the ballard sedentary sousa band played today at folklife, which meant that i actually left the house at 7:30 this morning, in order to get to the center grounds by 8:30. of course the BSSB didn’t actually play until 12:30, but if i had gotten there much later than 8:30, i wouldn’t have been able to find a place to park closer than about a mile and a half away. of course i also had a 10-hour parking pass, but i still would not have been guaranteed to be able to find a parking place.

so i wandered around the seattle center grounds for a few hours for a few hours, mostly before the humongous crowds of people got there. then i went back to my car and retrieved my instrument and went back up to the mural amphitheatre for the performance. it went fairly well: we had 5 trombones this afternoon, which is one less than the full compliment. i played all right from the audiences point of view (i didn’t make any mistakes that someone in the audience could have said came from me), but i didn’t play as well as i would have liked, because there wasn’t anywhere where we could warm up before going onstage.

but then, when the performance was over, the humongous crowds of people had well and truly arrived and it took me half an hour and several detours to get from the mural to the place where i had parked, because the humongous crowds of people were EVERYWHERE, and several times large sections of the humongous crowds of people had actually stopped in the middle of the path… yes, i know that it’s expected behaviour for humongous crowds of people, especially when there are such attractions as a hat vendor, or a t-shirt vendor, or that sort of thing, but i still get extraordinarily peeved at people who are walking along, and i am walking behind them, and they suddenly STOP for no very obvious reasons, which makes me stop as well, or look for some way around them… which is difficult to find when there is a humongous crowd of people everywhere… it wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the fact that i was taking up about 3 times as much space as i would have been ordinarily, because i had my trombone and my stands… there were times when i wish i could have taken my trombone stand and shoved it up the butt of the person in front of me, to get them to move out of the way, but there wasn’t anywhere for them to move, and even if there was, the same thing would have had to happen with the person in front of them, and so forth…

it’s 5:00 now, and i feel like i’m just beginning to come down from the instanity…