"an early night" part 3

I work from nine to three-thirty. Gennie doesn't start her shift at the video store until four, so she usually mooches around in her underwear at home, drinking coffee and writing. She had another job with an art magazine that went around monthly, it didn't earn much but writing was Gen's passion. During my lunch break I would come upstairs to find music blasting from the stereo and Gen either writing furiously or staring at a page full of doodles. We'd share a cigarette, eat half a bagel each and then I'd go back downstairs to work.
I have to say, it's convenient beyond convenient to live above the cafe. Not to mention this had been my dream job since I was 16. Before that I'd wanted to be a musician. But it was just a crazy dream. Most Saturdays Gen and I went down to The Cement Lounge (which was neither made of cement nor an actual lounge, it was an old brick building with wooden floors and a big stage against the far wall) because it was all ages and our younger friends, like Ally, could come with is. Sometimes big names played there, it filled up pretty quickly so that you could barely move without bumping into somebody. We knew some of the people in the bands and sometimes I'd write songs for them and play with them, but lately I'd been stuck in a rut. Writing music wasn't coming to me like it used to. Everything I wrote was tired and dull, or worse - generic. I guess it was just writers block but it felt more like a writers black-out.
Sometimes Gennie would help, by dropping one of her poems into my lap (she loved writing poetry but never knew what to do with the poems, she considered them a waste of paper) and I'd put music to them.



photo credit - mluotio