KjB

A year ago, I quit my job at firm de+co and began working full-time (more or less) at LFS. I also hooked back up with my current employer, and started down the path I’m now on with them.

It was the beginning of something. That’s for sure.

All of the time between has seemed a blink in time, and I’m sitting here now imagining it all in that “life flashing before your eyes” format. It goes something like this.

My old boss sweating and twitching as i tell him i’m quitting–Now. Driving to Luckyfish for the first time as an employee. Swinging on the trapeze. Meeting with Juliet at Olive Bistro, talking about subversive plans for employment. Stephanie and I hiding in a nurses’s closest in the Millidgeville insane asylum, wondering if ghosts or police are after us. Watching the train go by on the Mangum street porch. CW and I screaming at each other on the Mangum street stairs. Me crying in the rain. Watching hundreds of hours of sex and the city, back to back to back. My brother being hilarious and pragmatic while we eat giant angry-break-up cheeseburgers, get drunk on Hoegaarden and watch bad horror movies. Him moving out. Me missing him. Me making pissed-off home improvements–slamming paint to the walls. Stephanie and I making fun of mosaics at the Botanical Gardens. Realizing the irony in joining e-”Harmony.” Deciding that e-Harmony dudes are religious-freak tools, and joining Match. Happy-dancing with Hank at the end of the bar. Drinking mojitos with my favorite people as I cross the “line of suck” (as joe once told me) into my 30’s. Eating birthday cupcakes at my desk. Playing trumpet in the Thunderbox parking lot. Writing a late-night song for trumpet and guitar.Meeting my first PC students. Meeting my four jealous husbands–and trying to hear myself play over their tube amps and thundering drums. Jawbox, RMSN, RFTC, Medications, Rachel’s, Shellac, Trail of Dead. Getting lost in Cicero–the El cop’s suspicion of a manic Hank (he thought we were there to buy drugs). The Tesla coil.Acoustic on the porch. Dinner at the EARL. Playing metal covers–paradise city, highway to hell, When the Children Cry. Playing Legos. Carving pumpkins. Leaving Mead street, sad and confused, in my green coat. An uncomfortable, blurry Thanksgiving. Driving, talking to Stephanie for 5 hours straight. Walking into The Happenstance, nervous (and hiding it). Meeting the blond guy with the suit jacket and the hat. Singing “I’ve been hanging on the west side, trying to get away from you.” Hank on the monitor. Star Trek on the couch. Metalsome Monday on Friday. Confusion and resignation. Email flirting. Christmas listening to Appetizer Sickness. Wine on the porch with Laura. Walking across the bar toward the blonde guy with the suit jacket and the hat. 6 hours that felt like 6 minutes, and 6 too many beers. Suburban trips. Disappearing on weekends. Johnny’s after work. Concerts in the living room. Confrontation in the EARL parking lot–”why didn’t you tell me you were dating someone new?” Costello, Tupelo, Replacements, M.Ward, the Band, Dylan, Decemberists, Shins, Waits. 5 original songs. 3 name changes. Joe’s loft. New friends. Old ones fading. Waking up at dawn to see the ocean. 100 phone calls to Auburn. Walking across the bridge in Cedartown. Covering the tattoos. Meeting the Ex. Meeting my parents, and feeling like old friends at the Highland Tap. Cutting hair–blond curls falling to the floor. Donuts and photography. Recordings in Marietta. Dunch. Relentless editing at 4 am. Moving. Saturday conversations about death and religion and love, at Manuels, on the porch, in the car. Lox in the morning. Harmony at midnight. On stage at Eyedrum–Stephanie to my right, then Ben, then Hank. Fighting over the remote. Snuggling to the Simpsons. Waking up smiling. Dreaming every single night. Walking to the train. IM-ing in the mornings.

And that brings me to today.

Now that was 365.

Ah, rumors.

Word-of-mouth is such a poisionous and powerful medium. To cut to the chase, I just had a conversation with someone who heard that someone that I have known for many years, is telling people that I am “into all kinds of drugs.” Just the phrase reeks of 6th-grade rumor-mill shite, but since i had previously respected this person quite a bit, and since he and his significant other are also, recently ignoring me in a really obvious way, I’m both hurt and baffled by the implication.

It makes me want to make accusatory phone calls, ask everyone i know if they’ve heard the rumor, and then drive over there and confront this person and his business partner (who has known me, intimately, way long enough to know better) in person. But, you know what, i won’t. Because it’s not true. And logistically, i should know better myself than to act on second-hand information.

Instead, I’m going to do this:  Full disclosure for anyone interested.

I am dating a musician, play in a band with other musicians, and hang out with people of the arts/music crowd, often in places that may or may not have illegial substance-related things happening in them. Bars. Music Venues. Band practice spaces. Etc. And, to be honest, I can’t say that i’ve never seen it. A couple of the members of my own band enjoy a bit of the old wacky-tobacky now and again while playing, though, it tends to make me ill, so I generally do not partake, though I will admit that I have once or twice. Harder things, (coke, X, pills, what have you) I see much less of, probably because people assume that I’m not interested. They’d be correct. I am categorically - and always have been - convinced that I would be the one unlucky soul who would die immediately upon inhaling whatever mind-altering/mood-tweaking substance i was offered. Not to be cheesy, but for that reason (and the fact that my brain is “interesting” enough, unaided by chemical alteration), I just say no. Always. In the interest of total honestly, you fill find a good amount of Rum, beer, and/or wine in my bloodstream on most weekends, but that’s it. If anyone is interested also in the direct company I keep, I can say that Blake is a drinker, and nothing else, and that his band are all professionals with wives and kids and just don’t do such things.

So there. If anybody cares.  And not that the purpetrator is reading this, but, on the off chance that this gets back to him, I would say I am utterly beside myself that you would consider that this is who i am, and would implore you to reconsider the validity and motivations of your souce of information, and/or keep your imagination in check, and to yourself.

Thanks.