Green Day

Well, not necessarily because it is the first day of spring, though it was very nice today.  It has been a heck of a few weeks, and right now I am a bit tired.  I am in Virginia, the city, not the state, and go on stage once more tomorrow morning.  Honestly I have had to write down where I am and where I am supposed to be from day to day.  I guess I am completing my tour of the Great Lakes--with this as the far western edge of a big egg-shaped circle, imagine the other edge in the dead center of the "mitten" part of Michigan.  Complete the circle, and that is the 1800 miles that I will have driven by tomorrow afternoon.

It is interesting.  In this big circle of sorts there are probably 30 million people at most.  And I think it is accurate to say that these people aren't exactly well distributed across that circle.  There were parts of the UP and today, parts of Minnesota that I would have been hard pressed to find a thousand people within a 100 square miles.  On one flight last week of a little more than four hours, I flew over  more than 1.6 BILLION people--it was all across Bangladesh and India and much of the Middle East.  To me that is astonishing.  A flight across the whole US would encompass only 365 million.   I suppose that this adds to my sense of dislocation.

So why the Green Day reference?  I think that in many ways I am living a weird Green Day mix tape with two songs overlapping, I Walk Alone/Time of My Life.  I told someone a long time ago that this pursuit and these months looking would be a solitary journey, no matter how much I didn't want it to be and how much they promised that it wouldn't be.  It just is, I guess.  I am leaving and people have lives and are busy and and and so I guess I do walk mostly alone.  I guess it makes sense in many ways.  I am figuring out where I am going, and there isn't and doesn't need to be any  real conversation about where "we" are going in all the senses of we.  Despite my (accurate) prediction of this state, it is still hard sometimes.  I am pretty self-contained but this is new for me and some days are easier than others.  There.  How is that for putting a positive take on all this!

That said, it really is the Time of My Life.  In my life I have traveled  more than most, but in these few months I will have traveled even more.  I have already gotten to explore new places, meet new people and have had even more adventures and these new experiences don't seem to be ending anytime soon.  How many people can really say that?  I can, and I am lucky.

So if I were to listen to one of these songs again and again, I think I would choose the second song. We will see where the adventures take me.