I saw Gravel Truck (which Mitch Easter describes as his “new Let’s Active cover band” and Pylon (who are occasionally calling themsleves “The Pylon Reenactment Society”) tonight.

I first saw Let’s Active twenty-five years ago last month, about two miles north of where tonight’s show was. I met both Mitch Easter and my future San Francisco roommate at that show. REM was there too, but I didn’t meet them. My first brush with Pylon goes back even farther, to my first college road trip in 1982, when I saw them open for Talking Heads at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta.

I think most of the people I used to know around these parts either don’t live here anymore or don’t go out much. That’s not surprising; this is the first time I’ve gone to a show (or a bar, for that matter) since I moved back three years ago. I did, however, run into my faculty advisor from my undergraduate days at UNCG, which was sort of odd. I’d forgotten that he’d been in grad school in Athens in the early 1980s; he was all excited about seeing Pylon again. And we were both excited (relieved?) that there were people there who were even older than we were.

It was a great show, and when I left, it was cooler outside than it had been in a month, and there was a breeze, and I was walking around downtown Winston-Salem, and it was really nice, and I was thinking I really need to vary my pattern and do something other than the same old things once in a while. Not bars or shows specfically (I just can’t stay up that late and, well, I don’t drink), but just any sort of thing that I don’t ususally do. A change of routine is a good thing, especially for someone like me, who’s in danger of becoming exceedingly boring.

Hmmm. Maybe my misanthropy explains why I traditionally always preferred Coke to Pepsi.

Last night about 3AM, I woke up needed to take a whiz. This is not in itself unusual. What was unusual was that I had apparently been dreaming I was in a motel room right before I woke up. When I got up, I couldn’t see anything but some light leakage around the windows, and I couldn’t remember how to get to the bathroom because I thought I was still in the motel room from my dream. I was stumbling around my bedroom, not knowing where the bloody bathroom was.

I didn’t really wake up and clue into where I was until I started feeling my way around the room and managed to find my way to one of the windows and open the curtain. At that point (maybe it was the light from outside), it finally hit me that I was in my own bedroom, that the bathroom was just a few feet away, and (best of all) that I remembered where it was. I was very relieved.

I hate those creepy half-asleep, half-awake experiences.