My move to edinburgh for the winter has started off in pretty typical fashion.  I got a car service to the airport early this morning — and it’s a good thing I got an early start.  I forgot my passport, so had to call the car service guy immediately to come back to the airport (luckily he wasn’t very far away) and pick me up, then take me all the way back to the other side of Brooklyn to get my passport, then take me back out to the airport.  So that whole trip to the airport this morning cost me about $100.  Then it turns out that the 3rd bag (my banjo) costs $200.  So between transportation and baggage fees this morning I dropped about $350.  That’s only $50 less than the plane ticket to Edinburgh.  The $100 cab I’m fine with.  That was due to my own stupidity in forgetting my passport, but $255 in baggage fees!?  That’s robbery.  I thought I was flying KLM Royal Dutch, but it turns out the flight is operated by Delta.  Had I known that, I would have known that I’d end up being screwed.  I have *never*, not ONE single time flown on delta without having to pay a bunch of extra $$ for something or other.  I usually just don’t fly Delta.  Even if it’s a lot cheaper to do so.  Because I know I’ll have to pay eventually…  But this time they fooled me by hiding behind the good name of an airline I actually like.  Oh well, as long as they get me to Edinburgh safely I guess I can’t complain to much.  Delta is the worst.

Tonight I went uptown to Postcrypt (in the basement of a church on the Columbia campus) to see my friends Nels Andrews and Anthony da Costa play.  Both sets were great of course and afterwards Nels and I shared a cab back to Brooklyn.  The upper west side is SO FAR AWAY from my house, and I live about as close as you can to the upper west side and still be in Brooklyn.  It took an hour and a half by train on the way there (this was at 7:00 or so in the evening) and it took 45 minutes by cab at 1:00am!  Just ridiculously far.  Anyway, Nels and I were both starving by the time we got back to our neighborhood so we decided to get some tacos at the all night taco joint.  Unfortunately they were having karaoke night at the taco joint.  Now, if you’re like me then when you think of late-night taco karaoke you’re picturing Austin, TX but no, right here in good ol’ Greenpoint, Brooklyn.  Basically it was people singing shitty versions of shitty songs very loudly, so we opted for the bar on the corner where if you order a pint you get a free pizza.  This bar I have to say is probably the *worst* bar in the neighborhood.  Seriously bad.  How bad?  There was a dude breakdancing.  For reals.  Right in the middle of the downstairs corridor that leads past the bar.  He was really going for it too.  What he lacked in skill (which was a considerable amount) he made up for in gusto.  I know what you’re thinking… Brooklyn.  Breakdancing.  Trust me though, there was nothing ironic about what he was doing on the dance floor.  Ok, so maybe that makes it the best bar in the whole neighborhood, but it’s the kind of good thing that you have to take in extremely small doses.  We ate our free pizzas and drank our pints as quickly as possible and then beat a hasty retreat for the Black Rabbit.  (One of my top 5 bars of all time)  Tomorrow I have to pack my whole life for my move to Edinburgh (to be henceforth known as ‘The Brah’), but it has to be done prior to 1:00pm because that’s when the games start, and I plan on watching them all, as I am wont to do.  Blog. 

Back at the turn of the century when I decided it might be a good idea to have my own website — just in case I ever wanted to try and make a career out of this whole music thing — I tried to purchase AJRoach.com. Much to my disappointment, it was already taken. Some dude in Australia has it. I tried to buy it from him all those years ago, but he wanted a ridiculous sum for it. I offered to pay him what he paid for it and to buy him any other domain name that he wanted, but he wouldn’t budge. He wanted cash for it and judging from the figure he was asking for, I don’t think he really wanted to sell the domain anyway. So I had to settle for www.RoachMusic.com. Not being able to get my own name dot com is probably the reason that I’m not a Lady-Gaga-level star. Yep. That’s definitely what it is. If I had my name dot com, then all the industry types that I’m certain have been searching the web desperately for me would have found me easily and we could’ve “inked a big deal” (back when people used to do that sort of thing still). Instead here we are at AJRoach.net. By the way, feel free to click through to AJRoach.com. It’s been under construction for years. He really should just sell me the domain (at a fair price). Maybe I’ll write to him again.