Backstory

Tonight is my last night in my condo.  I’ve spent an enjoyable 2 and a half years here in this sleek modern man cave, with its wall of windows peering out across the treetops of the old fourth ward.  I’ve walked the length of Glen Iris, past the stoop sitters, crack dealers and scooterized church ladies to get to one of the finest breakfast places I’ve found anywhere.  And I’ve throughly indulged myself in the carefree ways of condo living while holding down a job (or two) out on the road playing music.  But all that has come to an end tonight.  I bought a house not far away from here.  And I’m going to try out the daunting world of home ownership for a while.  I’ll have a yard to mow, a roof to fret over and a new neighborhood to explore just as soon as I can move in over there.  Problem is, I’ve left myself a couple of months with no place to live.  I have renters moving into my condo in a couple of days, and renters in my new house for 2 more months.  So I’m putting everything in storage and living on the road.  Fortunately I’ll be on the road playing shows the whole time, leaving little time to feel the impact of my self imposed homelessness.  

I have a dog living with me.  It isn’t really my dog.  It belongs to my girlfriend.  And when she moved in, the dog gleefully took ownership of what I had mistakenly thought of as my condo.  Every inch of soft ground, every orphaned shoe and every dropped, and potentially dropped morsel of food has quickly become the sole possession of the dog.  The dog, named Zoe, is a black lab.  And she instinctively insists on bringing me anything that might resemble a fallen game bird whenever I get her attention.  Usually a shoe plays this role.  Sometimes it is a shoe with a sock and a dog toy.  Sometimes it is two shoes, the dog toy and a bone.  I’m yet to understand her complicated language of gifting.  And lucky for me, my condo isn’t typically frequented by game birds, which I think would add another layer of confusion to the situation.  

So as a life long self proclaimed dog person, who spent a brief few years exploring his cat fancy, I’m thrilled to have a dog around to at least pretend to be my best friend as I waltz across the room with her food.  I’ve introduced her to running, with limited success, as she is prone to fits of jealousy around other dogs.  And she will fetch a tennis ball with a depth of enthusiasm and mindlessness only a lab could embody.  But it wasn’t until today that I found myself confidently beaming with vicarious dog owner pride in the park.  I picked up a frisbee at the store, thinking she would enjoy a little change of the routine.  And, drawing on my high school varsity ultimate frisbee team skills - yeah it counted for a sport, I released my new Malibu model 110g frisbee disc into the afternoon gusts.  She gleefully took off after the prize, skillfully calculating its trajectory.  With a burst of athletic power and predatory determination, she leaped into the air, clamped down on the disc and gracefully returned to earth without breaking her stride.  She dutifully raced the captured token of her appreciation back to present to me at my feet and stood wagging her tail, awaiting the chance to do it all again.  She was a natural.  Just like the dogs on TV.  Hell, she could be on a Wheaties box with these skills.  Now my only task was to pace her so that she didn’t get worn out before enough people walked through the park to admire me and my frisbee dog, sharing our timeless and undeniable bond.  But of course, save for a couple of homeless men who didn’t seem in the least impressed, the only person who walked by had two greyhounds and clearly no interest in my leash-less dog’s achievements.  

But regardless if the Wide World of Dog Sports was there to witness or not, it happened.  And I was struck awe, admiration and I’m not ashamed to admit, pride.  

Give me a week off and what do I do? I hop on a plane with my brother and nephew and fly across the country to a Star Wars convention, of course. I don’t own a storm trooper costume (yet), and don’t really understand the plot of the last three movies, but I squarely belong to the generation that fell in love with the original movies. I was 5 years old when the first Star Wars movie came out. I have a pointed, if disjointed memory of my parents taking me and my older brother to see it in the old round cinema in Knoxville. I pined for the release of the next two movies. I had the action figures, the millennium falcon and even a Darth Vader mask that is rumored to be still hanging around in my brother’s basement. My 11th birthday party was at a showing of Return of the Jedi. And thus witnessing the festivities and curiosities of a Star Wars convention was a guilty pleasure. I tried to get my photo with as many costumed participants as I could, which I’ve posted on my flickr site. It wasn’t until after I returned to the Sugarland tour that I was hit with the incredible idea of inviting stormtroopers to work as security for us backstage. A missed opportunity that I’ll have to wait until the next convention to set right.

I enjoyed a rare, seasonably delightful day off in St. Louis this week. I was able to visit a few restaurants and haunts from my college days. Walking through the art museum, where I spent quite a few afternoons during my years pursuing my East Asian Art History degree (my fall back in case the whole music thing doesn’t work out…didn’t really think that one through, huh?) I was amazed at how many details I remembered, even though I hadn’t stepped foot in the museum in over 10 years. I could have led a tour through the Asian wing. Before we rounded the corner by the stairs, I could have pointed out that the 12th century bronze Siva has a crack in the ring. All stored away in there, taking up valuable cranial real estate. After a wonderful nap in the park, a stroll around the arch, a nostalgic dinner at my favorite Vietnamese restaurant and a satisfying and long overdue greasy diner breakfast, I headed back out on the road, leaving St. Louis behind once again.

Right now, I know where I am. I’m on a plane, fleeing Vegas for the second time in less than two weeks, on my way to St. Louis. I performed on the Academy of Country Music Awards last night with Sugarland (aka the ACMs, not to be confused with the CMA, CMT, or RMA award shows.) We spend a good bit of time backstage at every award show debating which song we played on which show, which year, never quite arriving at a definitive version of our own history.
It doesn’t help matters that a general disorientation has descended on me this week. Somewhere between Indio, CA and Grand Rapids, MI, I felt my conscious awareness of my location in both space and time start to slip away. It is a particular survival skill that I’ve developed for the longer runs. I just stop paying attention to the details, and just keep a vague eye out for a good breakfast spot or used bookstore along the way.
And it is at this point that I found myself entering the famed Mall of America. With our hotel across the street and a day off, this beacon of commerce seemed to draw me in like an Imperial battleship to the poor defenseless Millennium Falcon (I’m brushing up on my Star Wars analogies in anticipation of the Star Wars convention I’ll be attending next week. More on that to come.) After a few hours perusing all the same stores you can find in just about any mall anywhere in America, I finally got over my anti-consumerism smugness and withdrew my wallet to purchase a sweet belt decorated with 80’s style boom boxes (or ghetto blasters to use more historically accurate language.) The woman ringing me up asked if I lived in the area, and I looked at her stunned, realizing I had no clue what town I was in. Rolling back the days in my head, I remembered Indio, CA where it was 100 degrees. And Salt Lake City with the cool City Library and Japanese restaurant, then…nothing. We played some shows in Grand Rapids, but we left there the night before. So I replied “I’m not sure. Where are we?” Which must have seemed an improbable question to ask in the largest shopping mall in the world, which of course is located in Minneapolis / St. Paul, MN. She just smiled as if I was making a bad joke, took my money, gave me my belt and receipt. And I realized as I left the store that I was, at least temporarily unstuck in space and time once again.

Back in March, I flew out to San Francisco to continue work on my armful of tattoos. As you can see in the pic, it tickled. We added a dragon to the arm, which already has a koi and a tiger. The composition has been terribly out of balance, both spatially and conceptually since I added the tiger a few years ago. The tiger and dragon are often represented together in east asian art, usually engaging each other. My tiger has been poised there alone (and eyeless as we had to wait until the dragon head was drawn on to make sure their gazes were locked) for a few years now. We were not able to finish the entire dragon and background, but we made good progress for one day. Hopefully we’ll finish it up while I’m out in San Francisco for a show with Sugarland in July.

I�m reading Moby Dick right now. I�m finding the experience to be both cathartic and inspirational. I somehow skipped this important part of American literature during my education. Perhaps this was to be included in the semester in high school when my classmates and I, as self declared pirates of the curriculum, convinced our all too eager to please teacher that reading the Hobbit and Woody Allen short stories were vital to completing our secondary education. Or possibly I just weaved my way through years of English classes without ever stumbling over this brick of a book. Either way, I find myself now sinking into the depths of my week off chasing the great white whale. And I�m enjoying myself. I can�t help but cast myself a harpooner on the high seas of rock, although what constitutes the whale I�m chasing, I�m not so sure.

I�ve been reworking the design and function of my website. I�ve said this before and not followed through, but this time I�m confident I�ll have a new site to launch soon. I just have a few tweaks to clean up the design and I�ll be ready to go.

I�ve been partially inspired by my new desk. I haven�t had a proper desk for a while, choosing instead to work at the dining table or kitchen island in my house. But it feels good to carve out a little workspace for myself while I�m home. Plus the desk is so damn beautiful that I gravitate to it naturally while I�m home, perhaps indicating that my brief but intense love affair with my Eames recliner is waning. I�m slowly fixing my place up, having abandoned my previous approach to life at home of putting it all off until the tour ends. It turns out that this attitude is just a convenient perpetual procrastination technique, since the tour never really ends. As I�ve transitioned from touring with Train, with whom I enjoy staying at wonderfully inspired design conscious hotels, to Sugarland, where the family of travelers more often opt for spending the day together at the venue in the hastily thrown together dressing rooms of arenas and Rodeos, I�ve felt a growing need for some order here at home. And thus I�m finally getting around to painting, unpacking and decorating my condo in little spurts.

One of the advantages I�ve discovered of touring with a county band is that I get to come home just about every week, if only for a day or two. Apparently going out to hear country artists on Mondays or Tuesdays isn�t very popular. And since most of the industry is based in Nashville, tours are generally routed to pick people up and bring them home every week. And thus I�ve found myself home enough to break off my old habits of domestic inertia. Or at least I�ve purchased a vintage Dutch teak desk from which to write about how my inner decorator is blossoming.

I was busy last weekend playing a trio of shows to close out my year touring. On Friday I played with Shawn Mullins for his annual post Thanksgiving show at the Variety Playhouse. It was fun to jump up unrehearsed and play music with a great group of musicians. On Saturday I joined my brother, Ellis Paul and Matthew Kahler at a writers in the round night at Eddies. They asked me to sit in behind them as they traded off songs all night. Having three incredible songwriters, each deeply rooted in the tradition of great nights at Eddies, together on stage again brought me right back to the nights, weeks and months I spent leaning against the bar, engrossed in the songs I was hearing.

On Sunday, to top off the weekend, I joined Sugarland for one last performance this year as the half time entertainment during the Falcons Saints game at the Georgia Dome. I was fully engrossed in the royal treatment we received from the Falcons staff. I met the cheerleaders, watched the pre-game warm-ups from the endzone, enjoyed the game from the comforts of our box suite, and stood in awe as a Saints player brought down an impossible touchdown pass as we stood on the sidelines waiting to take the stage. We played our two songs during halftime to 80,000 football fans, stepping off the stage only seconds before the second half kick off. The whole experience was bizarrely familiar from having seen so many games on TV.

This past week, I�ve spent some quality time recovering from a year of touring. I played about 140 shows this year, which averages out to one every two and a half days. Which when you add in the travel days and lost days off wandering through malls in middle America, left little time at home to spend time with friends, take care of projects around the house and just generally exist. So I�m playing a little catch up now; rejoining the gym, setting up my writing studio and catching up with some familiar faces. One of the many projects that I�m hoping to finish up now that I have some time to focus is the compilation of my journals and pictures from my trip to China, which I plan on posting here.

Yesterday marks 6 years since my mother died on a brisk, bright and earth shattering Thanksgiving morning. It is amazing to look back over everything that I�ve experienced in the last 6 years that she hasn�t been here to share. I�ve married and divorced an amazing woman, witnessed the birth of my nephew and niece. I�ve moved twice. I�ve joined a grammy winning rock band, toured three continents playing music, performed for millions of people on television, and watched my brother become a country music superstar. I�ve survived eight months of chemotherapy and buried two grandparents. I�ve been styled, primped, catered to and put up on a pedestal. And I�ve sat on hard plastic bench in a crowded train station somewhere in central China, lost and hungry, coddling my last precious granola bar in total appreciation of how amazing my life has been. And without a moment�s hesitation, I�d give it all back to spend one more day with my mother.

Over the past couple of weeks I�ve been keeping up my consistently frantic pace of playing shows and traveling. I�ve been in 10 different states, including setting foot on the upper peninsula of Michigan for the first time in my life. I�ve seen some impressive livestock from Iowa to Pennsylvania, culminating in yesterday�s enchanting stroll through the swine breeding barn. I spent a couple of much appreciated nights in my own bed. And now I�m taking a moments rest on a flight to California to rejoin the Train guys for a couple of west coast shows.

I just left the Sugarland camp in Indianapolis, where just a few days prior, on a rare day off with Train I stumbled into a huge gaming convention called Gen Con. To be honest I didn�t really stumble into the convention. I asked around at the hotel and was graciously treated to a convention badge. I pursued admission to this convention mainly out of curiosity, but partly out of a burning need for my under nourished gaming soul to roll some 10 sided die with my fellow fantasy friends. As I perused the convention center, passing elves, storm troopers, pirates and an occasional real live mad scientist, I confessed to my band mate who had joined me for sport, �I�m with my people!� But I was only too aware of the truth of the matter; that in my $40 t-shirt and hair gel, I was not one of them. The blank looks I received in every room that I entered only confirmed that I was clearly an outsider here. I don�t know the rules of these tradable card games. I don�t recognize most of the characters passing me by. I don�t really know what to do with a 10 sided die. I don�t have a true commitment to this lifestyle. But seeing it all, if only for an afternoon reminded me of how detailed and deeply interesting people�s lives can become. Being surrounded by people indulging their acute interests in seemingly unheard of games and hobbies reminded me of how important it is to be open to whatever it is in my own life that keeps me curious and entertained, which right now is traveling and writing.

In less than a week I�ll be off to China. I�m anxiously excited, as I will be in some fairly remote areas with no language skills. But I�m up for the adventure. Many of the sights I hope to visit I studied in college. I have a vague itinerary, and plan on getting a little lost in the process. I hope not completely lost, as I fly back directly to a Train show in Seattle. I plan on taking plenty of pictures and doing my best to find out where it is that Chinese children hope to get to while digging holes in their back yards. They are already in China, right?