October 28, 2009

8:19 a.m.

Everything is amazing!

I just wanted to say that. There�s a very funny video going around now with a comedian on C0nan 0�Brien or some show like that, talking about how �everything is amazing and nobody is happy.� The band refers to it a lot, and I�ve adopted the first three words as a little catch-phrase for myself. One night on this tour I was feeling particularly sad, having, in a now-rare moment of masochistic nostalgia, googled Will to see if there were any recent pictures of him online. There was one. He looks good, healthy. But it got me into a sad place, so I went around the hotel room saying, �Everything is AMAZING!� It did not necessarily cheer me up, but I got something out of saying it. Intellectually I knew that my life was amazing, and that my heart would catch up again to that place where I felt it. It was a way to feel my sadness, I guess, and honor it, without getting caught up in the old reality that that was all there was. Man, I remember those couple of years. That sucked. And only now, when we�re talking a lot about our complaining and how to get a lesson out of that and turn it around, does my band find the courage to gently let me know just how much I complained in those days. I heard myself; I knew it. But I felt I had a right to protest my circumstances. I was in pain and I needed to cry out. And I wasn�t in a position to do anything else at the time; I had no other tools. Life was raw.

God bless �em; how did they ever put up with me? I certainly wouldn�t have done. It�s a good thing that, at other times, I was guffawingly funny and entertaining. My ticket to living one more day, when one at a time was all I could manage.

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We laughed so hard we wept, on the way home. The drive was so long � over 1,000 miles � we girded ourselves, switched drivers every hundred, and kept each other amused with alphabet games and silly impromptu songs about Zulu warriors. There was one theme in particular that kept us cackling most of the day. My friend/ex boyfriend James once told me that he was driving his daughter and her no-good, drug-addict boyfriend somewhere one day, when they saw a woman walking nearby who apparently had very pendulous breasts. Now James has a tendency to say whatever comes into his brain without filtering, and when he saw this woman he blurted out inappropriately, �Titty Longtitty!� kind of like Pippi Longstocking. This, in front of his teenage daughter and questionable bed partner. They all cracked up, and I thought the anecdote was priceless. So I told the band about it, and the whole time we were making up names for each other. I asked what the male equivalent would be, and Carol cried, �Willy Longwilly!� That was good for another bout of laugh-crying. We envisioned a series of band books about these characters. Willy Longwilly, of course, would have a pop-up book.

And so it went. After about eight hundred miles, Carol started singing the old Brothers Four song about the Zulu warrior: �See him there, the Zulu warrior! See him there, the Zulu Chief � Chief � Chief!� We joined in with nonsense and body percussion.

Chris ate almost a whole bag of Bit-o-Honeys, with a certain amount of subsequent regret. Mostly we try to eat decently on the road, but this trip it was hard to find food that wasn�t salty or just downright sad. All our hosts, however, were wonderful.

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And now, drat it all, it�s time to hurriedly prepare for work. There�s more; I�ll tell later.