Weird birds.
I’m weird. I understand this, accept it, and– on good days– embrace it. Most of my friends are weird; they run the gamut from geeks to dorks to the slightly odd.
But there are some people who defy my standards of weirdness. Well, here at the Rohs St. Cafe, on Friday and Saturday nights we occassionally get a super-ordinary-weirdness-factor performer. These are the people in their mid-thirties, with stringy hair a la smoking…and not just cigarettes. They bring their own, very large speakers and turn them up too loud. And they bring bizarre, electronic equipment which they dub “cutting edge musical instruments,” which they proceed to use at random intervals throughout the night, usually doing nothing musical with them at all– unless you consider feedback to be music. I know it’s wrong, but whenever one of these weird birds comes in and insists on setting up their own sound equipment I am immediately suspicious. We have definitely had performers who pulled an Ashley Simpson. We have even had some who were just drunk enough that I really wondered how they got their Ashley Simpson equipment set up, you know? Anyways.
We get these weird birds often enough for me to really be amazed at our economy. I mean no one runs around Russia with a souped-up balalaika, an over-sized amp, and aomething called a psnjliefnhih; and no one drives through the Sudan playing randomly at coffee shops and sleeping in a Vanagon (although this might be considerably less work for some of the migratory peoples of Sudan, who as I understand it, instead use camels, donkeys, and easily-disassembled thatched huts). The reason is simple: if you try to, you will starve. In America, we have homeless people who are obese. We also have musicians who either a) don’t mind starving or b) somehow make enough off their crappy music to buy large amounts of heroine, because they look like whippets with bad hair.
This is all very strange to me and I’m still trying to sort it out. I admire an economic system that allows us to give large amounts of humanitarian aid to small children starving in devloping countries, but on occassion I look at some of the people out there who are obviously pretty high up there on Maslow’s hierarchy, and I say, “Ok, fifteen years of this out to have taught you by now that you just aren’t very good at this whole musician thing. You’re never going to be a rock star. So, enough of this self-actualization. Go get a real job and contribute to society so that we can feed more starving children in developing countries.
I know that is very arrogant and hypocritical of me. I can’t really help it. It’s just how I feel.
November 22nd, 2004 at 10:54 am
That was awesome. I totally concur!!
The worst part is when one of these wacos actually does get a major recording deal.