Now it can be told. The reason that I’ve been in radio silence for the last two months is that my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I have been on a two-month automobile junket around the US of A. We’ve touched thirty states or so, seen virtually all of our friends (some of them twice, due to their own travel schedules), beheld many great wonders of natural beauty, and discovered one hellhole (Mesa, Arizona -105 in the shade in September, drivers with the manners of pigs, an ecosystem consisting entirely of concrete and chain stores – never, never go there). Our new heroes are the folks at the National Park Service – the vast variety of this great nation of ours is well and carefully entrusted to these folks, in spite of whatever happens with the chuckleheads who allocate the money. We are exhausted, overly tan on our driving arms, and thoroughly satisfied.
Being the nerd that I was, I had far too ambitious goals for this trip. In addition to seeing sights and friends, I hoped to keep a detailed log of our adventures, for future use in the vacation scrapbook I traditionally prepare. I also wanted to chronicle the trip in song – they didn’t need to be good songs, but the challenge of having to write, say, a song a week was something that appealed to me.
In the end, however, these projects somewhat came to naught. The trip log devolved into hastily-assembled notes. I have no idea how anyone blogs a vacation without driving themselves to distraction. It was all I could do to actually experience the vacation, never mind write about it on a daily basis. As for the songwriting project, I finished two songs and fell farther and farther behind, and finally gave up. I have lots of great ideas, but they simply didn’t get finished.
You see, I realized, panicking in a hotel room at 2 AM in Coos Bay, Oregon, it’s all about balance. Much of my life, I’m sitting in front of a computer, because that’s my job, and I want to keep in touch with you fine people. And much of my life, I’ve got a notebook in my lap and a guitar beside me, wrestling with the last chorus of something or other. But driving up Mt. Rainier, or staring at a bison three feet from my car, or hiking through the desert at the foot of the Guadeloupe Mountains – these things I can’t do on a random Tuesday in my apartment, and might never do again. So it’s important to take the time to be where I am now, and where I was on August 28 was staring at Mt. St. Helens, slowly steaming (the volcano, not me). The scrapbook, and the songs, can wait.