Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Tonight I visited an old friend who I had not seen in a while. He's my muse, of sorts. He's always got some sort of drama going on in his life and it tends to make for great songwriting material. Tonight he told about his wedding week.
He got married in Mexico and went down a few days before everybody else to get the lay of the land. Also, I gathered, to drink a lot of tequila and bid farewell to his wilder days.
He booked a room for something around $50 a night, but it was amazing! He had a view of the ocean, and access to a private beach. Everything was going well until he stumbled into his room late one night after a tequila tasting and found a small crab in his room. The crab was at the end of the bed and looked at my friend as if he had been interrupted during an important task. My friend froze and what followed was a good minute of silence, confusion, fear, posturing and uncertainty. Also drunkenness on the part of my friend. At that moment, the crab scurried under the bed. My friend, feeling comfortable in the knowledge of the common fact that crabs simply cannot climb bedsheets, went to sleep.
About that time in the story, my friend's cell phone rang. It was the Austin police. It seems he had enough unpaid parking fees that the police had booted his jeep. He bolted out the door without the common decency to finish his dang story.
Bottom line... where was this story going? I thought I had the makings of a great song. Maybe he and the crab became friends. Maybe a tidal pool came in and brought with it all of the crab's extended family - stranding my friend on the bed. Perhaps the crab found an alternate route to the top of the bed. Maybe my friend got up in the middle of the night to use the toilet and got snapped on his pinky toe. Who knows. In any case, I've got no material to go off of. I've never been so let down in my life.
Maybe sometime soon I'll find out what happened, and I'll let you know. Or maybe it's better left to the imagination. Maybe life is all about anticipation and the best stories are those that contain a little mystery. No, I think I'd rather know the end of the dad-gum story.
So I'm calling it a night. The band is playing a big show up north of Austin in Round Rock, TX. We'll be playing at a place called Junior's Ice House and Grill. http://www.juniorsgrillroundrock.com/ We go on at 6:30 and it's a free, all-ages show!
Here's a little bit of video from a recent show we had at Jovita's Mexican Restaurant in Austin, TX
