Man, I don’t even want to look at the clock. The damned things are all lies in any case, I don’t remember which time zone I’m in and I don’t remember which one I’m due to be in. In about 29 hours I’m due to be on the air at a radio station some 800 miles away, and I’m dreading the getting there.
Tonight I can’t sleep. My mind is filled with what-ifs and song fragments and images and shoulder-ache. My body hurts from not moving enough and then moving too much, and my brain is worrying over website redesigns that need to happen but frankly shouldn’t be worrisome. I’m wide awake and OH how I’m going to regret THAT come morning.
The toll roads through Kansas could be killers, but i can’t even get an internet connection to check, and I can’t decide if the couch is too hard or to soft, but I DO know it’s 4am and my alarm will go off in three hours.
I wish we’d had more time in Colorado. Somehow Seattle kept getting bigger and bigger, and Missouri was doing the same – and Colorado just squeezed in the middle.
We stayed two nights with my friend Jennie from college. I’ve always felt that there are few people who really think like me – and Jennie’s one of them. We met in our sophomore year and SHE is the one you can all blame for introducing me to Magic: the Gathering. I remember sitting on the picnic benches in the courtyard pitting our armies against one another, vast collections of stones holding everything down against the breeze.
You’d think a 3/3 Hill Giant could hold it’s own against a spring breeze, but then maybe you’ve never seen an Air Elemental.
And so we dusted off the cards and make quick and dirty decks and played on the Living room floor for hours. An addiction reawakened and all I want to do is play Magic all day and maybe have some Star Trek marathon all night. We talk of education and teaching and drugs and morality. We talk a lot about art.
I’m not sad that I’ve mostly left that thing behind. I’m lucky. It means I’ve Lived multiple Lives – going to art school, throwing everything I had into painting and sculpture and a 50mm lens. And now I truly Live through the guitar and these audiences that sometimes give nothing and sometimes give so much.
Tonight we played the Folsom Street Coffeehouse in Boulder, Colorado – and it’s good to see myself through her eyes. She’s just known me for an immensely long time, and she’s got gaps in her knowledge now – and has the distance to see how I’ve developed and grown.
It’s funny. It’s occuring to me that I’m a creature of stubborness and arrogance and perspiration. I go back and listen to old cassettes and of the things I used to perpetrate on audiences, and I really was just a fanboy beating on a guitar, throwing my voice randomly into the air. I’m fortunate to have to come to what I have now through some bizarre process of trial-and-error, but if I’d known what audiences back then must’ve REALLY been thinking, and if I could’ve heard myself through half-trained ears, I’d have given it all up long before I’d written… anything.
And yet through Love of it and the arrogance of thinking I was good at it, I’ve pushed throough to something that a LOT of people seem worthwhile – and yet it makes me hold out the worry that really I’m still kidding myself. That the people who Love us remain few and far between and that they just caught me on a good day, or on a fluke day or on theright day…
No matter. i’m not going to insult all those fans and friends who believe in me by disbelieving this collective pipe-dream. Maybe through this same kind of self-generated illusion we can get to be something more than broke pilgrims. Develop our gypsy selves into a caravan that people want to join.
Ha – what would Jennie think if i rolled into town and asked if we could crash for the night… and if the twenty-three cars, mini-vans and that one converted cement mixer can park down the street?
She’d be REALLY impressed THEN.
-excerpt from a letter I wrote while somewhere on I-70 in Kansas-
… I miss my Battlestar Galactica, and I can’t wait to catch up on Boston Legal, and frankly, when I’m down and can’t sleep, there’s nothing better than a disc full of Friends and there’s something about their coming-of-age in this 30-is-the-new-20-kind-of world that makes my heart ache, knowing that I’m older than they are in the shows and it’s not a world I’m probably destined for now. It seems everyone my age has outgrown such antics and everyone younger is trying to act like they’re more mature than that. I want a Chandler!!! Or barring that, of course, I’d certainly be fine with one hot night with Courtney Cox.
Today is the bad drive. We’re five hours in and perhaps have seven to go. We’re listening to CDs made by friends – both mixes and demos, whole albums and EPs and. well, we’ve gotten a bunch of care-packages all in a row from all over the country, all with homemade discs of music that’s supposed to make us else-sick enough to come back and return ourselves to the senders. The one we’re listening to now is actually the album of an artist from San Diego that we met in Denver last night – Beth Preston is amazing. Reggae and roots rock fused with a voice 75% Fiona Apple and 25% Sublime. She was achingly beautiful and painfully awkward and just a great show.
She’s keeping us alive on this mind-numbing drive. When the CD is over I fear we’ll be hunting the plains for a radio station, which probably means more classic rock. I could be done with classic rock for EVER.
I read the Bible once in high school and once in college. It was a long time ago and I don’t remember much of it, but I’ve read a lot of histories of it from all sorts of points of view. For myself , I certainly feel it’s a human-made thing, but I don’t know that that diminishes its power. I went through a grand exploration of religions in high school, hunting for something to refute my grandmother’s assertions that I was doomed to Hell. I went to a lot of temples and churches and altars and read a lot of books and completely failed to really understand most of it, and certainly failed to connect. Most of my friends at the time were experimenting with Wicca or the gentler brands of Satanism at the time, though I’m sure most of them have moved on from such things by now… in college I went hunting for myself again and got divided. Art was my tool for dismantling me and for filtering the world, and then I discovered music – and in the process of swapping out my mental toolkit I completely lost my mind and had an impressive nervous breakdown. It wasn’t pretty.
Nowadays I believe in math, and I wish I had more to cling to. I think I was coming to some sort of faith a couple of years ago, some sort of spirituality – but it was really, really shaken by the death of my father and I spent a lot of the following year pretty angry at anything larger than me. especially in the Lutheran God that my father had finally turned to in his last months. He felt terrible that he hadn’t instilled that religion in me and my brother, but I don’t think he ever really believed any of it but in desperation.
People ground me – for a cynic, I have an awful lot of faith in them. They drive me nuts as well, but I find them to be something I can believe in and they are physical, tangible Living creatures that are wonders of protein and happy accidents of hydrocarbons. We are wonderfully complex and stupidly simple and so very conceited to think that something as marvelous as the universe can’t create us on its own.
My God (ha!), Kansas goes on forever!
