Call Me Le Corbusier

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.