2025-06-01: disappointment

when i was in university, the wind band used to do an annual tour. one of the other groups had higher aspirations, and every few years would fundraise a big trip to europe. not us, though. sometimes our trips were to a big city east or west of us, but most of the years, the tour was just smaller towns, playing high school auditoriums to students, parents, and anyone in the community who wanted to come. the response was typically good — i remember one year, playing in the town where one of the percussionists grew up. the parents group was inordinately proud he'd gone a province over and into music: they arranged a huge ukrainian supper for us after the concert, and it was wonderful. the concert was fairly-well attended. this was an outlier, but not by all that much.

(i actually ran into him about ten years ago — the last time i was in my hometown, for a friend's wedding, he was the banquet manager. i'm a little sad he never went into teaching music, but i'm delighted we still recognized each other)

and then there was the other extreme. i remember playing in a little town about an hour south-east of where i grew up, and in that expansive auditorium full of chairs, there were exactly four people. what do you do? you play for the people who came. but obviously it stings, so much so that you can remember the details a couple decades later.

i'm thinking a lot of that four person concert, because for the last couple months i'd been advertising a poetry reading that i did recently with a few other poets, which was also a fundraiser for a charity helping marginalized groups in this current political climate. i promoted it regularly on my socials. got lots of likes and RTs. yesterday i left a rehearsal early to give myself lots of time to get set up, calm my nerves, make a cup of tea, read and re-read my set. we waited an extra ten minutes at the start time to allow more people to trickle in. nobody really did. apart from the readers and organizer, there were less than ten people, several of which were obviously related to the organizer. i didn't recognize any of the names. maybe people came for the others, but nobody came for me. all those posts and likes and RTs and nobody could be bothered to show.

i'm not gonna lie, it stings, a lot. particularly because on friday, i got a slim SASE in the mail: the last publisher i'd sent my manuscript to. not even the full thing, though, just a sample. and it's good, they said, but this year we have a large number of returning poets and...

hard not to feel deflated, that not only can't i get a publisher interested in my work, i can't even convince people to show up for a free reading fundraising for a great cause as well. i'm proud that we raised a couple thousand dollars from the real generosity of those who came, but if i can be selfish, this is the lowest i've felt about myself in a long time. coming up my band has a shared concert with a bunch of other bands for free at a local park, weather permitting. at least i know people are going to that, have asked me to confirm the time and place. there's a lesson in this i hope i can learn: the online is ephemeral; & what i'd do for others, i should never expect them to do for me.

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