It's not the fact that it was 4 degrees yesterday morning and -22 the morning before or that this February is the coldest month on record in Maine that has me thinking music. It's more that the Wednesday at the Square schedule is out and we'll get to see a cool young English/French band called Sweet Crude when we are there April 21-May 2. They will also be playing at Ogden After Hours the following night. That weekend we will spend two nights in Lafayette for Fest International. We will get to hear some other French/English bands including Canadian Lisa LeBlanc who writes lyrics like this: "Les yeux colles comme du CrazyGlue Il reste pu grand couleur sur mes joues...C'est que j'pedale trop dans l'vide. J'ai du global warming dans la brain." The band I'm most anticipating in Lafayette is MarchFourth Marching Band (A Date, A Command, A Band). Our Maine friends Jim, Martha, and Chloe will be around for Lafayette and a couple of days in New Orleans before. It will be fun to share some favorite things with them. Looks like we'll be at JazzFest in N. O. on Thursday. I'll be avoiding the big stages and finding Sturgill Simpson, Amanda Shires, and a bunch of brass bands.

Another reason I'm thinking about music is that after a couple of years of almost no music in Unity's gem of a theater, the college appears willing to let a group of local promoter/investors, including me, bring music back to Unity Center. We should be booking shows starting in April. I'm starting to look out there to venues in Portland, Boston, Northampton to see what's coming our way. As usual I'll try to snag them on a Thursday or other open night in their touring schedule. Getting music back in the theater is an item in both the new Comp Plan and the TIF Economic Development Committee. It is one of the best ways to get people to come here.

That which doesn't give you PTSD makes you stronger, right? Other people are coming into the terminal now, but last night and this morning it was only us, The Stranded. All nearby hotels filled up minutes after flights started cancelling. Terminal D closed for the night and I found my way over to terminal B which stays open all night. I actually walked to it to get some fresh air. Tried out a few seating areas. I'm glad they tolerate some of the homeless sleeping on the heaters but some had issues: frost bite, weird singing. I eventually settled into the food court with the other stranded. Find allies. That's what the interwebs told me when I googled how to spend the night in an airport. Around midnight, the staff set out cots for us in a quiet upstairs corridor. Lifesaver. The couple from Utah trying to get to Orrington disdained the cots and this morning they look like the Mormon walking dead. Now I'm back in the relatively cushy terminal D whose amenities I know well, the bathroom, the ATM, lots of food places, plugs everywhere. On my purchased hour of internet this morning I bought two Kindle books for reading offline, one light (The Girl On The Train), one heavy (The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice and Freedom). The rest of my iPad online time I do email, play Words With Friends and do Facebook. It's still about 10 hours until my flight out to Bangor. Should that be cancelled, I'll just start walking home. Then I'll burn these clothes I'm wearing.

Some lessons I might learn from this:
-- Don't fly in deep winter in the age of global weirding climate change
-- Don't fly through Laguardia again
-- Airlines don't cancel flights because of bad weather, they cancel to keep their planes where they are logistically most useful.
-- Thinking that you understand the weather forecast is just another form of techno hubris and anyhow, see item above.
-- Always have your rechargers in your carry-on.
-- Never watch another movie about Tom Hanks being trapped somewhere.
-- Don't facebook about your situation when it's this pathetic.
-- Learn Spanish. I'm missing the good stuff.

Just updated unityme.org. Scary thought of the morning: one could actually work out of this place. In a way I hate it that I have coping skills for this situation. A lot of coping is actually postponing. Waiting areas at airports should have interior courtyards so you can step into real air once in a while. One of the things I hate about flying is the way you are committed to the system/machine(airport plus planes), and are held in it until you are spit out upon arrival. And why is there always someone shouting?

The south is showing me some great blue skies and mellow temps. Spent a couple of days in Foley/Gulf Shores, Alabama and walked on the beach and on the state pier with my sister Georgette. Dolphins were swimming around the pier and this pelican let me take its picture. Crisp air made for a sharp photo. It was good to walk in the sand and get my feet wet.

That part of Alabama is intensely agricultural. I let the nice GPS lady put me off onto county roads earlier than usual and it was mile after mile of fields and farms. Not rolling and twisty like Maine, just flat as far as the eye could see. Crop fields, pasture, and fields of graceful pecans. Sometimes the pecan trees and the cows do it together. I was super pleased to see that farmers in Foley were starting their own food hub, and how the language they used was very southern, but that it was the same concept as what MFT is doing in Unity.

Sitting in the sushi restaurant on the fifth floor of the Shaw Center in Baton Rouge and looking across the river to the Port Allen side where we grew up produced the oddest sense of temporal/cultural dislocation. We could see the unpaved part of the levee where the ferry landing used to be. A little park now marks the former gateway to the world. We could see the "new bridge" (almost 50 years old) and now so outdated that it produces a huge traffic jam every day. I could see a water tower but not the old one that Douglas Messenheimer climbed (was it the feat itself or his exotic name that made it so memorable?); probably torn down years ago. Sushi, smart phones, climate change. We could have been on the moon looking across that river.

In contrast to the tiny library in Port Allen, guarded over by Mrs. Lindsay, my sisters toured me through the new main library in Baton Rouge, a marvel of an information and culture center. It would be a great library anywhere and it is in Baton Rouge because the parish has a library tax that supports it and Jindal can't steal it. Among its features is a cistern on the roof that collects water to feed the agave garden on the roof of the third floor. I want to bring their "One Community, One Book" idea home to Unity.