Outside of the Tent
Day one.
Technically, this could be considered day two, since we flew out yesterday, spent some time working out our stage setup for the tour, and slept on the bus last night, but today is the first show of tour, so I'm calling yesterday Day Zero, mostly because "Day Zero” sounds badass.
The bus. After years spent chasing the bus like it was a wild unicorn, I sometimes forget that it has gone from being the exception to the rule. I can probably stop writing it in italics. Still, it is hard to deny that these are exciting days for the band. To quote the acclaimed educator and philanthropist William Madison, "The world was changing, and the puppy was getting bigger.” With the additions of our new friends Corey and Craig last fall, and Amy at the start of this tour, we now have a five-person crew for a record total of twelve human bodies in our touring outfit. For reference, a typical tour bus sleeps a maximum of twelve people. We are officially rolling deep.
We haven't played a show yet, so there isn't much else to report from the tour front. Today I woke up in Fort Collins, rode a city bike around town to pick up some supplies, and ate lunch at an Indian buffet. Not complaining or anything, but how did the Indian restaurant lunch buffet become a thing? For such a universal constant, it seems kind of arbitrary. Anyway, yeah. Like I said, there isn't much to report today. To that end, I'll turn it over to Past Rob with the second, much longer part of today's double-header. Catch you later.
Hello, friends! Rob here.
I write this during a rare moment of peace and solitude in the middle of JamCruise. I do not intend to pay upwards of one hundred dollars for five days' worth of dial-up-quality internet, so I'll be posting this sometime in the next few days when I return to shore, and you'll have to take my word for it that, as I type this, I'm sitting on a balcony, overlooking the expanse of the Caribbean, watching schools of silvery fish loft themselves out of the water on tiny wings- a bizarre contrivance of nature, but one which makes for good atmosphere.
Three and a half days in, and I'm already willing to call this JamCruise a success. Our sets are on the first and last nights, and considering that I have three days in between, and that this is my first time going stag on the boat, I was a bit worried I'd be lonely, or stir-crazy, or just plain bored by now. Not the case. I've had the good fortune to connect with a lot of people, both musically and personally, and it's been a blast. Taking a year off really made me forget just how much fun this boat is. Ed hosted the jam room last night. He was given the directive to "play until they turn the lights on,” and with a healthy rotation of musical guests of every stripe (and a bottle or two of Jameson for the stage), the place was bumping until the sun began to peek over the horizon. It was less a concert and more a musical reenactment of the Battle of Thermopylae, a gritty feat of determination and heroism destined to be retold throughout the ages. The key difference, of course, is that everyone from the jam room made it home safely that night, so I'm pretty sure that makes the score King Leonidas I of Sparta: 0, Ed Williams: 1.
I'm listening through the songs that made the shortlist for my annual year-in-review playlist. I tend to accumulate songs throughout the year: songs that I associate with a specific person, songs that happen to pop up at significant moments, songs that I just really enjoy- and make playlists after I've got about an hour's worth of music. It's a hobby that I can trace back to the days of Napster and CD burners and adolescent joyriding. Normally, I've compiled my top fifteen or twenty jamz of the year by mid-December and I've put them in sequence and given the playlist an enigmatic but personally relevant title in time to listen to it on my flight to Tulsa for Christmas.
I'm behind schedule in this respect. I have likewise been shirking my duties as band historian. I do not believe these facts to be unrelated. In a way, both are about taking stock of the previous year, and blissful moments like this one have made a confusing and difficult task of it. When I look back over 2016, over a smoldering political landscape littered with the bodies of deceased luminaries, and count all of my professional milestones and personal glories along the way, I can't help but feel a twinge of something akin to survivor's guilt. So many people, including many I know and care about, and at times including myself, are heartbroken and scared- yet here I am, smiling like a dope because I got to be on TV a few times.
I know part of this is just that merciless and irrational voice in the back of my head: You're not good enough. You don't deserve any of this. Don't mistake me; I'm not fishing for praise or pity by opening up about this. I am confident in my abilities, and, paradoxically, part of the reason I've been able to achieve that confidence is because of the fact that, even when I look back at something that I did and think, "that was pretty good,” there's always that voice: It could be better. Youcould be better. I think of it as motivation.
Besides, in a much larger sense, all of this procrastination is built on a different foundation. Story time:
I went camping a few weeks ago, and it rained. At the first hint of precipitation, we pulled our chairs and supplies into the tent. We huddled in there, listening to the deluge pummeling against our canvas roof, until one of the guys stepped out to pee or something and immediately turned back towards us.
"Hey, it's actually not so bad out here.”
It turns out the gentle drizzle outside sounded much louder and nastier from inside the tent. The rain eventually did pick up, forcing us back under shelter for the remainder of the evening, but because we assumed- based on our limited perspective- that the situation was worse than it actually was, we missed out on some quality outdoor time. I didn't even get to make any s'mores.
This is a true story, and admittedly not a very interesting one in its own right, but GUESS WHAT? I'M USING IT AS AN ALLEGORY, YOU GUYS! THE S'MORES ARE A METAPHOR FOR LIFE GOALS OR SOMETHING!
It's a well-known fact that the scariest horror movies never show you the whole monster. This forces your mind to fill in the blanks, and when our brains have to guess, they tend to do so pessimistically. Think of parents leaving their child at home with a babysitter for the first time. The sitcom trope, at least, is that they spend the evening obsessing over every worst-case scenario imaginable and they can't even enjoy a nice dinner.
Knee-jerk caution is beneficial in terms of survival, but, as with many holdovers from the rough-and-tumble early days of humanity, it is not without its drawbacks. At its darkest and macro-est, it contributes to the human capacity for prejudice. When we already know that somebody is part of some group- foreigners, opposing voters, fans of a rival sports team, people who like Kirk more than Picard- our pessimistic minds fill in the rest, just like they do when we're watching a horror movie. While this saves us the dreadful effort required to get to know individual people, it obscures the fears and insecurities and hungers and hopes which make them at the very least irreplaceably unique, if not genuinely sympathetic.
In case you can't tell, I think this is a bad thing.
What was I talking about? Anyway, this same pessimism, on a much smaller and comparatively trivial scale, is why I let a nagging little thought process stall what was on the verge of becoming an uncharacteristic streak of momentum and productivity with this here blogspace. I spent too much time thinking about it and suddenly it just wasn't enough to write some goofy words about being in a rock band. This had to be special. Never mind that a handful of nice, supportive people just want to read a bit of your writing-this needs to be the greatest thing you've ever written. Of course, it doesn't have to be any of that, which is good, because it isn't. That's okay. The monster is worse in my head. The rain is louder inside the tent.
So, as with everything else in this entry, I'm a bit late, but here's my new year's resolution: I'm going to recognize that the things I don't know, the people I haven't put forth the effort to understand, and the things I've been afraid to try are all probably worse in my head. Don't worry, I'm not going to start doing speedballs and BASE jumping off skyscrapers because "YOLO” - I'm just going to step out from under the tent every once in a while. Sometimes, it'll be really wet out there, and my socks will get all muddy and I'll have to throw them away when I get home the next morning, shivering and hungover, but you know what? You've got to go outside eventually. You can't get a whole lot of stuff done from inside a tent. You certainly can't go to the bathroom in there. And don't get cute and try to pee in a bottle or something; that almost never works.
I never said this was a perfect analogy. But it's out there, and for the time being, so am I. Let's go have a great year.
