Open Mic Night

I used to firmly believe that if I played the guitar, wrote songs and sang soulfully, I would somehow become cool. This same thought has driven me to do a number of other things in my life, some of them quite stupid, and others legitimate- I still think that everybody else who plays the guitar, writes songs and sings soulfully is cool. I, however, am not. I have done cool things, but none of them have made me essentially cool. I can't really define cool, but it seems pretty inherent in all the other cool-thing-doing people. This makes me an anomaly, as I have never been cool for a single day in my life, and instead have maintained my dorkiness even when circumstances should have thrust coolness upon me.

Case in point: I played an open mic night on Wednesday at Borders. Here I am, playing guitar and soulfully singing a song that I wrote. Everybody else who played was cool, and they knew it. But I, somehow, was not.

Cool or not, there is no glory in playing a set at a Border's coffee shop- none at all. The blenders maintain there incessant whirring, frothifying the fancy cups o' joe that the Borders patrons boredly sip as you sing your heart out about your heartache or whatever. And you sit there in your argyle sweatervest, reading lyrics from your brand-new song off the napkin that you originally wrote them on, wondering if you will ever graduate from the dimly-lit world of coffee shops to the brights lights of the big stage, and somehow in the process actually, finally, become cool.