Counting time
This evening I'm off to a rock concert with my friend from America. We're off to see Bryan Adams, someone I've seen a couple of times in the past, and I know puts on a good show. He's one of the bands I've seen over the years that I like because he likes to interact with the audience, have a bit of banter with them as they say around here. I've been at concerts where it's lucky if the lead singer even introduces the band let alone say 'hello, Glasgow'. Yeah, and he does do that 'rock god' thing where he'll pull out some girl from the audience to go sing with him on that Mel-C track he released a while back, which is all good fun. Then he'll go that extra mile and come back out and play an acoustic set on his own when the band are back stage having a breather, not for like 10-15 minutes but 45 minutes or more. It's that little bit of effort to connect, to cross the divide between rock-star and audience, that seems to make the evening so much more enjoyable, atleast for me. Oh, and Bryan sure can belt out a good tune or two, which obviously helps... The guy's supremely talented. I even heard him phone in to a radio station once to tell the DJ that the record player playing his song was spinning too slowly as his tune was slightly out of key....
But it got me to thinking to the last time I saw Bryan play in Glasgow, back when my friend from Switzerland was across visiting and we arrived late not realising there was no support act and Bryan was already on stage. It must've been a couple of years ago now. I dawns on me from time to time, that I mark the passage of the days like this. I haven't worn a watch for near on 10 years now though I often find myself marking out time based on the occurrences of certain things. It started when I broke up with one my girlfriends. During that 'time will help you get over it' stage following the fall out, I found myself counting the number of times I'd taken the garbage out since she left, then the number of times I'd seen a certain film on tv, the number of cars I'd had, the number of times I'd seen a concert. Time in a different dimension to hours, minutes and seconds.
I guess it's the cyclic nature of things, and coming back to Glasgow this time certainly feels like the completion of one, another cycle older, another cycle on. And with the weather certainly changing around here as the new season kicks in, I've a certain sense of clearing out, of laying old bones to rest, and moving on to begin the next cycle. And where that leads, well, I'll just have to see.