We are back in the North country. Chicago. It’s 9:53 and I’m sitting in an arm chair in a dark Super 8 hotel room. Pete and Lyon are past out in front of me. Pete’s breathing is that of someone who has contracted a rare jungle virus, erratic and heavy. I know he’s ok…so it’s kind of crackin’ me up.
Big drives have a way of affecting your memory. New places do too. Clearing lots of ground in short amounts of time. Meeting new people 8:00 p.m. and then saying goodbye at 2:30 a.m.. Then you do it the next night. And the next. Pretty soon you realize you’ve spanned two thousand miles in less than a week, stopping off each day to play a show, maybe two. It makes New York seems like a lifetime ago. Its only been a little over a week since we were there, yet the memories of everything we packed in there, in such a short time too, carry an air of nostalgia, as if I were conjuring them from a place in my brain reserved only for pieces of days, that over time, have been sewn together as piecemeal memories. They serve to reflect an era, and not so much the specifics of a single day. One day i’ll look back at all of the southern tours and they will probably start running together and mishmash in my brain. Confusing the wednesday of one tour with the thursday of another. An era of my life to reflect upon while I’m in the midst of something else, which too, will become something of the past.
Big City. Small City. Mountain town. College Town. Windy Plains. Windy City. And still a week to go. Each place is both vivid and vague. Or maybe I just can’t tell. Did I remember that building from Knoxville or was it Norfolk? Did I have that conversation in New York City or was it in Johnson City?
All the different people, the juxtaposed landscapes, and the thousands and thousands of miles….the nostalgic veneer laid across the top adds a special quality to the final product, creating the look of an era, blocking focus from the individual pieces it’s covering.

Erik Alan 3/18