I spent forty-five increasingly exhausted minutes circling the block tonight, looking for parking. Can I tell you how much this sucks? It's not just a matter of circling. It's a fully interactive experience in avoiding collisions. Cabs, SUVs, trucks double-parked, pizza delivery drivers, pedestrians, humans on wheels (bikes, skates, planks) and an occasional cat. It's tiring.

Boston was busy tonight. I can always spot the suburbanites. They drive too fast and they can't parallel park. Sometimes they pull out and back in again at a better angle, sometimes they'll just fight it out in the space and inch back and forth for a while, wrestling the steering wheel. They eventually give up and declare it parked two feet from the curb.

They don't know how to wait for a parking space, either. They see me getting ready to leave, and they pull up just in front of me to wait. Please. You wait for a space behind the space, so you block oncoming traffic in the right lane and the other driver can pull out easily. If you wait in front of me, I have to go around you and merge right into traffic you've just tightened by a lane. This is not rocket science.

These drivers also tend to blow through stop signs, which is a deeply shitty thing to do in a city. But I'm starting to rant, here, and I just don't have the energy.

Today was beautiful, sunny and warm. WCRB, our classical station, runs a series of free concerts in Copley Square at noon on Thursdays (one more thing to love about Boston). The New England String Ensemble was doing something Bachlike when I arrived; I didn't recognize it. After the interval, they did Tchaikovsky's Serenade. I don't particularly like Tchaikovsky. I like my classical lighter, fluffier, more orderly. But it was live and free, so I stayed.

It looked to me like they'd emptied the fountain and put the ensemble in the middle of it. A month ago, it was empty and full of kids on skateboards. Two weeks ago, the fountain was on and full. Now it's empty again. How do they do that?

I just read through this entry again and decided I'm all over the road and I really should get some sleep.

Entrain's playing at Harper's Ferry tonight, but I'm so tired. I just keep looking at the clock and thinking. To go or not to go?

I remember when I wouldn't miss an Entrain show unless I was bleeding from both eyes. I knew all of their set lists, all of their lyrics, all of their musicians and a lot of other Entrain fans. I saw them in at least half the venues in New England, from tiny dives to a Newport mansion.

I've been a fan through three soundmen, three (or four?) conga players, three bassists and two frontmen. I've listened to the sound quality on their CDs get better and better. I've heard them cover "Sweet Home Alabama" (note-perfect) and "A-B-C 1-2-3" (they were joking, but they sounded great) and "I'm a Believer" (ditto).

But a year or two ago, Entrain went through a bad patch. The lineup kept changing; the set lists stopped changing. They started looking and sounding bored. And I picked up on the bad vibes, and decided to take a break.

I first saw Entrain in the fall of 1995. My then-boyfriend and I decided on the spur of the moment to go catch some live music at Harper's Ferry, a great local venue for blues and jam bands, and Entrain was playing that night. I'd never heard of them when we walked in; when we walked out, I was a fan.

Entrain's a jam band, a mix of blues and ska and world beat with a serious emphasis on percussion. After a few more shows, I noticed that when they went into a percussion break (think: four or five types of instruments, like a drum circle, not some mindless moron bashing his cymbals for ten minutes), I would lose myself in the groove. I would stop thinking and just dance. I was invariably exhilarated and laughing by the end of a show, my body relaxed and loose from dancing, my hair a sweaty and tangled mess, my soul renewed. Pure, clean joy... and something else. Something almost hypnotic.

Hanging out one night and basking in the afterglow, I asked Tommy (top picture) what the name Entrain meant. This, more or less, is what he told me:

The word ENTRAIN comes from the Law of Entrainment, a physical law that was discovered in the 16th Century by Christian Huygens, who observed that if you mounted two mechanical clocks close to each other on the same wall, in a very short time the two devices would be beating IN TIME with each other, each having modified its rhythm sufficiently to put both in a common time. More generally stated, the Law of Entrainment holds that two oscillators placed in the same field will synchronize. Of course, this applies to far more than mechanical devices.

-- shamanshop.com

And what does entrainment feel like?

Many people report a floating feeling. Your attention may start to wander as your thoughts become less linear and logical. You may find yourself in a lucid dream complete with sights, sounds and feelings. Some people, auditory types, often hear words in the pulsed sounds. This indicates theta activity and heightened creativity. Because your sense of time changes during the session, it may seem as if you have slept. ... This state should linger for a while after the session ends.

-- mind-gear.com

And I've been typing and thinking and realizing that I should be there tonight. But now, of course, it's forty-five minutes later and even if I got out of here immediately, I'd probably wind up stuck in line outside the club. If I'd decided to go earlier, or called someone yesterday, I could have been guest-listed and just skipped the whole hassle with the line, but tonight, I'm just another fan.

Ah, well. They're playing Harper's tomorrow night, too. There's always another show.