Today

Today has been a special day. The thing I’ve done the longest in my life besides for be alive is play music with Heiruspecs. I started the band with Felix when I was in 11th grade. I’m forty years old. We won best High School Band in the City Pages in the Year 2000. We’ve been doing the shit we do for a long time. I think Heiruspecs is incredibly good at what we do. We are a creative live hip-hop band that embraces all the magic that having a live band permits us to bring in to the genre. We are students of hip-hop, we are students of live music and we bring it together. From my completely biased point of view I think we are some of the best to ever do it in Minnesota. I’ve witnessed bands that blow us out of the water, I’ve been humbled seeing especially what some of the younger generation of players and writers can do, but I’m very proud of what we bring to the music world.

And I didn’t realize how much having that joy of creation, of collaboration, of camaraderie stripped from my life for a year and a half has been debilitating. I didn’t get to run songs, to use bass effects, to argue about how to end a song. One of the things most core to my existence was effectively tossed on ice for a year and a half.

This morning as the members of Heiruspecs filed in and we started talking about what we wanted to get done today. . .I felt so good, I felt so alive. I didn’t realize how important this is to me. I didn’t realize how much this matters to me.

I also got to take my kids on the bus today. Many people have to take the bus as their way to get to work, to recreation, to everything. Most of them had to keep on grinding during the thick of the pandemic to keep their life up. I take the bus as a form of recreation on Saturdays cause my daughter Sadie and I love it. Sadie is four, it is still my dream that she’ll be a bus driver. She seems so fascinated by it all. This was Naomi, my one year old, maiden voyage on the bus. She enjoyed it and honestly running to Music Go Round to pick up a check for some gear a sold, the Trivia Mafia Office for an unexpected bathroom break, Korte’s for some groceries and J&S for an iced coffee. It felt so good. Pop on the bus, pop off. Wait by the bus stop. Make small talk about the fire station across the street. Answer random questions. The bus means you spend time at unexpected intersections. New territory for a four year old means moments of discovery.

I didn’t realize how much I love that intimacy of the bus trip. My wife doesn’t go on the bus trips with us. It’s a thing for me and my kids. And we meet people, we laugh, we stop at random spots, we explore strange little corners of the city I would never take half a glance at if I wasn’t with my kids.

Today was great. Music is a gift. Children are a gift. They are both demanding, challenging and fatiguing gifts, but today I remembered they are a gift.