My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, is on the garden committee for our condo association. Now, I should be clear that there are three units in our building, and every single unit has one person on the garden committee. And since that person is not me, I did not get a vote when the garden committee chose to slaughter our beloved (by me) yews and completely wipe out every other living thing in the yard and start over. I am not bitter about this. Really. (I’ve processed my rage and moved on.)
To be fair, the previous iteration of the garden required, well, a lot of work, and, well, it didn’t get a lot of work. And, as a result, it became somewhat…unruly. We had various uninvited plants (otherwise known as “weeds”) invading our space and mocking our sovereignty. Our solution, apparently, was to throw out the baby with the bathwater, er, start fresh (I’ve processed my rage and moved on. I’ve processed my rage and moved on. I’ve – oh, you get the point), with mulch, and fencing, and machine gun emplacements for the turkeys (yes, we’ve seen them grazing), and now it’s clean and pretty and the neighbors no longer gossip about it behind our backs (or so I’ve been assured).
On a related note, I have a list of open mikes on my Web site.
I’ve maintained (and by “maintained”, I mean “failed to delete”) this list for a number of years, and I’ve updated it periodically (in geologic time), but I’ve neglected it for quite a while – the pandemic, especially, obliterated its utility. And, as a result, it has grown weeds – zombie open mikes that haven’t been open or miking for a very long time. And the longer I left it, the more intimidating the update process became, and the less enthusiasm I had for updating it, lather, rinse, repeat. But last week, I snapped – the weeds had finally become too embarrassing, and the neighbors were gossiping behind my back (or so I imagined). So my garden committee of one began the tedious process of cleaning up.
I removed – count ’em – 78 open mikes which had died over the last I’m-too-embarrassed-to-tell-you-how-many years, and every single listing that I kept had to be updated. Every. Single. One. I know lots of things can change in the six or so years since I last scrubbed it – but damn, that’s a lot of changes, and what’s worse, I added fewer than 10 new open mikes. There’s less live music overall – fewer venues, fewer people who are willing to take the trouble to host, fewer people who feel comfortable in a crowd. You cannot convince me that this is a good thing. Four of the open mikes that remain on the list are entirely virtual. And while that’s great for shut-ins and the elderly and for people who don’t have the time to drive to hell and back (and don’t get me wrong, these things are important), I don’t think it’s good for music in general.
I’m an in-person guy. I think we spend too much time in front of these screens of ours – not just attending virtual open mikes, but doing all sorts of other things, shut away in our bedrooms and dens, that don’t involve touching someone else’s hand, or giving them a hug, or experiencing the energy of a shared in-person experience. In a month or so, SWMBT and I will attend the Fourth of July fireworks display in Newton, with its carnival midway and cheesy hometown band performances. It will be mobbed. It will be loud. And it will not be virtual.
Our garden committee could be playing Garden Simulator on their Nintendo devices. But we actually prefer getting our hands dirty.