The surrealism of this journey never ceases to amaze me. When I toured for a living, and for a few years afterwards, it was a seemingly endless journey across the American frontier. I experienced more in those years, traveled and adventured more, saw and did more, heard, worked, played, and lived more, than most people will in a lifetime. I know what it means to be a nomad, a wanderer. To wake up in a different city every day. To adapt and learn and live completely different kinds of lifestyles. That vast array of experience has helped to forge me into the person I am today. It is why I can manage and function anywhere, despite never really being comfortable anywhere. I never mind anywhere. I can make do with almost nothing. I know how to just make things work. Very little bothers me, even less can actually stop me. I can go on for a while here, and I have lots of other notes to include, but I am exhausted. I’ll follow up later.
This morning I woke up in Santa Monica, CA after spending the previous evening on the beach, at the end of a stunningly beautiful day. The weather was gorgeous, I finally was able to take a long, hot, shower and get myself cleaned up, and I got laundry done. I slept in a bed. When you live on the road, days like that are few and far between. They are like pocket days, 24 hours of stepping outside of the reality you’re existing to recollect and recover. Personal days. Recharge days.
Tonight I am laying on a couch, in a home at the top of a mountain, hidden away somewhere in a forest outside of Santa Cruz, CA. Another unfamiliar ceiling. It was a very long, dark, winding, road to get here. I have no cell reception. I’m writing this offline before I hijack some bandwidth. I can see every star in the sky here, but there are no fireflies like where I grew up. Bluegrass music is coming out of the TV. In 8 hours I will be awake, collect the few things I unpacked, and climb aboard a motor home that is very similar to the tour buses I spent most of my 20’s on. This will become three days of driving across the desert with two men I have known collectively for less than five days until I am in Albuquerque, NM. They are both chain smokers, but I fear for the well being of my camera, clothes, and computer more than I do my own lungs.
That’s all for now. Just wanted to get it down here. Side note: Today’s photos were brought to you by my phone, not my camera.