London Town

I know I was going to be keeping this thing more up to date than I am. No excuses, but things do get out of hand sometimes. Life takes over and reality retaliates. I just checked back on myself and the last entry was Christmas time. That was quite a while ago. Damn. Jesus just keeps getting born, doesn’t he? Then they raise him up and kill him again. Then the stone gets rolled away and there he his playing in a rock band wearing a stylized loin cloth from one of those Paris design firms. I sure wouldn’t want to be his manager…

So here I am in London, just off of Oxford Street, working away in an Internet café. I know I should have a lap top of my own. Hell, I should have my own air plane. But I like these places – they have great high speed connections, they’re cheap, and you get to sit next to African students writing home to wherever it is they come from about whatever it is they are doing here. And since the English have been slowing but surely doing away with all that smoking that they used to do (and everybody else who was in the same room with them) its a whole lot easier to move around and get sociable.

I’ve been here for about a week and a half now. When I arrived I brought the weather with me from Seattle – the great lingering Siberian freeze that shut down almost everything. Also the wind storm that put the lights out. The day after I got off the plane a wind storm hit with 100 mile an hour winds and that ain’t no joke. The BBC did a projection using 50,000 computerized graphs to show what global warming is likely to do and it ain’t pretty. Still, ole terminally positive me, I figure we’ll just struggle our way through it like we have everything else. I just don’t figure we’re done for and I’m not ready to throw in the towel until the mastodon is at the door its great jousting tusks are rending through the wood frames right into my intestinal fortitude…

The gigs have been going well. All except the one that was canceled, though I guess that one was spotless. Hard to make a mistake when you’re not even there. I’ve got four more to do and I hope to run out of CDs by the time I get to the end. I also hope to get home with enough money to pay the rent, which will be late. And maybe to turn on whatever utility may have been turned off. I love the city but they have a way of disconnecting things when they don’t get their money. And I left on a shoe string….

But things are looking up. I am already booked fort next summer’s Trowbridge Festival and I may even have a line a good Irish agent. I’d love to get the whole thing going on a better level. There’s also a BBC Radio 2 guy named Mike Harding who really likes my stuff. He’s been threatening interview me but nothing has happened so far. If it does though it could be just the kick that I need.

Anyway………… I type with two fingers so it takes me a bit longer than the other people in here. They are all clattering away like a team of literate insects, happily writing great vast multiplicities into the cybersphere. Me, I just slam those keys like I mean it. And I do, but I have to go off to the train station for tonight’s gig. I’ll get back again to you later.