You know, not too rock, not too blue, just bit o' jazz, looking for some melody with a back beat and baseline groove, 'cause that base player mos' def'' laid down a thick and crunchy piece, and that jazz feel from 2 drummers finding different parts of the beat teasing out time and syncopation, and Jerry Garcia--guitar icon--I could never understand my roomate's, Larry Reid, a music major studying claasical guitar at Wake Forest, devotion to Jerry 'cause 'tweren't Rock enough for me 'cause I'd formed a lifelong attachment to mid 70's British guitar rock, you know the ususal Led suspects.
Nevertheless, didn't that form the beauty and joy of the Dead? They sounded like no one else. With Jerry and his classical/jazz style, sometimes with piano and backup singer, and Bob Weir on rhythm guitat holding the whole hot mess together.
Picked this version 'cause it falls several months from the last time i saw my ex girlfriend on a date with us on a party bus to the show run by the stoner frat at Wake. Don't hardly remember the show, just the spectacle: people dancin' up and down the isles, with streamers and twirlin' and enough tie dye to clothe a continent.
Do remember the painful silence as I drove Wendy Hall back to Salem College with me frozen, unable to even realize I had emotions much less express them.
I'm sorry, and I love you would have done for starters.
Then broke my neck at the beach at a rugby party a couple of months after getting kicked out of Wake for drunken vandalism. Didn't write, didn't try to call, the only human thing I managed came from walking 'round and 'round the Citrus Bowl when Wake went there after '79 football season, as if could pick her out of a crowd of 50,000, just walked and walked, using up a chunk of the steps God had alloted me.
Had a lot ot regrets before that and since but somehow don't consider any of those steps wasted.
Then--don't you just hate when a passage in a narrative starts with then, signalling some bad shit coming down--how could I write or call? Hi, i'm a quadripeligic; do you want to visit FL? No, just too bad a shit, man.
Took a couple years to walk without a cane and by then the time had passed. Well, what the hell. Kinda got a hankering on visiting Winston-Salem again and reclaim some of my youth, ironic now that I'm in a effin' whhelchair again. Do you know how many Wendy Halls exist on Facebook? As usual. waited 35 years to do the right thing.
'f me.
Amtrak does go through there. Maybe can make my connection to Denver from there.
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