Whitney worked at a rock music venue on the beach in L.A.. She has an MBA and is starting a new life.

There are things that I am glad that I can put behind me, and there are things that I will miss.

Like when I kept Seth Macfarlane from going into the Green Room during a Roger Clyne show. To be fair, we were on the alert for a weird stalker situation. Roger’s tour manager had told me to make sure no one came back. And it was dark enough to make it tougher to see Seth’s face. To be fair, he wasn’t the stalker. Duh. And he complied and gave me no attitude when I told him ‘no’.

So if I try to crash the Oscars this year which he will be hosting and he tells me ‘no’, I will try to be as gracious…

Like when Exene Cervenka was walking through the box office and I stopped her because I was looking at her wristband-less wrist. Then I looked up and saw her face. I gave her an embarrassed hug, and then apologized again because I was concerned about jostling her off balance with her M.S.. My mom had had it for decades before God healed her, and I know the effort it takes to stay balanced. Despite my sophisticated age, I blushed a mortified fuchsia and was glad that the lights were red so that no one could see.

To be fair, I hadn’t been notified that she was even coming. And to be fair, she still jumped on stage and gave us a gift of an impromptu set with John Doe. And it was free…

Times like that I will miss…and won’t miss.

I won’t miss Guttermouth’s Mark Adkins throwing up on our gear onstage. Especially after drinking his preferred red wine/Red Bull concoction that makes vomit go Technicolor.

Or cops from other jurisdictions getting hammered and then barricading themselves in the bathroom stalls because they don’t want to have to give their names to paramedics who I called. Yes, they sent flowers when they sobered up…

I won’t miss skinheads. Or rich kids who pretend that they are poor to seem more interesting. Or racist Rastas. Or women who like their men to fight for them as part of the fun, and the men who agree to it.

I will miss the bands telling me that my dress is pretty, and locking eyes with them when they are on stage. I am glad that I was there when people had seizures or had strokes or had fallen, like the kid at the TSOL show whose pelvis collapsed under the weight of his own body. I found him sitting quietly on the stairs. He told me that it had happened before, but that he needed help. I stayed with him until the ambulance arrived and was glad I was able to look into his eyes, but I wish it hadn’t happened.

I won’t miss music being held hostage by the liquor industry. How to make live music profitable without having to ring at the bar is a problem I wasn’t able to solve. I thought of composer John Cage and my sister’s old boss Merce Cunningham and how they detangled dance and music from each other. But where I have been, musicians get booked only if people drink when they watch them play. So art is still chained up to a beast, like Princess Leia to Jabba the Hut.

But I will miss people celebrating, and giving strong drink to him that is ready to perish and wine to those with heavy hearts, so that poverty can be forgotten and misery not remembered. (Proverbs 31:6-7)

I will miss that, and I won’t…

I will miss sunrises being my sunsets, and driving home when even the bad guys are asleep. I will miss talking to the Pier police about gardening. I need to remember to get some of my sunflower seeds to the pretty cop with the scar on his cheek. He already gave me some that he had dried in his garage after he had harvested them…

I won’t miss people that can’t be trusted, and I will miss being in a place where you can discover who you can depend upon.

Quote of the Blog from Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy: “…he had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic or aesthetic…”

Image of me out the back door of BriXton, by the trash bins and outside stairs that look out over the sand and ocean, taken by Ron Cleary who was there to take pictures of a band.

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