Not My Tribe...

I played guitar in one of my bands last night. The noisy, raw, garage-rock one. I felt alienated & a bit surly. I was masked up, and I wore a zip-up fleece jacket. All black. I felt like I was wearing armor. Maybe it was all in my head. I was putting up my defenses. I am vaxxed and boosted, but I still have a hazy, nebulous fear of encountering Covid-19. All the stories I hear, and they are many, is that the virus is not something you really want to tangle with. I have my own normal breathing issues, I have seen what the virus can do to a human being's lungs. Not good. And the death toll keeps rising, and because there are nearly 41 million Americans who are still not vaxxed, the pandemic is nowhere near over. 

So, playing music in a bar full of young, unmasked, and who knows if they are vaxxed, human beings, just seemed too Edgar Allen Poe "Masque of the Red Death" to me. Yikes. I was there, trying not to be there. It made for an unsatisfying performance. The best moments were when I kind of got lost conjuring up some weird-ass, in the moment guitar solos. Messy, rambling, my fingers searching for the next note like a blindman in the dark.

I wasn't the only person wearing a mask, one of the female bartenders wore one, and one other person had one on, but this was a packed to the rafters drunken horde of Saturday night revelers. Gave me the creeps. As soon as our set was over, I packed my gear and headed to the street. I bolted out of there and grabbed a Lyft back home. "There's no place like home." I felt like Dorothy, back in Kansas. My own humble abode. Happy to be with my loved ones, happy to be far from the madding crowd. I am being overly-dramatic, too cautious, too much fear? I don't know. Out of step, yes, I felt out of step with that crowd of human beings.  Not my tribe.