What Un-fresh Ghost is This?

The space between getting home from tour and feeling home from tour varies from just a couple days to a month. It’s a weird, jet-lagged netherworld where you roam around in the dark, a ghost in your own house or an annoyed somnambulant. Movies at 4 am and a fear of morning birds permeate – the birds are so BUSY and chatty! 

Three days home and my suitcase is still abandoned near the door, turning slowly into a sack of hardening concrete. When I finally go to move it I wonder (again) how I lugged this atomically dense wheelie coffin around in the first place. Why can I still not pack correctly or frugally after 30 fucking years of touring?! I’m disgusted with myself so I click the crappy telescoping handle back in and drop the bag back onto the floor. It makes a loud “THWAP”! I wake the cats and they give me severe piss-face. “Sorry!” I hiss.

If I’m lucky, the time zone I just came from will cause me to wake up around 5 am and feel super productive for about a week until I blow it. That version of me is a ghost too because it’s not really who I am, it’s who I wish I was. Maybe a future ghost of myself, when I finally maintain a schedule dictated by me, who is of rock-hard mind and not my lazy, dumb body? I have a very colonized/colonizing notion that I will finally break myself and “buckle down” (as my dad would say) when I conquer my natural, and entirely reasonable need for sleep. I’m not a fucking “pioneer” so it’s idiotic that my go-to setting is, “Deplete your entire being for success!” “Run toward the Cholera!” We Americans are literally fucking insane. 

When I’m in this surreal zone, I don’t eat for success either – that would make too much sense. A few pieces of bread in the dark next to the sink in the moonlight? Grapefruit juice out of the container? Maybe half the container? I don’t even taste or enjoy it, I’m just putting coins in the machine to get it back to bed and hopefully to sleep, and perhaps, if I’m lucky, back into Eastern Standard Time. Phone calls are missed. Emails unread. With every new communication technology developed comes a new way to disappoint my friends, colleagues and family. It just heats up my cauldron of anxiety. “Did you ever get my email?” “Text?” “DM?” “Voicemail?” I’ll never be able to catch up. I’m so sorry. My brain just can’t keep track of that many threads, let alone check them in a timely fashion, even though I try really hard. My brain does other kinds of organizing and compensation, but not that. 

Jerome the dog doesn’t help my re-assimilation efforts. He’s an elderly guy who loves nothing more than to nap as hard as a fat, greasy, dusty, little black bear. It also doesn’t help that he’s the size of a large hot water bottle and just as warm. He burrows into my side like a tick and it’s impossible to break the comfort hold. It’s like I finally caught the medicine ball in PE and I’m not letting go!  Luckily, he also loves a walk so he gets me back outside.. 

I race to get my coat on and get out on the trail before the sun is snuffed out by 4 pm.. I don’t really make it (Daylight fucking savings) so when I get outside with Jerome it’s fairly dark which draws attention to the Christmas lights on my neighbor’s house. They look really nice in the grey twilight. I love Christmas lights. I’m not religious and I’m very much not into Christmas at all, but now that I have a daughter I’m liking it from her perspective. We decorate for Halloween (in September), leave it up and just add Christmas lights; “Christmaween”. This last pandemic year we just left it up all year, so again, my sense of time is warped. But the snow is falling as if animated into an old movie; big, misshapen, irregular flakes swan their way down toward Earth in no hurry whatsoever. All the sound is gone save my muffled, crunching feet and Jerome dashing around like a pee-powered snowmobile. It seems like the trees of The Lung are holding the sounds of the world like a patient guardian on a playground would hold a coat for a little kid. “Go ahead…” they nod. So I bend down to look at a spider standing backlit on the softly glowing snow. Weird, maybe her clock is off too?