First One's Usually the Hardest
Just after midnight at a hotel on the grounds of the Cleveland airport, I watched an airplane glide down onto the runway. In my mind, I was David Attenborough narrating a piece on tropical birds: "The Southwest variant can be identified by its distinctive blue plumage, as opposed to other common species of 737, like the Delta or the American, whose feathers are predominantly white with just a bit of coloration along the wings and tail...”
I had to go down to the front desk earlier because my key wasn't getting me into my room. When I got back up, my new key wasn't working either. At this point, I realized I was doing it wrong. Just needed to change up my key-swipe motion. I bet my first key was totally fine. I probably owe the front desk guy an apology. Sometimes, the problem is you. Remember that. And don't just remember it so you can share it with an acquaintance of yours who "really needs to hear it”- remember it because you really need to hear it. Anyway:
Hello, friends! Rob here.
It's my first night on the road since getting married. It's weird. My wife (holy SHIT!) and I have been a couple since sometime around the mid-Cretaceous Period, and we've been living together since the Paleolithic or so, so in a practical sense very little has changed. But there's still this feeling of having flipped along an axis. We've gone from "pre-” to "post-”. Everything is the "first (X) since we got married”: The first tour, the first dinner, the first low-key afternoon where we accidentally got super drunk...
First night away from each other. We're both old hat at spending time apart by now, but still. It's a new world.
This is also my first entry in quite some time. Anyone who has spoken to me recently knows that I've been using my wedding as a knee-jerk excuse for pretty much everything I've allowed to slip through the cracks in the last six months or so, and to some extent I stand by it. The world of wedding planning is a fractal inside a Russian nesting doll inside one of those multi-storied Inception dreams. Every answer just leads to more questions. You dig, and you dig, and you dig, and you never hit bottom. As THE BIG DAY got closer and closer, more of the time and energy that I might otherwise have devoted to writing was instead spent chasing down the minutiae of the minutiae.
But that's not all. There's an element of inertia to it as well. I always struggle with the first blog after a period of inactivity. After a while, it becomes something of a monkey on my back – the longer I don't do it, the more of "a thing” it is that I haven't done it in a while. Plus, at a certain point, it becomes difficult from a practical standpoint: what do I write about? What do I omit for the sake of brevity? Do I talk about anything the band has done or just prattle on about my own baggage for like six hundred words? It takes on a bit of a Sisyphean quality: if I included everything I could possibly hope to include, then by the time I was done writing this there'd be another week's worth of stuff to write about.
That's what's makes the "prattle on about my own baggage” method so enticing. None of it is important, so all of it is important.
It's our first day of real tour in a long time. Not only that, but this is our first tour where we're flying everywhere. And I do mean "everywhere.” In one 5-day span we'll be traveling from Toronto to Los Angeles with a brief stopover in the northeastern United States. In another, we will go from Indiana to Michigan by way of southern California. Note that this means we'll be making two distinct trips to California in the next three weeks. This month is gonna be wacky as all get out and I'm very excited about it.
If nothing else, it's more uncharted territory. Speaking of which, I would especially like to send my love to you if today is your first day at a new job, your first day in a new city, your first day of training for a marathon, your first date, your first day home with a newborn, your first time eating sushi, your first day of sobriety, the first day your spouse has been away on business, or any other first. It's a new world.
