The Gaming Outpost

I collapsed early last night, and spent the night alternating between chills and sweats.  I am not recovered from the sickness, and may be returning to bed, where I have spent most of today, when I finish this.  I rose late-morning, set up coffee to start at noon (which I still have not tasted), and uploaded the first Examiner temporal anomalies article in the new series, Warlock part 1:  not so easy, sketching the story in which a warlock escapes colonial Boston for twentieth century California with a witch-hunter in hot pursuit.  As I returned to bed, the resident nurse dosed me with six hundred milligrams of ibuprofen sometime after noon; she followed this with another four hundred milligrams when I arose again shortly after five, from a fitful sleep.

I tentatively diagnose exhaustion.  I had been asked to help the Silver Lake Community Church with its parade float; they wanted their kids accompanied by something more than the church worship band, so their music director got all of us plus the drummer Nick from Collision.  Although I was little involved in the past weeks with the carpentry and such, I was first on the scene Sunday morning, shortly after nine, already setting equipment that had come with me while waiting for someone to open the church where the rest was stored.  We used ninety percent of my functional equipment plus some of Baxter’s to set up separate sound systems for vocals versus instruments, and while some of the others were in church I went with Nick and a couple others and finished tacking everything in place so I would be comfortable that it would not fall.

We were doing sound checks and testing the generator within the last hour before the parade began.  Jonathan, the church music director, had said that in addition to a clever but simple medley of Happy Birthday, This Little Light of Mine, and Joy to the World which fit the float theme (a birthday cake for Jesus in which the kids wore flame-like caps to make themselves the candles) we would do a few of the “popular” Christmas carols (Jingle Bells, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, Deck the Halls, and Angels We Have Heard On High are the ones I remember actually doing, although we practiced a few more) and the Collision song (that is, my song) Free, which he thought was a good Christmas song (I’d have thought Easter, but then David Meece’s We Are the Reason got promoted as both).  We tested Free with the sound check, and the pastor said that would not be one of the songs we did during the parade, so I shrugged and said as far as I was concerned it was up to Jonathan.  He grumbled a bit about it, but never called for it.

I was at the church before the float, and someone fed me four squares of pizza (one with sausage) from a local pizza shop some love and my wife hates, along with a tumbler of root beer (Mug, not Barq’s).  It was already dark by the time I was alerted to its arrival, and everything had to be off-loaded back into the back storeroom of the church to protect it from the weather.  While I was finishing that, the pastor informed me that the equipment (which arrived in August for the rehearsals for the concert for the September 10 ice cream social, stayed for the late October Fall Festival, and then stayed again to be used for this float) was cluttering the rear entry and would have to be removed this week.  I observed that it could not go that night because I was without a car, relying on others for transportation.  I did not mention that I did not have a key and so could not move it at my convenience.

I thought I would remove it Thursday when the church band rehearses, but Jonathan cancelled practice because he is away this weekend.  That means either I disrupt youth group tomorrow or I disrupt church on Sunday; I’d rather do the former, if I am well enough, as I can apologize to the youth leaders and blame the pastor.

In any case, I will probably be finished with regular work with the church band.  I’ve been looking to phase out my involvement, which was always envisioned as temporary, for quite a while, and with the parade behind me and nothing major ahead and the demand that the equipment be removed, I think I’m probably done there.

I am not finished reading Eric Ashley’s latest contributions, but I intend to do so.  They are entitled Practise Bits:  Magic and Practise Bits:  Petrification, and at this point that’s all I know, although maybe I will print them and take them with me.

–M. J. Young