Catching My Breath
Live from a Saint Paul Coffeeshop
I am catching my breath after a long week of work. I make light of the work I do pretty often. It’s funny to be tired after a long day of talking between jazz songs, or writing trivia questions, or doing interviews. But, it’s pretty exhausting and I work pretty hard. And even if it’s easier work than installing tennis courts in a mid-day Cape Cod sun, I don’t have a memory of that level of exhaustion.
Okay you might wonder why I chose tennis court creation in Cape Cod as my stand-in for trying blue collar work. Well, back in the summer of 1996 I was in Massachusetts playing gigs with Catfish Blue. While band members Steve, Conor and I played Road Rash, billiards and grab-ass all day in Western Mass. our singer, Todd Stentiford, was making well over $2000 in one summer laying down tennis and baseball courts for the richest of the rich in Cape Cod. He would talk about the sun as this physical presence, like a demanding boss, bearing down over Todd as he toiled away making sure the doubles lines were just so. As a tenth grader who hadn’t worked a real job before, I just hoped I would never be making tennis courts in Falmouth with the sun trying to kill me.
And no, I’m forty-four now and I’m not making tennis courts. I’m thankful for the demanding work I have done in my life. Working group homes in my twenties was both the most demanding and most boring job I’ve ever worked in my life. Doing shifts of parental observation was pound for pound the most mentally trying job of my life. But at this point I’ve been in dream job territory for about 10-12 years. Traveling around the country getting paid decently to play bass with Dessa and smoking weed at gas stations with Joey and Aby was a pretty great job. Writing trivia questions and convincing bars to hire Trivia Mafia was a pretty great job. Talking between songs on the Current and taking requests was pretty great. Programming music and handling afternoons on Jazz88 was the shit. And now I’m sitting in a basement having conversations through a computer monitor with amazing human beings. I’m going to events/sites of interest in the Twin Cities and taking videos/doing interviews and covering it. I’m also putting flyers up around town and trying to drum up interest in what City Cast Twin Cities is doing. My day job is being on a podcast. My fun job is being on a trivia podcast. I play bass in an exciting instrumental band that gets on stage once a month at the White Squirrel but also gets down once a month in the basement and works on new music. I handle the skeleton of Heiruspecs, shipping out records and t-shirts as the orders trickle in from bandcamp. I have a beautiful professional life.
But today I’m tired. The only thing that did get cancelled for the week was going to involve me drinking a Sazerac down at Meritage and getting some video of said Sazerac downing. I’ll have to get back to that because god damn it a Sazerac sounds tremendous at this moment.
City Cast Twin Cities just launched our first episodes of the podcast this week. I bet you want to listen. I can help with that.
Three episodes out to the world. This morning as we started working I told the collected team on ZOOM that I was pretty confident that working at City Cast Twin Cities was going to be a dream job. . .I told them the surprise was that it was a dream team. I’ve never worked with a more tight-knit, dedicated, talented and imaginative team in my life. This should be an out and out good thing. . .but I’m also second guessing myself trying to make sure I’m doing enough and I’m doing the right things. It’s a lot to navigate and I know I’ll find my way. As I type this is the first time that I’m 150% confident that I will find my way.
I’m at Luminary Coffee in Saint Paul on Selby. It used to be Cahoots. It’s where I met the first love of my life. It’s where I was the first time I ever heard my music on the radio (Radio K roasted my high school band Hailbop on Off the Record). It’s the first place outside of Central High School that Heiruspecs ever played. A couple songs ago on the speakers it was the J-Live tune with Handsome Boy Modeling School. That’s a great tune.
I am catching my breath to realize that a lot of the things I’ve been working on to avoid laying down tennis courts in 1996 has come to fruition. I got so high last night that I wasn’t able to spell the word jealous. I couldn’t even spell it well enough to convince the spellchecker that I was trying to spell jealous. THE PROBLEM WAS THAT I thought it started with JEL. I sat in the hot tub and put it on Jets Max and listened to Grandaddy, Goldlink, Prince, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and D’Angelo.
It was a spectacular Thursday night. I hope you’re jeleaous of it. I’m catching my breath and getting ready to make some more awesome stuff next week. Happy Halloween to you and yours.