ceciliatan

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

Hope

July 4^th, 2016- Universal Studios, Orlando, Florida

Ziggy’s eyes locked on mine. “You have to get a wand from Ollivanders,” he said with too much enthusiasm.

I glanced at the line snaking its way down the sidewalk. “I’m not standing in that line.”

“But you have to!” He tugged on my arm like a little kid, and I hid my smile, not wanting to encourage him. “The wand chooses the wizard, Daron. Come on.”

Damn the person that turned him on to Harry Potter.  “Yes,” I said reasonably, “we can go in the store and buy a wand so we can do all this magic-y stuff while we are here, but I’m not standing in line to have one specially chosen for me.”

“Oh, believe in magic, you Muggle,” he said in a huff and waltzed past me into the store.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

So you might remember Meg sent us a song once before for a fanworks challenge (“Longing Song“), and this time she brought us one in response to the Orlando challenge. She writes:

“For this most recent fanworks call, I have a song for you. “Moondog Kingdom” is a song about an M3 (plus a few of their inner circle) trip to the Magic Kingdom in an A/U where at the end of the 1989 tour, instead of everything going fully to hell, everyone just goes to Disney World instead. (Also in this A/U Splash Mountain exists in 1989. Apparently it wasn’t actually built until 1992. But that’s what imagination is for – tweaking theme park history to suit your silly songwriting needs!)

“Thank you for making this call for fanworks. In the immediate few days after the Pulse shooting, I was reeling mentally, and when I saw this call it gave me something to focus on. (My deal: I’m a fellow “B” in the QUILTBAG, and I was born in 1987, so I came of age and did my coming out in a time where things – while not perfect or nearly safe enough for everyone – have been getting steadily better and in many ways have been better than I know they were for people before me. This was the first time something of this magnitude of anti-LGBT hatred has happened during my lifetime where I’ve actually been at an age to take it in and it just…hit. Hard.) My brain was basically a circuit of shock and grief and anger and upset-ness for a little while, and I knew it would take a few days for it to stop running that way, but I knew that when it did I would have this to look forward to working on. And when I finally did get to work on this, it was healing, as intended, and it was just fun. I always enjoy writing songs for DGC. :)”

You should be able to play the song in the WordPress embedded MP3 player:

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

The show in Orlando was fun. I figured Remo needed to get his mind off his family angst so I pushed him to play with me a little on stage, turning one of my solos into a long jam that I threw to him and after burning through a round he threw back to me and I tried to throw it to Alex on keys and he shook his head and passed it but Remo was ready to jump back in. The audience absolutely roared in approval when he took up the solo again because it was unexpected. It was, as the term goes, “a moment.”

There was a moment in the second encore, too. At the very end of the first encore Martin had some kind of drum emergency–something happened along the lines of a cymbal fell and not only broke the head on the snare it managed to take out a foot pedal, too. The second encore was the point where we usually put a ballad in anyway, so I suggested Remo and I just go out there with two guitars and do it acoustic and he agreed immediately. With zeal, even.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

Remo and I went into the hotel bar for a nightcap. I got my bourbon in soda instead of straight up since we were in Florida and it seemed more appropriate for hot weather, even though it had turned into a pleasantly cool night out. I figured I could use the hydration, anyway.

And the bourbon was soothing to my fatigued emotions. It was tiring to hold them in all the time but then it was exhausting to let them out, too. How is that supposed to work? I pondered that while watching the little bubbles make their way past the ice cubes in my glass.

“You think he’s going to grow up okay?” Remo asked.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

For a lot of the day Remo was unnaturally quiet, but I think it was the same as me: trying not to get sucked into the bickering. We just kept our mouths shut and went along with the tide floating the family from thing to thing. He carried Ford for a while and talked baby talk to him and pointed at animals and gave their names even though Ford wasn’t anywhere close to the talking stage yet. I guess you have to do that though so that babies will start talking eventually, right?

When it was my turn to hold Ford, which didn’t come until one point where all three women went into a store to try things on and we menfolk stayed outside to sit on a bench, I discovered I still didn’t have the knack of baby talk. I always talked to Ford like he was a regular person who just couldn’t answer yet. It was a one-sided conversation but, you know, he had a personality. He wasn’t like a doll–he was very clearly a little person, reacting to things and having feelings. He just couldn’t say anything about it yet.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

It gets hot in Southern Spain in the summer. Although was it any hotter than most of the other places I’d lived? Maybe a little. It was regularly above ninety degrees. The apartment had air conditioners set in the walls next to the windows, but only in the bedrooms.

Not sure that’s really why I moved into Orlando’s room with him, though.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

(Kickstarter update! On the first day we got over $1,000 in pledges!! That puts us almost 1/3rd of the way to the $3,500 goal! Almost all of that first $1K came from regular readers of DGC. MCA Hogarth nabbed the first pledge, quickly followed by Amy, Joe, Cayra, et al… Go check out where we are as of now on Kickstarter. -ctan)

–

Two days later Orlando took me to meet Gloria–the woman with the jowly face whom I had met briefly on my first night in Seville.

He brought me to a house across from a university building. Unlike most of the houses in this area which had the door at street level but the living quarters up above, this one had a large ground floor parlor which was her classroom. We went there directly from busking so we were carrying our guitars (as well as a lot of loose cash). Gloria was sitting on a stool in one corner of the room, a ragged oval of cajones around the perimeter.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

(Hope you enjoyed Ziggy’s diary, but now we’re back to Daron! See the bottom of this post for some other exciting site news… -ctan)

I didn’t go to Spain looking for love. I didn’t go there looking for fame, either. I’d spent the better part of the previous three years of my life chasing after both of those things, with mixed results. Maybe it was time to look for something else.

So here’s what happened with me, and Orlando, and flamenco, and my quest for something I can’t really put into words… but I’m not going to let that stop me from telling this story.