My Old Neighbor

I turned the coffee on a little while ago. Right after I woke up for a little midnight nap.

I should make a coffee. It would be nice. I'm still a bit groggy.

the Blue Up? Now (1987)

At one terrible low point in the middle of the 90's I lived in a really sketchy apartment. The kind of place where you knew that security deposit was forfeit because the landlord was never going to return it without a court order. Where every Christmas the heat would mysteriously go out for a couple of days. Where a former building super still had keys and went into random apartments and pilfered things to sell. (He skimmed a few cds off the top of various stacks I had in milk crates so I didn't notice that my Faust imports were all missing until I went to listen to one.) Where walking home from work after the bar closed you'd get cruised by cars with baby car seats in the back and lone creepy suburban guys slowing down as they drove past looking you over for sex.

Yeah, it was a crummy little studio shithole.

But one of my upstairs neighbors knocked on my door one day when I was playing my guitar and doing some crappy home recording to see who I was and what was up. That was Rachel Olson who would go on to be known as Ana Voog.

This was her band. They'd just released a cd on Columbia Records.

We chatted for a while and I played her some of the stuff I had been working on. She was very polite about it. She said I should come and knock on her door sometime. But I never did.

That wasn't the sort of thing I did.