As some of you may recall, my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I have taken two loooong trips around the U S of A in a series of trusty Honda hatchbacks. Each time, we were on the road for a bit more than seven weeks, and each time was glorious, and we’re gonna do it again someday. And the most dramatic thing about this enormous country, as far as I’m concerned, is the difference between this side of the Mississippi and the other. The population density of these United States east of the Mississippi is almost four times as much as on the west side, and it shows. You cross the Mississippi from this side to the other, and there ain’t nobody there.
One of my favorite things about these trips is spending an extended amount of time in the Southwest – I wouldn’t want to live in the desert, but my, it’s breathtaking, once you get used to the “abandon hope all ye who enter here” vibe that highway signs like “Last Services for 9,000 Miles” evoke. There’s something majestic about all that space. It feels bigger, more expansive, less stressful. And because there’s so much of it, you end up spending a lot of time, if you drive all the way around the country, in this expansive space. And you relax. And then you turn around, and come home, and you cross the Mississippi again, and it’s gone. It’s actually worse than gone, because you’ve gotten used to the pace and the space, and suddenly it’s chaos again, and it gets more frenetic the closer you get to the Boswash megalopolis. And the feeling of loss – even if it’s temporary – is palpable.
We had a pandemic (well, we’re still having a pandemic, but at this point, we’re always going to be having it, so it’s not clear that there’s any value in advertising it – all the attention might go to the pandemic’s head, after all). And for some of us, the ones without kids or obligations other than a remote job, the world slowed waaaaaaay down. We crossed the Mississippi of life. And now, we’ve crossed back.
SWMBT and I keep a calendar on the office wall (yes, a physical calendar, you philistines, like the good Lord intended, with glossy paper and pictures of trains and little squares for dates where we have to scribble things as the pen runs out of ink), and if a chicken could walk sideways, its footprints would be all over that calendar. Medical appointments, dinners with friends, studio sessions, open mikes, you name it, the chicken has scratched it in. Sometimes it feels like that damn chicken is running our lives; but, truthfully, it’s just scratching what we’ve asked it to scratch.
Maybe we’re making up for lost time; maybe it’s always the time that loses, or maybe it’s always us that loses to the time, I’m not sure which; but it feels, nowadays, like even breathing needs to be scheduled. These are first-world problems, to be sure; we’re traveling and seeing friends and lopping things off the to-do list, and I am pursuing the completion of my long-awaited album like the last steps of the Bataan Death March, and it’s all good, but on this side of the Mississippi of life, it sometimes feels like we’re riding the rapids so often that we don’t have time to just sit on the shore and watch the river.
And yes, you songwriters, that’s a song idea. Go for it. At the moment, I don’t have the time.