2010 Tour 3

I posted to Twitter that we played a house show in Arcata, CA on 7/18 and there was crowd surfing. Here is the proof. I didn't take the picture, someone at the show did. If you're that person, post a comment so I can give you credit.

Beginning in Los Angeles, I lost most of my hearing in one ear. I thought it was a wax impaction, but it turned out to be the beginnings of a respiratory virus or sinus infection of some kind. The problem was inside my ear, not in the canal. That put a damper on my mood and I lost motivation to take pictures for basically the rest of the tour. We finished and came home on 8/4 and I'm still recovering from whatever it is. It only took a few days to get my hearing mostly back, but the days I played without my right ear were pretty miserable (Phoenix, Tucson, and Albuquerque probably deserve an apology from me, since I was about as engaged as a corpse at those shows). After that, the clog just switched sides a few times a day.

BJ and I shaved into mustaches in Arizona at Andrew Weiss's house, which lifted my mood a little. I don't think I'm cut out for facial hair; it itches too much. Before I got rid of the 'stache, though, we shot the very first Pitchfork Colonoscopy promotional photograph. It is probably also the last.

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I'm always moody after tour. This I now realize is due to not being able to communicate about the meaning of tour. When I say "the meaning" I'm referring to a particular interaction of creative output (performing daily) and the gigantic, terrifyingly beautiful landscapes in between. Lots of people have taken road trips, and lots of people have performed. So they think they know what it's like, but they don't. It's the combination, for long periods of time, that overwhelms me, and it is vastly different than either by itself. I see meaning everywhere. My physical body is at its limits, my social energy past gone, so it's just my eyes and ears inundated with raw beauty, unable to dwell on it the way I want to. I leave every place far too quickly to give each its due --- but trying to tacitly honor each landscape and community. I doubt even the friends with me on these trips could really relate, though I'm sure they'd understand cognitively. There's a paradox there too --- that it's so lonely in so much good company, which as I said above is a problem of articulation.

One of my professors in school said that I live "an extraordinarily bifurcated life." She's right, though probably not in the way she thinks. It's not about having multiple personae, but more a sense that I can't reconcile my deepest drives --- for warm intimacy and homeplace (satisfied belonging) on the one hand, and the sense of being everywhere out there in the land (abandoned to the mercy of great power) that I have when on tour.

Before, I called this the "tension between wanderlust and cuddles." Like everything, it's naturally more complicated than that. In reality I don't particularly care for travel in and of itself, especially not the cultural-connoiseurship kind. And I'm not naturally emotionally needy or relational either, rather I'm often overly-rational and unsympathetic. It would be easier to just anaesthetize against contradictory impulses, but I won't do it because --- again --- everything is just so &%@#!*^ meaningful.