Rainclouds and Cigarettes: Off Days in Texas

10-5

I just don't have the energy tonight. A long, shitty, grey day in Texas. My distaste for this sprawling, dull state has returned. The people are rude, the food and cigarettes overpriced. My head has been pounding for hours. I feel like stamping my cell phone into pieces. Too many words were spoken tonight, and perhaps too many more were left unsaid. I don't know which is the greater tragedy.

Two days without shows have ruined me. Tomorrow we resume the long haul, a show a night 'til kingdom come. My hyena tongue is salivating at the promise of smokey bars, snowy loins, the never-ending blacktop, and the painful, beautiful sting of music in my ears, cranked up and drunk, like a knife dipped in honey, stabbed into my brain.

Arkansas, I miss you and all of your old promises. Little Rock meant something to me once. I'll tell you all about it sometime.

10-4

Sort of a lonely night in Austin, the kinda night country songs are written about. Faces missed, all kinds of faces.

Hungover all day, jumping on a trampoline and daydreaming about vampires. Cigarettes, tomato juice. I had to wash fucking cat piss out of my Levi's.

These days of relaxation are spoiling us. We have a long, long road ahead. Tonight I am beset with a sort of homesickness, but for where? Which home? Beset with longing, but for whom? For what? If there's anything a certain cold night in Las Cruces, NM taught me long ago, it's that these road feelings of skeptical angst and anxiety are easy to overcome. Let them naturally pass, lost to the whistling wind like smoke from a cracked window, disappearing like the horizon in a rearview mirror. Do I lose a bit of empathic humanity if I decide this is truly the life I want to lead? Is it worth it?

Maybe what I'm losing is made up for in what I gain; a purposeful, lonely sense of self. How do I know about the world? By what is within me.

"Maybe in the American park I am just a cow chewing a bit of discarded tin foil. Maybe everything I care about has been eroded away and I am just a gaunt idiot whose ribs are cracking under a Southern sun. Maybe I am standing on a dead planet in a scientific film and because everything is strange and new I miss the beauty of it. Maybe my desires are too human, too tangible, too immediate." - Henry Miller

Maybe Miller has it all ass-backwards, though I must admit the imagery is striking.

Oh, and I won't forget the rainy Austin dreams, bracing myself against the wooden railing in front of the bar.