In two weeks, I’ll be just a couple hours away from boarding an Amtrak train headed for Chicago with slightly more than I came out here with but not by much.
In some ways, I’ve started to view my experiences in Buffalo and then Seattle and then now as some strange middle school to high school to college experience that I got to live all over again, minus the student loans and pre-calc requirements.
Or, in other words, I’m learning all of the life bullshit now that I feel like, for whatever reasons, I should have been learning in my late teens and early 20s.
But I guess they say you have to be “open” to change and the world and yourself and others, and I wasn’t quite there until last year. Actually, let me rephrase that: I wasn’t anywhere close to those frames of mind until I turned 30, the one exception being a brief window of time about six years ago.
But like a good runner, or some type of half-quitter, or more accurately to draw a cycling metaphor, I put myself at a moderate but comfortable tempo pace in search of some endless tail wind like a good domestique, all the while waiting for someone to tell me what the plan was and what to do next while turning myself inside out for the “greater good”.
I think there is a point in here somewhere, but I am either too over caffeinated or too sleep deprived to find it at this point and articulate it.
And anyway, there’s a decent chance that it could turn into some endless self-serving ramble, akin to an Yngwie Malmsteen song that starts off interesting but by the first chorus has gone nowhere interesting.
Instead, and speaking of music, a quick anecdote:
The one and only time I saw The Purpose, they played on the floor at a soup kitchen on a freezing-ass cold February night when I was 17. They were the only band on the bill that I hadn’t heard of, and while some might argue it wasn’t their best set, it’s the closest I’ll ever get to seeing At The Drive-In or The Stooges at a small club in their heyday. I don’t know how else to explain it.
Their set ended when one of the guys in the band, frustrated that neither of the two guitars he’d brought along would work correctly or consistently, smashed one into a million pieces near the end of one of their songs. John, the singer, said something into the mic like “Well, I guess that was our last song. We’re The Purpose. Thank you.”
A little while later, I got to know John while he was singing for another band called The Break. I brought up that set one time, and if I remember correctly, he mentioned that that particular weekend of shows had a pretty direct effect on that The Purpose and its ultimate demise.
Needless to say, while it would have been cool if I had bought a Purpose t-shirt that night, or taken pictures of them playing and freaking out, I’m just pretty happy I got to see them that one time.
Which reminds me of another story about seeing a band live that I’d never heard of, but we’ll save that one for another point in time.
With that, it is back to crossing things off of checklists...