So, it looks like I'll be working in a new school next September. Dunno which one. If I play this right, it means I can move out of my crappy little third floor apartment. That needs to work right. I need a good place to live. A new group of people to work with means new challenges. I always rub people the wrong way at first and make a bad first impression. When you're new and seem a bit weird, people are apt to believe even the most outrageous things people say about you.
After work, aflush with the news and jittery, J and T and I got beers and pizza and musical instruments and played a bunch of stuff. When we were eating, though J and T were wanting to decide what specific songs to play, I subjected them to an good episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks in which Simon Amstell, nerdy little Howdy Doody looking gay little British man though he is, effortlessly and hilariously, continually puts down and ridicules guest hellion Danny Tourettes, a self-proclaimed punk rocker who was trying to front punk attitude, but they all mocked him silly. "Donny is smoking a cigarette in the studio! One you can purchase legally in the shops! Whatever will I do? I'm not sure I can continue..."
We all went to the open stage at a local pub, hosted by a kid from our school, and we rocked out. Kids showed up to witness our rocking. We opened with me doing Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down, me playing acoustic, J on slightly distorted electric, and T on organ. Then J did a scorching version of Ziggy Stardust with us backing, then we did Nirvana's About A Girl, with me mainly singing, and doing kinda scrapy hip hop beat inspired strumming with T doing Doors style keys. J sang choruses on that one, with me on harmony, the "All alone is all we are" repeated over and over at the end, with the keys grumbling in a held discordant swell, and the electric guitar feeding back. Then we did Neil Young's Harvest Moon to chill out, followed by The Band's The Weight ("take a load off Fanny, and put the load right on me", with me hitting a bunch of falsetto harmonies) and we finished up with a noisy version of Neil Young's Hey, Hey, My, My.
Due to the disparity in the two Neil songs, it didn't sound like we were repeating ourselves. The other acts had no keyboard, and didn't have a lot of energy, so we were the (aging) rockers of the event.
We sat, tried not to be too sarcastic about the Christian guy singing a whole bunch of songs too high and too fast, censoring them (i.e. Green Day's Basket Case: "She said it's lack of bleep that's bringing me down, am I just paranoid, or ya ya ya"). He was nice, and friendly and helpful, which I think evangelicals should at least be. He couldn't really help coming off to everyone as a high-voiced, acrylic sweater-wearing cheeseball in a state of arrested childhood. He meant well. He went out of his way to be helpful and nice.
People like that make me nervous. They'll go on about how they just really, really love Jesus and just really, really love singing songs about him, and then say "It's too bad there's so many queers in this town. Hate the sin, love the sinner" or something like that, and then I either have to tell them what I think of their comments, or not, and I don't do well with not.
T opened up a bit about his own United Church experience, and what about it didn't work for him. That was very interesting. The quote from me that he seemed to want to remember was when I said "I didn't just give lip service to the worth of the teaching I was being given. I believed it and tried to make it work, and by 17 years of age it really made me want to be dead."
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