Well, I hit about the one month mark in Kansas City this week. It has been kind of a blur, kind of limbo, and also alot fun to explore. I went to Sun Fresh on Southwest Trafficway tonight for the first time and got some stuff for dinner. Hen House, Price Chopper, Sun Fresh--so far these are the grocery stores I've gone to. Exploring caves, rivers, dense wooded areas, mountainous regions--these are all good. But there's something about exploring grocery stores that is good too. We all have our store or stores--if we are privileged--and we get sick of them and know where pretty much everything is. But at a new store you get to wonder, where's the beer? How deep is the office supply inventory? Do they have padded envelopes? I will be curious which store becomes "our store."
This week we signed a lease on a giant refurbished basement apartment in a building that was built in 1892. (Right before finding out the sewer pipe in the house we have on the market is F'd to the tune of $--ah whatever.) It's on the historic register and is really close to what used to be the Foolkiller Theater, where a great surge of touring punk bands came through in the middle 80's. The heart of midtown, and of memory. I thought that was cool.
A bunch of us caught a number of those shows, and it is a place of personal legend, an old haunt this is no more. It's a bike shop, a lawyer's office, and a Caribbean lunch place now. And it's more or less home, about four blocks from Pryde's Westport, where they now have a pie counter in back. However, the expenses of moving being what they are, we may be shopping for parmesan shakers at Family Dollar and eating Texas Ham And Cheese from QT.
Last night Steve and I figured out some Cramps songs and that was great fun and took me all the way back to high school when his dad yelled at us for running our power cables through puddles of water in the barn. My first time up singing and playing on this leg of life will be participating in a tribute show at Record Bar. I'm a pretty casual Cramps fan but listening to their records recently just hit me at the right time and I realized they are not a cartoon punk band (well they kind of are). They were an archival conduit of all kinds of cool, twisted unique Americana. I love to keep learning, in my random maybe neophyte way.
