What the fuck just happened?

We're home from tour and I'm in a familiar haze as I try to figure out what the hell just happened in my life. On tour time plays tricks. Time stands still. Days pass without anyone noticing. Watches are useless. Time isn't told by numbers... but by cities.

"Scotty you stink. When was the last time you took a shower?"

"Fargo?"

I can't speak for anyone else but I really feel like I wake up as a different person after a couple of days on the road. My perspective on reality becomes skewed. I start to lose the ability to care about anything but the 40 minutes or so that we spend playing each night. Reality fades away and my cellphone becomes this weird portal into the "real world" that seems light years behind me.

Every day we show up and treat Indianapolis or Berkeley or Dublin or wherever like home. We get comfortable. We make friends. We act like we've been living their our whole lives. We are experts at making ourselves feel at home. Sometimes I forget how weird it is that we immediately start rifling through cupboards and closets to find pots and pans to cook with when we show up to houses of people that until that night were perfect strangers. To us it's normal. In our minds we're home. Every night we lay down roots and every morning we leave for a new home to lay roots in. On tour you live a new life every day. On tour you learn to love something intensely for a night... or a moment... and be so removed from it by the next day that you forget that the stories people are telling you are about things that you witnessed or took part in.

Every day my only real home is a van that I share with 4 people who entertain themselves by trying to pressing my buttons while I do the same to them. Every day my life is an acting out of the party game where you ask people "if you had to live on an island for the rest of your life and could only bring 3 things what would they be?" except my island has 4 wheels and I've traded in my "3 items" for "whatever I can fit in this backpack". The 4 stinky dudes come free with the island of course. You learn a lot about people by what they choose to stuff into that backpack. For me it's lots of blank paper, pens, books, and dry underwear. For Mayo it's a tech deck skateboard, a pair of pants, a copy of devil may cry 2 (in case we stay somewhere with a playstation), and a pair of skin tight shorts that have a little pp screen printed on them. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that your best friends are your worst enemies at the same time and you have to live on whatever your "bare essentials" are. It's all a twisted game.

The whole thing is a total mindfuck. For the first couple of days your body struggles to adjust. But once you're in it's just a mental game. It's like running. That first half mile sucks but when you hit your stride you get into the zone and you can run forever if you know how to talk to yourself. The shows are the pavement. Some shows are great. Fresh asphalt. Flat as a pancake. Some shows are terrible. Cracked sidewalks. Potholes. The good ones make it easy and the bad ones test your mental resilience. That's not even mentioning shit like having your van broken into, getting stuck at borders, breaking down. And on top of that, the whole thing is a team race. You've got your buddies running right next to you with just as much potential to pull you down as you have to pick them up (and vice versa).

It's like anything though. You adapt. If you want to do it you will figure out how to do it. We all did. But then you get to where I am right now and just goes up in smoke. I'm home and I don't know what to do with myself. I felt guilty for sleeping in my own bed last night. I met friends for various things today and I felt like the time between the last time I had seen them and now had been cut out and the reel had been spliced back together. Like there are two weeks just missing. I can remember everything that happened but it's this weird blur where days run into each other and I'm not sure I ever even left Syracuse. And this one was only two weeks. This messes with my head. The 5+ week jobbers are breeding grounds for insanity. Coming home from those is hard and it usually takes me a night or two of sleeping on my floor or a couch before I can get into my own bed again.



So I don't know where I was going with this except to say that being home is weird. I don't have much to say about the last few shows except for that our friends in Wasteland shredded, I froze my ass off camping in Vermont, and seeing friends in Burlington/ playing with Ceremony was awesome.

Our hometown made us feel lucky to be from here the other night. Tour was incredible but it still felt so great to be home. Nothing out of town will ever be able to touch what happens when we play the Westcott. I like knowing that the show last night was that much sweeter because we had been on the road for the two weeks prior. How the water in an Oasis tastes so much better than even the fanciest bottled water you can buy at the grocery store... because you had to do some work to get there.

Alright kids, this old man is going to try to get some sleep whilst trying to hang onto the feeling of total bliss that comes from something like sleeping in my own bed after two weeks of hard floors and tight squeezes. It will fade eventually just like it always does. I swear one of these days I will figure out how to stay there.





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