you exhale as much as you can. then you fill your lungs, and a blue plastic piece rises along a numbered axis. the top is 4,000...whatever units it is, cc's of air by volume or whatever.
the top of the column is sealed over with the thickest plastic of any of it...I guess so people won't see a modified version for sale at Freaky's...
right after surgery, I was in the 2,000 range. yesterday, I made it to 3,500.
I'm glad I have a suck meter. I'm glad I haven't pegged it. I thought it augered well for the gig with Runaway Express yesterday.
I think I could have hit the suck meter a little harder during that gig. I actually may have had a suckier performance at some other time during my life.
I have a triptych on my wall upstairs that I made from three Littleton Historical Museum posters one summer, when I played there with Runaway Express, Jubilant Bridge, and Upsidasium!
I'm just returning from a place where my continuance gigging was seriously threatened. and, technically, the threat isn't quite over. it has served, as it should, to make me remember how much I love life, me, music, playing, and gigging. and I do. I say it like the Cowardly Lion...I do believe, IdoIdoIdoIdo.
and the Littleton Historical Museum series is the good stuff of gigging...well attended by appreciative people, kinda ok money, a genuinely beautiful setting, and I like Loreena who has always run it.
it's also had its share of peacock poop.
I'm not speaking figuratively. there was a tall tree over stage left, my traditional spot with Runaways. when the peacocks weren't parading around front upstaging the music and causing oohs and aahs, they would be in the tree cawing loud bursts of criticism or competition. (our band had never signed with NBC)
my memories of the Littleton gigs included sometimes actually getting rained out, sometimes just spending hours wondering if we would, doing the cover-my-PA dance, dealing with heat and sun and running sunblock and insects and allergies
and an avian Jackson Pollock on high, making a splatter masterpiece of my shirt.
seeing "our" stage set up at the Museum yesterday as I drove up, Jim's van, Chris's drums, a waiting vacancy stage left, was a little like going to the field in Telluride and seeing the stage outfitted for the Bluegrass Festival, or going to Rockerfeller Center and seeing people skating on the ice rink and the biggest anywhere tree lit up. a place that exists all year, changed for a special time, a time I am somehow to play a part in.
it was like a dream.
a dream I had fought hard for for a couple of months, and face more fighting in the months to come.
but a dream that contained as well the allergies and rain and my hopes and insecurities throughout the years.
it was like the first day back to school. the familiarity doesn't gradually mount...it hits you all at once, every step bringing you back to structure, taking your turn on the hot seat, A minuses and C plusses, and caustic teachers and the girl sitting in front of you you can never never talk to, and teachers who inspire you throughout your life, and jerks on the playground, and the human endeavor.
yeah, make no mistake...musically I literally live for it.
but there it all was at once...and, how would I do tonight?
I could not have wanted a better setting to find out.
I date, rightly or wrongly, my playing with Runaway Express back to 1986...at least that is when the first project of theirs I played on came out. the band was already a country by then, with long standing traditions and a rich culture, and its own regional accent.
in the years since I feel like I've learned much about that culture, hoped to become one of the preservers of it, maybe occasionally added something to it. and thanks to the grace of the other members, I feel like I can respectfully travel within its borders pretty freely.
but I stop short of calling a Runaway Express gig "comfortable".
there's always a new song, a new turn, an arrangement changed on the fly, someone's part to cover when they're not there, some bit of musical business we haven't executed in ten years that sending out a cue for wouldn't hurt.
I am my least comfortable when underchallenged.
so, yesterday, I was thanking God for these people, in this place, not only for the symbol of continuance when my continuance had been threatened, but for these people, who I knew would, to a woman, be pulling for me...and for this assignment, which I had spent so much time covering before. I knew I had a state of the art safety net for anything I found out in real time I was just not able to do right now.
and I knew that Daniel, Ernie, Chris, Butch, Sally, and Jim had spent a lot of time hearing me really suck on occasion. like, 5,000 cc's.
they could stand it.
so it was a little like the dog reciting Hamlet. the point for me, as for a lot of the audience, wasn't that I could have executed the soliloquy more clearly.
the point was that I was there doing it at all.
which in a way is always the point. certainly for Butch, who had had a recent roll of the dice that determined it wasn't his time yet to go. and is it less so for those who go through personal drama, or depression, or financial strain, or any of the thousands of reasons people decide just not to try so hard?
it's so fucking stupid that people think they can find any relief at all by making things harder for someone else, when the wonder of it all is that so many people are doing so much despite all the stuff that could rise up to stop them. we're all here each day because it just ain't our time not to be yet, and we're damn lucky.
my cancer stuff isn't really so different an example.
I had a lot of incentive to peg that spirometer, to suck hard there and not at the gig.
and I think that's how people are going to write it down. weak, short of breath, unable to turn my head, maddeningly stiff in my shoulder, getting over breathing tube laryngitis, I held down the third guitar chair for an hour.
Dr. Nemechek, your miracles are working.
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