Jazz Poetry Jams (December) Meets My Week

This was supposed to be a post about going to Jazz Poetry Jams at the Blue Room on Tuesday, but that's not how it's seeming to come out.

One thing and another, between house guests and the demands of work and whatnot, a couple of days have passed since I took the photos, and the narrative of that evening is being crowded out in my mind.

It was a good poetry slam, Miss Conception did a great little mini-feature, the poets were good, the headliner had a lot of material dealing with sex — a pretty sound evening.

Forward to Wednesday evening. There was snow in the forecast, but it wasn't to start until pretty late. I had the girls, Wednesday is the usual night for that. We went to Judo only to find out it had been cancelled for weather that was not yet arriving.

So we had a four person Judo class for about a half hour, Corinna teaching Michael, Molly and myself.

Digression: My back was pretty out of whack from Flogging Molly. Mo thought we were talking about her when I'd mentioned the tickets, so we had to explain that floggings weren't simply the next step after Judo classes.

At Flogging Molly, I moshed for the first time in my life. Slam dancing had never appealed to me, but mass hysteria or something took hold, and the next thing you know I ran into a guy I worked for years ago. I ran into him ten times or so, and some of these collisions produced bruising.

Or maybe it was some of the other fellows and girls I was crashing into in that chaotic pit of punky Irishness.

But while the contusions on my shoulder and side don't hurt unless I poke them, even the one that had a bit of greenishness to it, my lower back was really unhappy about the treatment it received. I was pretty sure I was going to have to book a chiropractic appointment.

So Judo class (where this digression started from) wasn't feeling like a swell idea. But the warming up and stretching process really helped, including a ripping back-pop that Corinna heard from ten feet away. I still freak out getting thrown on my shoulder and whatnot, but my back was feeling nothing but improved.

So anyway, that snow arrived in the night and on Thursday morning, normally, I drive my honyocks 30 miles to school and from there drive 35 more miles to work.

There was a couple of inches of snow down, and it was still coming. School was cancelled, so I called the Artist Formerly Known as Frau Lobster and worked it out to have the girls stay at my house for the day. Then I departed to just drive to work, a bit over twelve miles, something I normally bicycle if I don't have kids to haul.

Corinna told me I should ride my bike, but besides the fact that I wasn't leaving early enough to do that and be on time, the roads were looking freaking treacherous. She has some snow/ice bicycle tires that do pretty good, I rode to work on icy roads once last winter on them. But this was universal slickness, and winds gusting to 50 mph to boot. It was a full on blizzard.

I had never driven my xB in conditions like this. I guess I should have known, the front wheels of it will skitter and skip on dry pavement if you gun it in first, the car is so lacking in curb weight. The first time I got stopped on the snowpack, I spun my wheels and rocked through a full cycle of the light before I managed to get sort of moving again.

Even the Interstates were awful. I got to where I get off on Southwest Trafficway off I-35 and I could see that uphill was gridlocked. No way I'd get up it if I stopped and there was no way not to stop. So I took Broadway instead and promptly had to stop and got stuck. AAA told me maybe 90 minutes to a tow truck rescue, but a half hour later a MODOT guy gave me a push and got me moving again.

I made it a quarter mile until I got stuck again, updated AAA on my position and spent almost two hours helping push people who managed to get out and some who didn't — including a woman in a Chevy Blazer, not really a car I'd expect to get stuck like this. A tow truck with the AAA logo showed up, but I'm not sure he was the one dispatched to me. He told me to forget getting up the hill, there was a buss stuck across Wyandotte at Armour and a two car collision with a wheel ripped off a car blocking the other road I could take going that way. "Anyone who went up that way is coming back down," he said. He got me out of the snow bank and pointed back down Broadway, and I arrived at work almost four hours after leaving the house.

A coworker told me she'd felt sorry for the people she saw waiting at bus stops that morning, but not me. Sure, I'd left the house without my coat's outer shell, without gloves for that matter — I should have thrown my panniers in the car, that stuff would have come in handy. But sitting in the snow bank on Wyandotte, watchin the busses go across 31st for hours, I realized that my best move would have been to catch a city bus a block and a half from my house, transfer to a Max downtown. I might have been just as late getting to work, but I would have been safe and someone else would have eaten the stress of driving on those roads.

Those roads were some of the worst I've ever driven on, and it made me miss Mayor Funkhauser. Kansas City ran that guy out on a rail because his wife is annoying and he's a dork. But he's an honest dork, and I honestly think he's the best mayor Kansas City, Missouri has had in the past fifty years. Two years ago, we had a super harsh winter, and the roads in KCMO were bladed clean, salted and sanded every time it even looked inclement. Funk was fighting for re-election that year, and he honestly believed city services were what mattered in that effort.

Nothing against Sly, but it was painfully obvious this morning that the city's snow removal plan is once again, "wait a few days, it will warm up."