New York City

I think I always imagine that I will feel different when I am really far from home.  Sitting in this van and watching the scenery change sort of feels like a time warp.  You spend hours on a highway that your phone told you to travel, and suddenly, New York City appears over the horizon.  Maybe it's the absence of an atlas (or maybe it's because I'm never actually driving) but sometimes it feels like these cities just sneak up out of the countryside and rise before me like some kind of backdrop or projection.  

What I'm really trying to say is that New York felt so surreal!

It's a place that I've decorated in my mind since I was a child.  It's so far away. It is huge. It is alive. Something about it in my childhood mind seemed magical.  And to be in the city, even so briefly, had me caught up in some, perhaps faux, encompassing spirit, charged by its grandness, its history.

We sound checked fairly quickly in the Mercury Lounge, and I worked through the remanent of a funk I was in.  Even when life is wonderful, the sadness can creep up at the drop of a hat.  My mother was amazing, and we were pen pals through every tour.  And if you were great friends like we were, you'd wait for each other's messages full of comedy, whimsy and love.  I still want to tell her about all the people we've played for and the things I've seen and the stories I've read that won't leave my mind, though I know that I can't. The hope is that somehow she might know.  Lights still periodically turn off and on when I'm alone, and the three sequential knocks on the wall are unexplainable but real.

And if those happenings are all bullshit that I've weighed into too heavily, then so be it--I'll keep placing my bets on that side of the scale because it makes me feel like energy just shifts and our spirits are real and love transcends the grave.

I'm going to choose to believe that she saw us that night, standing on that stage playing to a nearly sold out room, people packed in with bated breath.  They loved it.  They cheered!  And it was so rejuvenating.  After the encore, I talked with some folks at the bar, a couple from Mexico City, a guy who'd never heard us before who we won over, and some really affirming women.  People were so nice and open and encouraging.  It's exactly what you want when you feel like you've knocked it out of the park.

Mercury Lounge. NYC. 

Afterward, we walked down the street to a bar and hung out with some friends from Austin. I've known at least two people in every city on this tour except for one and it's been lovely.  It makes America feel much smaller than it is.  After a couple of drinks in the 90s drenched, brightly lit bar and watching the demise of a petite blond pool shark, we closed out and hopped back in the van and left the city. Back on the teleportation highway, dreaming of a bed in a Super 8 motel in the middle of anywhere u.s.a.