Nothing to see here, People; move along!

 I’m not allowed to talk about it. Confidentiality agreements and all. I wish I could.

Maybe I can add a few details without compromising anything. Let’s just say that yesterday, when I was on the bus with the team, it reminded me of being on the bus for Ozzfest. Touring across the country on a bus is not always as glamorous as people make it out to be, as there’s this fight for coziness when trying to sleep that leaves people in awkward acrobatic positions, body parts randomly sticking out between gaps in the seat and draped across the walking aisle, making anyone attempting to go to the bathroom have to dip and dive to reach the destination.

It’s funny, because these young athletes look at me at the right age of 42 as some sort of anomaly. perhaps there are other cultures on this planet where people hook up at young ages, and reproduction is the number one thing. However, when you happen to have a cliff diving accident that leaves doctors saying you would never walk again when you’re 19, and that you probably never have kids, it gives you a different sort of perspective on relationships when you take kids out of the equation.

For me, it’s like why would I put up with the drama and hogwash of sharing space with someone else, when I could just say go to your house and clean up your own dirty laundry? If there is a mutually beneficial situation, it’s not that I’m opposed to it, but when you take that needy desperation of wanting a child out of the equation, it makes you see flaws more accurately sooner. Sure, I am a girl, and I do have the reproductive parts within me, but I also have a lot of other things fighting against that, so it’s not like I could never get pregnant, it’s just that there has yet to be anyone to be able to afford the medical bills should that happen, as high risk is not a cheap scenario.

I already had to fight to learn how to walk again. I have a past of being a fighter, especially with my history of being involved with mixed martial arts before that accident. I have also been on the planet long enough to know to be wise in picking whatever battles that could arise.

One of my friends laughed and suggested that some of these guys might even think that I am casting spells or whatever kind of weird old cat lady things that might stereotypically be done by an old spinster. When I try to explain touring on Ozzfest years ago, every once in a while, I will get someone who may have heard of Ozzy. Of course, when I try to explain everything, I get the wide eyes that are kind of more scared than anything, or simply a disinterested, “so what are you trying to tell me?”

It knocks the ego down a few notches, and sometimes people like me need that. Of course, just when I am trying to be humble, I get a phone call when I’m riding on the bus. It’s one of my friends who is reading a book that I wrote about them, asking if I can recall what book it is, as they are a reoccurring character, whose name changes in multiple books, and over the course of writing more than 100 books, it can sometimes be very challenging to discern which passage came from which book, but considering that I happened to know which book he had last acquired, I was able to name that book, which was “The Music Mafia.”

This is the same character who came with me when I covered the first jam cruise for High Times. At the time, someone had accused me of being like the female version of Hunter S. Thompson, and I was on a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas kick, so I went on in character, thinking people would realize I was playing a character, and I introduced him as, “…and this is my attorney.” Of course, there is always one gullible dip shit who totally buys into the illusion, so she takes the bait hook line and sinker, asking where he went to school, which he replied the school of hard knocks, to which she asked if that was located next to Red Rocks in Colorado.

He thinks that she is joking, so he says yeah. The next thing you know, she is going around introducing him to everybody on the cruise as an attorney, and he is not an attorney, but he has been in trouble with the law enough to know a lot about legal issues, so he was actually able to bullshit his way though scenarios when people asked. This is, of course, the same person who toured on Ozzfest with me back in 2002, so he is like my brother from another mother, and we have just had too many crazy times over the years, which is why it’s hard to pinpoint exactly which story involves him out of all of mine.

Then I get a call beeping in, and it’s from another friend, address friend friend, asking if I want to go rage it for Memorial Day. It’s last minute, but I put an a press request for a show anyways. We shall see if it gets accepted or not, and if it does, you might have a little bit more details that can provide pictures and my normal spread, as opposed to a cryptic picture of what I had been trying to explain to many of the guys yesterday, which is when they travel to look at the manhole covers, as different cities in the globe have different designs on them depending where you are:

I do have a ton of pictures from yesterday though, so maybe at some point in the future I will be able to share some of them, but as for now, this is what you get. Take a look at the manhole covers. It’s one of those traveler things.

Healing through sports, burlesque and music

 There is a reason for my delay on typical music coverage, and it’s because my focus has been drawn back to sports. The whole thing is a little embarrassing, but it’s a darkest before the dawn story I will tell. Yes, it’s true that I may have, once again, overstepped my boundaries.

I’m a habitual line stepper. People told me to “stay in your lane,” and “learn to walk before you run,” but I like making a grand entrance. When a television and radio station said they wanted to double their audience on a budget of zero, I devised too grand of a plan: my bad.

Who here would not want to see Fort Rock return to southwest Florida? There’s no good reason it left. Oh, lack of vendors paying to help support the show?

When it’s sold out every year, bring it back. When that same festival location has a history of selling out since the late 90s when it was 99X who was doing the festival, as opposed to 93X who was running the festival, be at a different name or not, that says there’s an audience.

The X-brand radio stations folded, seemingly nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. Detailing this out to the local radio and television station, I explained that there is a gap in the market, and we could very easily try to capture some of that market by doing things on the radio and television, as well as teaming up with the festival team who still runs the Welcome to Rockville Festival. The overstepping came when I dared to try to make an introduction to merely bring everyone together, whoops.

Too much to suggest commandeering a music festival in my first week, let alone suggest bringing rock music to PBS and NPR, with things like a PBS rocks campaign and a documentary of behind the scenes at the festival, while trying to weave in some science into entertainment, I was likened to a Bon Jovi fan and told I was “too commercial for public broadcasting.” They fired me, saying I was “not a good cultural fit.” That’s enough to depress anyone.

They assured me it was nothing I did wrong, other than “not being a good fit culturally.” Okay, maybe I had been scheming behind the scenes, even suggested a new festival location, such as the new Braves Stadium in North Port, or combining it with the Florida International Airshow to give a historical spin to the event. Is it so wrong to not want to have to drive all the way to the other side of the state for just one decent festival here, please?

Tell me it would not be cool to have local celebrities like Sarasota’s Olympic skateboarder, who could be flipping around in between sets. Bring in Rockstar and Redbull to make the adrenaline kick even higher. My little vision was apparently too much for them to handle back then.

Honestly, I had planned on covering Welcome to Rockville, making the drive to the other side of the state. I was not thrilled when they wanted me to do publicity beforehand for free in order to get a press ticket, given my years of previous publications I have done and still never wanted to make that long drive, but the kicker is hearing press still might not even be able to get a photo pass for those who do this publicity work ahead of time for free for them, but that’s besides the point. Just when I started to think of some stories I could write an interviews I could do, my attention got diverted back to sports.

Many of you may recall that I was the sports writer down in Key West, and I have covered a plethora of sporting events throughout the years for other newspapers, magazines, blogs and websites. The funny thing is that I did not even realize I was applying for a sports job. licking my wounds after being rejected by public broadcasting, being just a little too intense for them, I had thought about simply going back to education, and at the time, I thought I was merely applying for a teaching job.

Due to confidentiality agreements, I cannot say what sport, what team, who I am working with, or any of those crazy details. What I can say is that I am helping people transition from other countries. I am helping them not only learn English, but also ways of American culture.

This has been an extremely humbling experience for me. Not only is it the fact that I might have had an ego coming  in from the music industry, as it was 20 years ago that I toured on Ozzfest, but it’s also that these guys in sports don’t care about the music industry the way I do. While I may have thought that touring on Ozzfest was a cool thing, being able to tour with all these musicians, these guys from other countries have no idea who the hell Ozzy is, let alone Ozzfest: knock the ego down a little bit.

If I try to explain to them what Ozzfest is, or the various people involved in the heavy-metal music industry, they think I’m talking about the devil. It’s hard to try to explain to people who have never seen that stuff that it is just a façade, just an image. People try to create all kinds of images, and while I might have always thought that the heavy-metal scene image was cool, some of my students are literally not knowing what to think when they see images of pentagrams, dripping blood and shooting fire.

I’m sure a few think I am crazy, but they still indulge my shenanigans. It’s a very cool process, as I am learning as they learn. I’ll admit that I am not native or fluent in their language, knowing a little more than some basics, but they teach me as I teach them; if I pronounce it wrong, they can correct me the same way that I teach them.

It truly does boil down to the essence of teamwork. The whole scenario gives me an entirely different appreciation of teaching and learning, as the students are teaching the teacher, as the teacher tries to teach them, very zen. There’s still moments of frustration when words become like tongue twisters, but when both the students and the teacher can fumble at times and still pick it back up, that just goes along with the practice makes perfect teamwork.

What does that mean for the music scene? Well, instead of Welcome to Rockville, I am scheduled to be on a bus with the team, trying some impromptu English lessons. That does not mean that I am done with the music scene by any means, let alone pyrotechnics and real estate.

Just this morning, I was planning a collaboration. I would say details to follow, but it might just be a wait for the surprise type of scenario. Let’s just say that last night I took one of the latest imports from Chicago to her very first burlesque show: teaching America’s youth.