TRYING TO GET HOME THROUGH A MAZE WITH A POPPED-OUT RIB

End of tour is a very confusing time. By the fourth week we are all tired but so dialed in our routine that it is automatic. The music is taking on a life of its own and reaching new highs. Winding down and packing up to leave is confusing and intrudes on our collective harmony. This last tour was so fun and positive I didn’t want to leave. Not wanting to leave was also influenced by the fact that I was not headed home (an unfinished place that I have conflicted feelings about as is…) but to a funeral for my friend and mentor, Dexter. 

It was a “memorial” and a “Celebration” but I cannot celebrate when my musical spark is gone much too young. Dexter Romweber of the Flat Duo Jets is the person who, for lack of a better term “pushed me over the edge” into a life of music. He is etched into my heart which I imagine as sharing the aorta with his own. I have lost power. I am compromised by his death. I still can’t accept that he is gone. The tears and the warm hugs and speeches did nothing to convince me. His evidence is everywhere. Small paintings, sounds, photographs, shadows. Like he left just before I got there. This might be an easier way to live. He was a disappearer in life anyway. Someone who would abruptly leave and go for long rambling walks. I’m so grateful he let me go along on a few. Telling me things too wild not to be true.

I saw some beloved friends which helped, like Melissa Swingle and Daryl White of Bloodshot Records’ most underrated band, Trailer Bride. It was heavenly to stand with them in the sunshine and love each other. Not that we had ever paused. The flight home was the day of the eclipse, set to land exactly as the moon began to touch the edge of the sun. Of course I was flying in to Burlington, VT which is the greatest point of the totality, so I knew there would be people coming for that on my flight. What I did not know is what a trampling bunch of shoving, elbowing assholes they would be. I somehow popped out a rib lifting a bag a few days before so the jostling and flying elbows turned me into a snarling werewolf. I instructed a man very tursely to “back up and don’t trample me.” He mocked me. He is lucky to be alive due to the fact that I had no checked baggage and a milkshake waiting half a mile away. 

I watched the eclipse outside a restaurant with a small crowd of onlookers. It was peaceful and reverent. The moon made quite a spectacle in front of the sun. I thought of Dex as I looked at the denim, aquatint shadows all around me. Then I got in my car and crawled the 4.5 hours home behind the sea of Massachusetts and New York license plates. Upon entering the house I realized my dog, Coco had taken a massive dump on the floor and used a bunch of my clean clothes piled on a temporary table in my temporary house to smash onto the top of the pile to “hide” it. It broke me a little. I didn’t have the heart to wash my face. I just went to bed. I’m hoping the next few days will get easier. I’m hoping this for all of us. xo