I lost my first client today for COVID-related reasons. Lost might be a bit of reach. I’ve been paused. I suspect there is a lot of pausing in my future and I’m doing my best not to panic about it.

So instead of stress-blogging about my road to financial ruin I will tell you about a small, good thing.

Usually sometime during the weekend my best pal Wolfdogg will turn on his Twitch stream and play some songs for anyone who wants to watch. As my friend & fellow Westernerd EM said a few weeks go about watching him, “It makes my heart happy.”

I tend to know a lot of the songs by heart because Wolf and I have very similar musical tastes. Duh. We met on a Paul Westerberg message board back in like 2004. Do you remember that? I do. That fact makes Sister #2 laugh so hard she cries. It makes my niblings Jaycie & Max laugh and laugh whenever I tell the story because they hardly remember a time when the Wolfs weren’t like family.

One time I apologized to Max for really dropping the ball in the uncle department, but then he said he considers Wolf and Atom (BFK’s husband) kinda like uncles and then I felt better, because I brought both of those men into his life.

So as I was saying, Wolf’s and my musical tastes match up pretty closely. We have dragged each other through many musical crushes (remember when I was obsessed with The Kooks?). And one of those came back to me this weekend.

On Instagram I’ve been doing the 30-day music challenge because my niece asked me to (and then promptly abandoned the whole thing). One of the prompts last week was to post a song that makes you sad and I chose Dolorean’s “To Destruction.” That song just wrecks me. Still.

So this weekend when Wolf said on his Twitch stream that all those song challenges were making him revisit some forgotten favorites I did not expect “To Destruction” to pop out of his guitar. But it did, and it made me so happy that I cried.

It was a lovely, beautiful thing that happened and I’m glad I could share it with you.

The post The COVID Diaries: To Destruction appeared first on I Will Dare.

Here at Aunt Jodi’s Home for Wayward Nephews we had a pretty quiet and mellow weekend, which was a fucking delight after the high drama of of last weekend. The only thing that would have made the weekend better would have been getting a break from work.

I am not complaining, because I’m grateful to have work, but it’s really very busy and working seven days a week in the middle of an apocalypse while also trying to acclimate a traumatized kid to you house has been a lot. I’m behind on all my hobbies. I haven’t finished reading a book in over a week and my temperature blanket? Whoo.

It’s just been stress on top of stress on top of stress and oddly — knock on wood, cross myself, thank my lucky stars — I have been sleeping like a muthafuckin’ champ. This surprises me to no end. Every morning I wake up and I’m all, “DAMN, I slept the whole night without waking up at all.” It’s nice and I think it’s the sleep that has helped me keep my shit together for the most part.

Another thing that has helped tremendously? Watching live-streaming performances from my favorite musicians. This weekend I got to watch Wolfdogg twice. As my friend EM, who joined the Twitch stream today said, “That just filled my heart up.” Mine too.

I’ve also been joining Amanda Shires’ “I So Lounging” YouTube live thing every day at 5 p.m. (central) and basically low-key weeping for about a half hour while she and Jason Isbell sing songs and riff with their friends. Both the nephews know to leave me alone while I’m “watching my show” and they don’t question if tears leak from my eyes and for that I am also grateful. Because I can’t really explain the weeping because it’s not joy or happiness, but maybe it’s just the relief of the momentary absence of dread that makes me cry.

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Bringing the disparate areas of your life together can be a little nerve wracking. When I invited Vodo my former Loft teacher and now friend to join Heather, Wolfdogg, and I on our journey to Milwaukee, I was worried.

Vodo is kind of awkward. I’m the reigning Queen of Awkward. Wolfdogg is a slightly taller & nerdier dude version of me. Awkward + Awkward + Awkward has all the potential to equal the worst thing to ever happen inside a minivan ever.

But then there was Heather. I was putting all my eggs in Heather’s basket. Heather is nothing but grace and charm and putting people at ease. She’s the best hostess ever. We could have invited the Queen of England to sit in the way back and we’d still have been okay, because Heather’s easy goingness makes everything smooth.

The day started a little rough. I was five minutes late (because I am an asshole), Vodo was ten minutes early (because apparently he is not), and within forty-five seconds of sitting in the back of the van Vodo was throwing stuff at me.

“What is this?” I asked.
“I don’t know it just came off,” he said.
“VODO YOU BROKE THE MINIVAN ALREADY?” I shouted.
“Nah,” Wolfdogg said. “That’s been broken.”
“You’re gonna get us kicked out before River Falls,” I snarled as we took off.

Because I was so nervous I kept up a pretty consistent run of stream-of-consciousness chatter, which for an introvert who rarely has to talk to people with her mouth is a lot of work. However, my fear of awkward silence far outweighs my fear of sounding like a babbling idiot. The more you know.

I told them how awful I was at dating and how hard it was to find someone suitable and how I was very popular with short men who wanted to be lifted up. This and Hobbits became a running joke of the weekend.

?Short man in fancy dress? I have no time for you,? Vodo said at one point dissing both my feelings toward the book and my views on most men who want to go out with me in one fell swoop.

And while I tried to tamp down my disdain for all things Hobbitty and StarWarsy and Doctor Who-y, the conversation that flowed from some of those topics was my favorite of the entire weekend, because it’s then that I got to see three people that I adore find something else in common.

There was a very long discussion about Doctor Who that I kind of tuned out of. It was nice.

And while the trip down to Milwaukee was all anxious energy and anticipation and jokes a minute, I kind of liked the trip back to Minnesota more.

Four weary music fans low on sleep and high on coffee. Comfortable with chatting and intermittent lapses into silence.

I spent a lot of time with my head against the window singing, because I am incapable of not singing in a car no matter who is in that car with me. Sorry Queen of England & anyone else who has to go on a road trip with me in the future, you’ve been warned. At one point Wolf even complimented me and Vodo on or harmonies when we dueted on Teenage Fanclub’s “The Concept.”

What was so great about this trip home was that the songs then spun out conversations about books or movies or other songs and musicians. There’s much to be said about being trapped in a car with three incredibly smart people who share the same pop culture sensibilities as you do, even if the left side of the car is being total assholes about your inability to listen to long instrumental intros to Death Cab for Cutie songs.

And even though I spent a lot of non-singing time threatening that left side of the car where Vodo & Wolf sat my favorite part of the whole trip was watching the two of them airdrum to whatever song was on the radio.

The post The Roadtrip appeared first on I Will Dare.

“Did you answer the phone?” Vodo asked after I, well, answered the phone.
“You called me!” I screeched.
“You aren’t supposed to answer.”
“But you called.”
“I called so I could get your number into my phone. Nobody answers. Don’t you know that?”
“Vodo,” I said. “I’m old. I answer the phone.”
“THIS IS SO AWKWARD!” He said in a tone that sounded kinda all-caps and exclaimy.
“I am going to hang up now and text you.”

I should probably just apologize to Wolfdogg & Heather right now for having to spend five hours in a minivan with Vodo and I. I’ve already threatened to live-tweet everything he says & to throw him out of the car before we hit River Falls.

The post Portents appeared first on I Will Dare.

The first concert I ever paid my own money to attend was Bell Biv DeVoe (now ya know) at the Met Center in (I think) the spring/summer of 1991.

A longtime New Edition fan, I was giddy with excitement to attend this concert with my high school BFF Nikki. I drove two hours from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin where I lived at the time just to see BBD and Keith Sweat and Johnny Gill. I wore my flyest, brightest tie-dyed shorts.

Since I was a poor kid I didn’t get a lot of opportunities to see live music even though I loved the hell out of it. I spent any dollars I had on music I could keep, and in 1991 that didn’t happen very often. In fact, I stole most of my music from the Chippewa Falls library, making endless mix tapes from the records I’d check out.

Before Bell Biv DeVoe the only other concert I had seen was The Jets & Limited Warranty. So of course I was giddy as fuck. Nikki, my petite, blonde, cheerleader BFF, and I were amped up and chatty as hell as we navigated our way to our seats. And that was probably the last happy moment of the concert for me. Well maybe not when Johnny Gill sang Rub You the Right Way, but still . . .

I had the great misfortune to be seated at that concert in front of and behind total assholes. Every time I stood up the people behind me would tap me on the shoulder and ask me to sit down because they couldn’t see. Because I am a nice, Minnesota girl, I did. Of course. But because I am a freakishly tall Minnesota girl, whenever I sat down my knees were wedged into the seat in front of me, which totally pissed off the woman in front of me who turn around and ask if I could move my knees. It was awful, because I literally had no where to move them. At all.

There is something about being freakishly tall that really brings out the total asshole in people, even Minnesota Nice people, at paid events like concerts or movies. Take for instance this total bullshit about tall people being jerks puked up on City Pages today.

Of course when you’re 5’1″ as the author of that piece is, isn’t just about the entire fucking planet taller than you? And also, why do people taller than you owe you anything? We have just as much right to exist as anyone else. Plus, as my 6’9″ BFF Wolfdogg pointed out, actual tall people, the freakishly tall like me and him, are ridiculously aware of how much space we’re taking up at all times.

It reminded me of this wonderful description Kim Gordon had about her ex-husband Thurston Moore in her book Girl in a Band:

. . . and the wariness you see in tall men who don’t want to overpower other people with their height.”

That wariness goes about quadruple for tall women.

I’ve been a concert-going music fan for more than twenty years now and I have never, ever been front row center at any concert I’ve attended. I got pretty close when I saw Mike Doughty at Hippiefest a hundred years ago, but that was a strange combination of drunken bravado and hippies that had never before or since been duplicated in my entire life.

Being a freakishly tall female concert goer adds an extra level of peril to the whole experience, because then you get the sexism on top of the usual belligerence of shorter-than-you men. I remember a particular Ryan Adams concert at First Ave where a drunk guy was mad at me for being in front of him at the back of the room and at the same time told me how he’d forgive me in bed because “we’re all the same height laying down.” (Barf)

As you can see that article totally pissed me off. I see this lament about tall people at concerts all the time and it drives me bonkers. Because really? What are we supposed to do? It’s not like we can fucking help our height. So if you’re short, why don’t you stop being an entitled asshole and move. Fuck.

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