1. I finished writing this morning. I drank a couple of cups of the smoky, dark chocolate-y SilverCup Midnight Blend, my favorite coffee, roasted at Silvercup Coffee, right here in Kellogg. I was enjoying the still morning, my solitude, thinking about the Deke traveling to New York today, happy that she gets to see Adrienne and Jack and hang out in Nyack, a place we love to visit. I thought it might be fun to continue reading profiles by Joseph Mitchell over breakfast somewhere, and, after some deliberation, decided to go to Best Shots. Their breakfast portions are a little smaller than Sam's and that sounded good to me and it's often quiet at Best Shots first thing in the morning and I thought I might be able to continue feeling the sense of ease I was enjoying this morning and have been feeling for a while now.
I walked up the ramp to the entry of Best Shots and a guy I didn't know was coming out, a can of snoose in hand, loading himself up a pinch between his cheek and gum, and we nodded at each other and I asked him how it was going and he said he was doing great and he walked a few steps and just as I was ready to pull open the door and he exclaimed to me, "Hey, buddy! You'll love it in there! You can watch Kansas beat Duke all over again!" and he laughed and strode to his pickup. He was right. A couple of the televisions were running the last minutes of regulation and the overtime period of last Sunday's 85-81 thriller, Kansas over Duke, over and over again. If there are Duke fans in the Silver Valley, I haven't met them, but I sure talk to plenty of "anyone but Duke" fans. My guess is that Best Shots was running this part of the game over and over again so that fans could exult repeatedly in Duke being eliminated from the NCAA tournament. If any Dukies came into the Best Shots, they should get ready to be trolled, ready for a pretty sick burn.
2. Friday, I had been in the basement looking for The Story of the Weeping Camel, a DVD I thought for sure I hadn't given away when we moved from Greenbelt (but it looks like I was wrong), when I discovered I had kept a favorite old CD, Left of Center, by the Eugene jam band, Nine Days Wonder. Nine Days Wonder played regular gigs at the WOW Hall late in the 1980s on into the early 1990s. I can't tell you the exact lifespan of the band, but I do know that starting some time in 1989, I started going to their shows whenever I could. Listening to the CD in the car today reminded me of all the dislocation, uncertainty, inner chaos, and longing for security I felt during those years. Those Nine Days Wonder shows, along with shows they shared with Little Women or other shows I went to by Big Head Todd and the Monsters, Zero, Widespread Panic, and other jam bands delivered me back then, temporarily, out of my inward torment into states of ecstasy, especially when dancing. The gratitude I felt back then for these bands and that music engulfed me today in the Sube as I listened to this Nine Days Wonder CD and remembered all that solitary dancing on the WOW Hall dance floor and the release and the sense of togetherness I felt with so many others who were otherwise strangers to me, and my wish, at the time, that I didn't have to return home or face my academic failings or my job uncertainty, but that my life could be one long sweaty formless dance.
3. Ed needed to pick up a roll of snoose today down at the Fightin' Creek Market on the CdA Reservation, so he invited me to join him and to go to the casino for a while. I both accepted and said I'd drive, so we headed out around noon or so and Ed told me about his recent vacation to San Diego and about spending some time in Mexico and we talked about a bunch of other stuff. I heard from the Deke during my casino visit. I hadn't thought about the fact that she'd be taking the train to Pearl River, NY. Not only that, I hadn't thought about the fact that when she got off the train in Pearl River, the station is right across from one of our favorite breweries, Defiant. The Deke sent me an excited text telling me that she got off the train, bopped right over to Defiant, and was enjoying a Fake News IPA and some wings. Yeah, sure, I wished we were doing that together, but this idle wish hardly dampened my happiness that the Deke was at one of our favorite spots and I walked around the casino for a while beaming, relishing her good fortune, not only for being at Defiant, but for the time she would soon be spending with Adrienne and Jack.
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