Mark the Bartender: “So what’s your story?”
EC: “Just moved in to town a few hours ago and my furniture isn’t being shipped for two more days. So tonight I’m drinking until the floor looks comfortable.”
Mark the Bartender: “Let me get you a beer.”
Wow, three years already? That story, which honest to god is true and took place at Kelly’s, just turned three years old. Here is the explanation behind it.
I moved to town on July 1 making the drive from Chicago to Kansas City with a lightly packed car (basically whatever I didn’t trust with the movers). It was a pretty uneventful trip during which you realize that there truly is nothing to see in Iowa other than the wrestling hall of fame and that Iowa is a state that is much too big by a factor of ten. Anyway, I get to town on the first and move in to my place with the slight problem being that my movers and Benchmark Furniture wouldn’t be delivering my stuff until the third. That’s a slight problem in that for the first day I didn’t even have a chair in my place. Hence, off to the bar to get to the point where I figured that I wouldn’t mind that I was sleeping on the floor. And people wonder why I know so many bartenders.
But man, three years in this place. I don’t know if I should be amazed by how fast the time flies or by the fact that I survived three years here. And I know that last sentiment is a little harsh and I had a conversation with Erik about it over the weekend. I’ll readily admit that I give Kansas City and Kansas in general a lot of crap in the blog about things like banning evolution or not knowing how to build a sewer system in which the streets don’t flood anytime it rains or deciding that they should burn copies of The Catcher in the Rye. All of which still make me wonder just exactly what is in the water in this place and which makes me buy a lot of bottled water as a safety precaution.
But that said, I think that I’ve had more fun in this town then I realized or would have imagined. I’ve described this place as a smaller Chicago with everything much more convenient. While it means that there aren’t the crowds that I’m accustomed to (and there are times when you just want to be surrounded by two hundred thousand people in Grant Park) it does mean that I’ve gotten to do more things here than I ever would have back home. I can get to basically any concert I would ever want to attend in forty five minutes and be in the front row for ninety percent of them. I can go shopping or hit the museums in a matter of minutes. And if I want to check out the bar scene that is more than easy enough.
So I guess that after three years I have finally had it pounded into me that how much you enjoy a place is based on what you make of it. And the more I try to make something of it here the better things are getting. So it is nice to know that three years later I’m glad for a few more things beyond the fact that my furniture arrived. There just may be interesting times to be had in this town after all.
The five random CDs for the week
1) The Drovers “Little High Sky Show”
2) Jimmy Buffett “Feeding Frenzy”
3) Coldplay “A Rush of Blood to the Head”
4) Gillian Welch “Hell Among the Yearlings”
5) Sarah McLachlan “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy”
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