her fall into the river whose shore we were playing on while making it seem like an accident. I mean c'mon, I just got the hang of this whole loungesinger act and I know I might sound like an amateur sometime but you don't have to go showing me up at my own gig. Wait until i'm done or something. Nono it was perfectly within her rights and I just was annoyed because it was a flashback to those cattlecall musical theater auditions where you think you did a great job until some broadway baby gets up and blows everyone away on exactly the same song you did except a 500x better version than the song you did and all that congratulating you gave yourself feels like a pretty pathetic lie. And so to console yourself, as I mentioned, you begin to devise elaborate methods of inflicting disastrous injuries on said person, which is totally sick, and then you are sickened by your own sickness in some sick cycle of psychobabble inside your head and eventually you get so exhausted that you barely want to look at yourself in the mirror letalone hear yourself sing. I know I know.... issues. I'm working on it. I'm introspecting and whatnot what else do you want. Okay speaking of introspecting I have to go write.

Writing is coming along quite nicely. I am almost at my second 200 pg. cycle and although i have no structure to speak of some fat themes are emerging and i think I've found a solid voice... though i'm still wondering about some extras, perhaps footnotes or recipes or maps and doodles and whatnot, hmmm...

xox
H