I have returned from a ____________ Pacific Northwest Tour with Moosejaw.  I leave the modifier open because I’m unsure of one word to sum up the experience.  It was fun, no doubt, and the memories will last a lifetime.  Monetarily it couldn’t be considered successful, however we garnered plenty of new fans and connections and played consistently competent sets in each market we visited.  And, best of all, we survived!

Now it is back to my rather uneventful and underwhelming work life.  (Not to be confused with my awesome and awe-inspiring home life with Meredith.)  Like Icarus, I may have flown too close to the sun, burned by its rays and forever blinded to the normalcy and relative darkness of the earth below.  It’s the usual post-show depression I feel, times twelve.

Rather than wallow, however, I’ve decided to do something constructive with this trough and re-record a few favorite Macy songs in hopes to achieve the sound I was striving for at the start of it all.  I will begin with the backing tracks, recreating them without the hiccups or mistakes that I’d accepted as compromise rather than scrap the whole track, then take these to a studio and record the vocals without the bounds of my apartment and my misplaced consideration for my neighbors.

After that, I plan to write new fiction.  I reconnected with a friend in Portland while on tour and she sent me a few pieces of her short fiction to read.  I’ve read a lot of work from a lot of people, and more often than not it is painful and self-indulgent, at best, but her submissions were a breath of fresh air.  I realized as I read that I’d completely divorced her face or voice from the work, which is incredibly difficult to do consciously.  However, her work stood alone so well that I had subconsciously forgotten her and lost myself in the narrative.  I felt as though I were reading something I would have happily paid for and learned from.  Her talent lies outside of mine and I could never hope to kiss the clouds that she rests upon, but it did inspire me to get back to it, to push myself farther than I have in the past.

In other news, I smashed the screen of my smartphone.  I think I’m perhaps the last of my friends to do this.  I was starting to feel excluded, but no longer.  As timing permits, my contract is up for renewal next month and I have the opportunity to upgrade to a new phone, so I’ll be joining the iPhone community, another exclusive club which I’ve found myself outside of for many years.  Don’t think this will subject you to tireless Instagram pics, however, as that is just not me.  I appreciate the aesthetics of the technology, but I’d rather share it with myself than with you.  Instagram is photographic masturbation.

Here is a Duncan Sheik song that has been inspiring me the past few days:

Oh, if you’re keeping score, I’m 34 years old now.