The Witching Well

Andy and I paid an exorbitant price this past spring for tickets to last night’s Police concert at Fenway Park. At least, I thought so at the time. Now? Not so much.

I mean, yeah, the tickets weren’t cheap. I wouldn’t pay that kind of money to see the Rolling Stones or the Who. Though I might consider it if someone could get Ringo and Sir Paul on a stage together.

But oh my freaking Gods, the Police. Best. Show. Ever.

All three of them have still got it. Andy laid down a couple of guitar solos that just melted my mind. Stewart was all over the damned stage during Wrapped Around Your Finger, running back and forth between the drum kit and the xylophone like a man half his age. And Sting? Well, Sting was Sting. The crowd was on their feet through the whole damned thing.

They played for almost 2 hours, leaving the stage only once for just a couple of minutes. They played Synchronicity II and Roxanne and Every Breath You Take and Don’t Stand So Close to Me and Walking in Your Footsteps and just about every other big hit they ever had. Including Invisible Sun, which still feels relevant as hell more than 25 years after it was written.

Totally worth every freaking penny.

Excuse me while I fire up Yahoo! Music and play all their albums now.

Mood: bouncy

Someone on a message board pointed me toward GoodReads. I’ve been poking around it this morning, and I think I like its interface better than LibraryThing.

Mood: chipper

The funeral was a beautiful community moment. The crowd was a wonderful mix of people, all ages and every ethnicity, guys in ties and girls with tattoos and folks who’d probably slept the night before in what they were wearing. And when I say “crowd” I mean:

What can I say? The man was loved.

The service was lovely. The ICC literally crammed people into every space they could, and there were still a few folks outside listening through the windows. Butch’s sister and brothers were there, and a few people shared some memories. There was a lot of laughter. I suspect Butch would have liked that.

Mood: sad

Yeah, this is bothering me more than I’d ever thought it would. Plus, everyone is still talking about him.

For those who care, the memorial got moved to tomorrow night at 7:00. A New Orleans-style funeral parade from the corner of Harvard and Comm. Ave. that will pause at the place where he died before going on to the ICC church for a service.

In the meanwhile, I’ve found a bunch of videos of him on YouTube. Here’s my playlist.

Mood: melancholy

Folks over at the Noise have been talking about Mr. Butch since his passing was just a rumor on Thursday morning. There are some lovely stories in this thread. I especially love the tales of Butch giving money to other people when he thought they needed more than he did. He was such a sweetheart.

Also, there are a couple of video clips of the man himself on The Mr. Butch Show.

There’s a memorial tomorrow night.

Mood: touched

It was the summer of 1986, between my junior and senior years of college. A weekday morning, around 6:30 am. I got off the subway, on my way to the breakfast shift at my summer job. Traffic was light, by Kenmore Square standards anyway, and the sidewalks were almost eerily deserted. Just a few poor slobs like me whose workday started too early for real humans. It was going to be hot. It was already sticky. And I didn’t want to be there. I trudged past the Rathskeller with my head down, so I didn’t have to see the too-bright sky.

“Good morning!”

I cast about for the source of the voice, and stopped dead in my tracks when I located it. A lanky black man with long dreads was standing outside the club, wearing most of what had once been a pretty nice suit. And, yeah, he was talking to me.

“Morning,” I mumbled back, trying to be polite, just wanting to get on with my day. Then he smiled at me as broadly as any carefree ten-year-old and I couldn’t help smiling back.

That was the day I met Mr. Butch. Musician. Poet. Folk icon. I made that gods-awful early trek through Kenmore for the rest of that summer, and if he was there (as he often was), he always had a smile for me. It never failed to make my morning.

More than 20 years later, I still consider it one of the highlights of my college days. I imagine there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people out there with similar memories. Because Mr. Butch was a fixture in Kenmore Square for years before all the new construction in the 90s changed the character of the neighborhood. Before the BU police harassed him and the rest of the area’s homeless population into exile. He made his home in Allston after that.

Yesterday, Boston lost a little part of its soul. Yesterday, Boston lost Mr. Butch. He leaves behind a lot of friends.

Mood: sad

My cunning plan to make my employers give me more money and a better title by doing more diverse and interesting stuff than I used to has finally paid off.

Senior Assistant Director + 12% pay raise = happy me.

Also, they’ve finally put my editing work and my HTML coding in my official job description, along with a bunch of other twiddly techy bits that I’ve been doing for years.

Mood: merry

Series Three of Doctor Who starts tomorrow night on SciFi. They’re running the Christmas special, The Runaway Bride, at 8, followed by the first regular-series episode, Smith and Jones, at 9:30. The series will run through the end of September in the Friday 9pm time slot, skipping only Labor Day weekend.

Word is out in the fandom, too, that Martha Jones will be appearing in a couple of episodes of the second series of Torchwood and that Catherine Tate will be reprising her character from The Runaway Bride in Doctor Who’s Series Four.

Mood: chipper

I try to make all the characters in my writing into real people, you know, the way you do. Because no one is interested in reading about propped up bits of painted cardboard.

But when you (and by “you” I mean “I”) start delving into the heads of violent antagonists in an attempt at fleshing them out, when you start understanding who they are and why they are the way they are, you start maybe sympathising, just a bit, with their worldview. At least when you’re looking at their world through their eyes.

And you start, maybe, liking them. Just a little. Or more than just a little.

Which can be damned disconcerting, considering the nasty things they do.

Mood: uncomfortable