Sometimes she thought about packing it all up and moving into town.

This was the caption on a favorite old t-shirt of mine, under a picture of a pretty young cowgirl kneeling on the ground and looking up at the moon. Then I packed it all up and moved into town, leaving my horse and saddle behind.

Today I'm homesick, even after a day (yesterday) of homie-hop at the hip-hop stage at gay pride Oakland, organized by Juba from the Deep Dickollective (D/DC). A whole ten-minute freestyle with a stage full of queer rappers, mostly butch men and women, mostly but not all African-American, was the phenomenal climax of the show. It may have been the first ever city gay pride hip hop freestyle, at least maybe the first publically-sanctioned one of that magnitude. And most of the rappers in that freestyle were young- some barely drinking age. As D/DC sings (and thank the gods for this fact): "Why keep on trippin'-trippin'-trippin...? We are your future."

So why am I homesick? If I wanted more laid-back music there was the womyn's (wymyn's?) stage where someone I know saw a nice lady playing solo acoustic guitar and singing a song about yoga. Oh it wasn't (all) that bad. That stage also featured Kindness, and they do rock, they do, with Dawn Richardson of 4-Non-Blondes at the drums and bassist Catherine Chase and Shelley Doty (a guitar superforce). So, what don't I have here that I had back in the sticks?

See a web cam where I'm from.

OK it's not exactly where I'm from, it's about 2 hours east of where I'm from. And this is 43 hours west of where I live now. If I pointed my Toyota at Northern New York and started driving today, just three days' drive.

Now, to pull out my fiddle and polish up some tunes for a hoe-down this afternoon for some other expat citified hicks who grew up with live music as something you do for eachother as a way to pass the time, with whom I went to an empty San Francisco bar last night and saw The Trout Band, which may or may not have included some of these people. (This picture speaks a thousand twangy words.) The commonplaceness of live music is something the rural US has in common with urban Russia-- another part of the mysterious conglomerations of reasons why I ended up there at age 20, I guess.