Re-emerging, ever so gently...

If you have found this, you are indeed intrepid! This is a quiet little post, a sneak up on ya' kind of thing as I gently test the waters for coming back out and making  the music again. It has been an intense few months.
Well, it's been intense since March 14 in fact, when I found out the work world I had been building up for so many years was just going to go away. Ok, maybe it took months to fully come to that conclusion, but the loss of immediate work, all on one day, as I gave my first and last show at Toast on Bloor,  was a gut punch. I am a worker bee. I stay busy and do whatever I must to keep the lights on in this metropolis I was born and bred in.

I use an actual book book for a calendar, a Moleskin with ink pen and a highly sophisticated highlighter code for keeping my various workings organized- blue for meetings, green for weird money J.O.B.'s, pink for teaching.  I use purple for gigs because it's a solid colour to align with artistic pursuits. I used to have just a bit of purple, not necessarily every week.  When the Covid hit, I had a lot of purple. I had been slowly adding in gigs around the city, moving the show out of town, building up a case for needing to play more, to purple more.

I left all the colours in my book where they were. I was a few months ahead. I started an on-line show, All The Fridays, but used yellow to indicate some sort of temporary state as I had an inability to see this as a normal, new way of life. Slowly all the colours disappeared from my Moleskin and I was left with just this yellow.

Yellow is a tricky colour. It's the colour used for the self-confidence chakra, if you are into that (I am). But it's also used as a 'get the hell out of here' colour in the corporate world. Subway does not want you to stay for longer than to eat their 'food', so they make use of the vibrant yellow. Not the muted yellows- those say other things. But the highlighter yellow?? It kind of yells at you, as its' meant to do in the highlighting game.

So I 'got the hell out' in a September break that was meant to be for just a month.  All the colour from my book, gone. It is still my calendar. I use it as my history of what I am up to and, increasingly, as a Zoom etc. organizer. I am still a bit in denial and have not colour coded the Zoom meetings yet. I will. The colour will return. I will return.

September turned into October, as it is right now whilst I type. The last few months I have spent upgrading sound equipment, swearing at the process of upgrading sound equipment, shouting, crying and then just  breathing deeply into the brave new world and knowing it's the way ahead. I have also been courting the muse a bit here, writing poetry a bit there and sometimes, forgetting about how the world is now.

I was on a bike ride the other day and kind of forgot about COVID for a great deal of minutes. That was quite enjoyable. Sometimes there is a quick intake of breath and I re-realize I have left whatever I was building, in the way that I was building it, behind. It's a mix of grief and weird relief and confusion. A strange emotional cocktail that feels like one endless hangover from a live lived before the winds of change blew in a far less poetic manner than the phrase suggests. Gut punch in March, resignation here and now in October.

The colour will come back to my trusty Moleskin very soon. And it will be purple, damn it! 

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