I haven't started coming down yet.
I guess I should begin at the beginning of yesterday, at the pseudo-interview which was really just a nice young man at the United Hospital Network wanting to meet with me and find out what it would be that I could help them with.
The ten minutes he wanted turned into an hour, a lot of it chatting about this or that thing that we love about open source, other bits of it him asking advice on things that I mentioned having rather strong opinions about.
I doodled a little, offered a few words about architectures they might want to use, offered up some warning as to what difficulties they might encounter beyond simple hardware compatibility.
We parted ways smiling and wanting to work together, but once again the best jobs have the biggest drawback. In the public sector where everyone smiles at you on the elevator because the most important thing is still people, not money, they don't have the budget to push all their projects through.
He finds out about his budget in one or two months. When he asked if a temporary contract would be okay, I nodded to the point of neck-crickage.
And then I wandered down some overly bankified Toronto street to my car, and ran into someone I knew from Lyon in 1997, who I haven't seen since his rather unpleasant visit to Montreal in 1998, and who I thought was living in Dublin right now.
I didn't ask how long he was staying, and when I managed to extricate myself from coffee, I gave him a false phone number and only felt mildly guilty.
He's one of those people that promises to teach you to juggle and then teaches you all the wrong things intentionally so that you never surpass his own skills.
Then there was the concert that I've been waiting a decade to see.
And I could talk about all the little things, the camera guy and the way it took him all night to give me his phone number on a napkin only to have me quietly, but affectionately explain that I'm seeing someone, the way he insisted that he wanted to get together at some point anyway to film me and hear me talk about the show.
I told him we'd be at Java tonight before climbing if he wanted to come by, I figure that in an effort to continute to believe in people I ought to give him a chance to prove that he really was interested in something more than the minimal cleavage of my very low cut shirt.
All his attention drew others, though, I guess, and when poor MC went outside because she was sad and hurt and when my selfishness kept me in the concert hall at least a few moments longer...
I pulled on my jacket to escape cameraguy and pushed closer to the stage, closer to the feet of Dave Fielding, the man who haunted my heart with his fingers for so many years.
Then Mark Burgess hopped down into the crowd and began clutching at people's faces and singing to them. Singing what sounded strangely like Bauhaus covers.
When he reached me, the first non forty-year-old in the crowd, and possibly the first female, he grasped my cheek instead and planted a great big sweaty one on me.
It didn't taste very nice and I was disappointed that some part of me is missing an intrinsic fanboyishness and wasn't THRILLED at that moment.
It wasn't thrilled when I was handed, for the third time, invites to the "private" party with the band tonight, and I turned them down without really thinking, preferring to get back into climbing after this weekend's hiatus.
What did thrill me, though, was that first moment, that first guitar riff, that first snatch of hard melody.
Every note I recognized, every memory of every bar and every DJ booth in every song.
Every night sitting with the CDs I searched so many cities and continents for, every, every, everything.
And through the whole thing, through the new songs and the achingly familiar ones, through the ballads and false-ballads where I remembered where each breakpoint raise-my-fist-point would be, where I remembered enough to sing the chorus back to the singer, where I...
WHere I lost myself
through the whole thing I waited for our song, for my and Marc's song, for the song that the two of us would lose ourselves on the dancefloor of a long-dead but infinitely important bar at three in the morning after a long Sunday night, and when they played Monkeyland for the encore and I hadn't heard it yet, when I was clutching at MC's shoulder and praying for it
I heard the opening riffs, and my mind exploded. In my left mind's eye I saw my first mix-tape, it was the sixth song on the first side, right before a Creatures song.
In my right mind's eye I saw Marc hunched and nearly still on a stone dancefloor surrounded by smoke and empty space.
In the rest of my brain I screamed and danced and cameraguy filmed me and I kicked some obnoxious DJ unintentionally, and and and and
in my heart I heard those first few notes and I was soaring through a moment I never thought I'd have the chance to live.