it's the jazz baby!

was what roy kept saying for weeks before this past weekend. it's the jazz baby, everything changes.

well, what the biggest build up to a weekend i've experienced since i was eight and watching the 1990 new years countdown on City TV, turned out to be somewhat overrated. i can remember telling my dad how i was SO excited to watch the countdown and how devastated i was to find out that the biggest event on television was nothing more than a series of crappy, lying television ads. he smiled in a way that only a father can, and the only way that a son can recognize years later, he realized that his son was just as observant as he wished and could hope.

this is my blog and i'll be as nostalgic if i want to. as far as i am concerned i am unbiased. in fact, i am the most unbiased, so there.

in effect the jazz was another excuse for the staff to get overly stressed, pissed at each other (which at the time felt not so much like each other as it did me) and, at times, reduced to tears immediately following brad having stacked the empty kegs in such a way that:

it pissed me off - so says steve the manager.

and then as i went back upstairs to the bar with a case of corona he tossed at me he cried and threw kegs around the cellar. at the end of the night he looked at me over his pint of gin and tonic and looked at him over my cup of carlsberg and we stared each other down. i said steve. he said yank. i said are we still friends. he said no no we aren't, i am not friends with yanks.

it was then i knew that we were still friends and that we would always be friends. at least until the next jazz, or until the next time we worked together.

at the end of it all the cork jazz couldn't hold a candle to the Toronto jazz festival. that is a bit too harsh. the jazz fest wasn't what i expected it to be because it wasn't to much a jazz fest as it was an excuse for Guinness to monopolize beer sales and for the population of Cork to expand ten fold for the duration of 72 hrs and for everyone to get so drunk that they get sick everywhere in their new bathroom.

what i mean to say, is that the weekend wasn't really about jazz. sure the bands played jazz, a bit of jazz anyways, but it was more about being out in mass amounts and doing mass amounts of drinking. but it's the jazz baby, and apparently the jazz baby is all about working ridicules hours for little pay and tricking yourself into thinking that it is all worth it.

what i did learn is that this trip is not about work, i'd rather be traveling and the first chance i get i'm getting out of Cork and going to galway for a few days. and maybe to france after that.