of the deep

There's all of these movies that try to poignantly weave big cities into the narrative of their story as some kind of force or character that take on a life of their own and end up developing a sort of rhythm that's supposed to be the reminiscent of  people in them.  Something like that, I'm no movie genius, but that's my take.  And I sort of buy into it. Some places quickly feel comfortable and are easy to fall in love with, other places make you feel off kilter and want to high tail it before you end up dead or in the hoosegow.  My point in all of this is that my total disdain for Halloween and the garbage it involves I feel like this was one of those glowing moments where my hippy-life-pulse alined closely with that of the place I live.  

 Friday night I headed over to a fellow EC transplants house for a big potluck and house show featuring EC's Kalispell.  I gorged myself on tons of good food and met a bunch of great people.  It's funny in all the time I lived in EC I never caught these guys play (even after running a local music radio show, whoops) but I was really pleasantly surprised. Maybe it was the brie, apples, and wine speaking, but it was a really awesome show.  After things wrapped up I headed down to Rev and completely changed gears from quiet toe tapping to blurry shirtless dance party.

 Tiny Daggers, Fire Retarded, and Poney played and before I could take more then a handful of photos the night tipped into total disorder and I was more concerned with shaking what the good Lord gave me to mess around with my photo making box.

 The night ended shortly there after and I slowly made my way home to catch some well earned zzzs.

 Saturday started off with a huge breakfast as fuel for the 5th annual Madison Halloween Alleycat.  I didn't know anyone racing, but for $5 I figured I knew the city well enough at this point and it was worth it. There was only two real routes to the race so I picked the group that looked like it had some strong folks in it and when the race started I got on their wheels and stuck there to the first checkpoint.  I felt just fine until rolling up to a basketball court. I fancy myself to be a relatively athletic person. Decent eye-hand coordination, reasonable endurance, decent power.  None of that shit comes into play when I have a basketball in my hands. I am by far one of the worse basketball players on the planet bar none. I got to the stop with the first 5 or so people in the group.  I was the second to last player to make a basketball shot to allow me to move on to the next checkpoint. Literally half of the field got there and made a shot and took off while I was stuck sitting around ball in hand like some sort of jerk.  I reasoned the race was over and finally got out of there to the next stop.

 Everything from there went pretty well. I made up time by drinking a minimum and hustling from stop to stop.  Then I pulled a rookie move got cocky and pulled away from a group.  Got lost and lost easily 10 minutes of time.  Took off again, in the direction of the final stop and took my time to ask twice for directions to make sure I was heading the right direction.  Bother people said I in fact wasn't and needed to circle back to the other side of the capital. They were wrong, I realized they were sending me to the St. rather than the Ave, and turned around limping my way to the finish having easily lost 30 minutes on the mistake. Needless to say I wasn't to stoked. 

But all's well that end's well. I hung out at the after party with good people and proceeded to get loose. A little too loose maybe, but there was free beer and free pizza so it's no wonder I didn't make it to the Rev party later that night and didn't get much done Sunday either.  I didn't take many photos from the race, but you can view others online here if your interested. It was an awesome weekend and I applaud anyone who was part of it.