March 22nd, 2022. It’s snowing heavily outside. Looking out the window, it would be easy to mistake the environs along I-80 for the outermost edges of the earth; perhaps Tierra del Fuego, or at least southern Patagonia, just a stone’s throw from the western Antarctic peninsula. Even in ideal driving conditions, it feels a bit like playing Russian Roulette, being in the middle seat of a Ford Econoline 350 with the back row removed to accommodate enough unsecured gear for a band twice the size of the one I’m currently on tour with. In this weather, you might as well swap the revolver out for an M1911. All it takes is a momentary lapse in concentration to hit a patch of black ice, overcorrect, and strike the firing pin against this chambered round of a 15-seat van, obliterating both ourselves and everything in our path. There’s no emergency facilities for miles – it would take at least an hour for an ambulance to get to us if we got into a wreck. I try to comfort myself by thinking, “there must be emergency helicopters nearby for this exact scenario.” Realistically, this isn’t helicopter weather either.
In the distance, the vague silhouette of a gas station sign fades into focus. I check my phone, and I realize I’m now in Wyoming. How long has it been since we crossed the border from Colorado? Satellite layer active, I realize that in a different season, the beige-gray ice underneath me is actually the aptly-named Red Desert – something more closely resembling the interior of Australia than Nunavut. Even the name of the town we stop in sounds like a Western Australian desert town: Wamsutter.
Pulling into the Mobil off the highway, a hand-painted sign resting on rusted iron poles catches my attention: is this the same gas station in the album cover for Frame & Canvas by Braid? I had been listening to a lot of Braid lately. I rediscovered them and their masterpiece of a swan song; once again, I remembered why I love that band so much in the first place. Alas, I’m wrong: the sign outside the Mobil, though similar, is not the same as the one on Frame & Canvas.
Walking into the bathroom – an oddly large, cavernous space with a jarringly high ceiling – I can’t help but be taken aback by the laminated signs posted every two feet across all of the walls:
DO NOT DRINK TAP WATER
Not that I was going to. But it struck me – I figured that practically every truck stop bathroom I had ever entered, I could, in a pinch, drink the water from the sink if push came to shove. But never, ever would I act upon that thought. It’s filthy – who knows how many people’s unwashed hands came into contact with the rim of the spigot before being lazily rinsed without soap? Who knows how often the clerk cleans the underside of the spigot in the first place? But in this instance – non-potable water, gray water, reclaimed water, whatever this system uses – under no circumstances, even if I were on the brink of dehydration, could I drink this water. The sign doesn’t say why, but it’s for that exact reason that you know exactly what will happen if you do.
Outside the door, a rotatable display of VHS tapes features dozens of copies of direct-to-DVD films, none made after 2014. Past the aisle to its left, Wyoming souvenirs abound: shot glasses, mugs, keychains, handmade wooden discs hung by rope, snow globes. Past the aisle to its right, an apparent mini-grocery store: full-size boxes of cereal, cans of Chef Boyardee, bags of charcoal, pasta, marinara sauce, diced and canned fruits and vegetables, bags of rice. Regardless of which one you walked through, you ended up at the same place: the hot bar at the counter next to the cashier, ordinarily serving fried chicken, but currently closed. I wonder if the lack of hot food is a consequence of the torrential blizzard, but I figure that this snow is surely par for the course for this part of the country, fazing no one, least of all a remote gas station for whom travelers are dependent on as a critical source of fuel, food, drink, and human interaction. I buy nothing and leave, stopping just outside the gas pumps to admire the sheer magnitude of the snowstorm as it contrasted against the snow-capped mountaintops in the background. I had only ever been in this part of the country one time before, in 2019. What passes for ordinary in this part of the country is extraordinary to a band of five boys from the Deep South; we’re not used to mountains and snow at this scale. Staring at it, you feel as if you exist in a sort of nexus outside of time; a space where the moto perpetuo of entropy slows to a halt. As long as you remain in place and don’t move, you’ll be as you are, forever.
Back in the van, I pick up where I left off: First Day Back, track number four off Frame & Canvas. I think to myself: I’m 28 years old, I work a dreadfully dull, unfulfilling, and unstimulating day job as a supply chain software engineer at T-Mobile, I haven’t had a girlfriend or had sex or even been on a proper date in years, and without excessive elaboration, I’m starting to wonder if I had made some bad choices in the past that may have contributed to the combination of all of this. But trumping all of that is the fact that I play drums in a band with my friends, and the last nine years of building a music career might just be starting to pay off: we signed a two-album contract with an indie label, and at least one talent buyer in Boise thought we were good enough to play the illustrious Treefort Music Festival, where American Football played in 2015. And so we went: our first proper tour in almost three years, circling the southeast, a straight shot to Austin for South By Southwest, and a quick detour through Mountain Standard Time to play shows in Kansas City, Denver, and Salt Lake City before reaching our final destination, Treefort.
An hour later, a silent sigh of relief is collectively breathed as the snow lightens up, and in the distance, the brown-yellow grass turns into a foreboding-looking industrial facility, not too dissimilar to Akira’s final form. Directly opposite, the snow-capped hills give way to a gorgeous blue sky shining down upon an unexpectedly bustling small town. A sign by an exit ramp reads Rock Springs. “Ten-ten, ninety-seven, Rock Springs, Wyoming hotel.” I wonder which hotel it was where Bob Nanna wrote the stream-of-cathartic-consciousness journal entry that became the lyrics to I Keep a Diary. In a very literal sense, I wonder where Braid was coming from, and where they were going. In a broader, more metaphorical sense, I wonder where we’re coming from and where we’re going.
Despite the relative success, behind the scenes, things were going terribly. In the past month alone, I had fronted over $7,000 to make this tour happen: $4,000 to get a used minibus up and running, and another $3,000 to reserve a rental van after our minibus shit the bed upon starting the engine. Meanwhile, our highest guarantee of that nearly-month-long tour was a measly $250 from Treefort. Our cost to do this tour was approaching $10,000, and it was unlikely we’d recoup even a quarter of that. Income minus expenses would leave us deep in the hole coming out of this run, and frankly, I was getting sick of fronting thousands upon thousands of dollars of my own money to keep the band going. We still struggled to draw more than a few dozen people in our biggest markets, we would regularly go multiple shows in a row without selling more than a CD or two, and with my 20s coming to a close, every fiber of my being was telling me, listen bud, you’ve been at this for a very long time but it’s just not working out, I think you ought to call it a day. It almost felt as if continuing was an affront to the powers that be, and a barrage of brimstone and fire being rained down upon us at nearly every turn was their way of telling us to stop, just stop, do something else instead.
At least in the end, I can say that the most embarrassing part of that tour wasn’t when we realized we accidentally brought the minibus keys up to Asheville with us after returning the bus to the repair shop. The most embarrassing part of that tour was going over to my Bumble match’s Airbnb on the last night of Treefort, ending up not even making out let alone hooking up, and then getting kicked out at 3 AM when another Bumble match of theirs came over.
The common theme across all my Facebook messages when I was in high school and in my first few years of college jumped out at me pretty quickly after I downloaded all my Facebook data and looked through the /messages folder. In all of them, there’s a kid on one end who obviously has nothing in the way of emotional support; a kid who would put together group chats with two or three of his high school friends to “plan hangouts” and then immediately turn them into group therapy sessions. The kid uses dictionary words left and right as if to present a juvenile miasma of melodrama as something more dignified and self-aware than it really is. What surprised me the most, though, is that most of the bad shit that that kid wouldn’t shut up about has been long forgotten, relics of a life I’ve lived but don’t recognize.
I often need an incident or an era or phase of my life to be years upon years behind me in order to accurately assess it and determine where it falls in the pantheon of life experiences that have built upon each other and led to where I am today. In my adolescent years, I’d stay up late, lying in bed watching old '90s commercial compilations and Indigo League Pokemon episodes on my iPod Touch, reminiscing, “what a simple and wonderful time it was 11 or 12 years ago.” Today, those same memories are now 24 or 25 years ago, and the memories that by now have happened 11 or 12 years ago are those of my late teens: going bowling with friends on Saturday nights at the Brunswick Zone, waiting for Cosmic Bowling to begin so my friend Michael could request Darude - Sandstorm and Cascada - Everytime We Touch, put on his fedora and light-up fingertip gloves, and dance like a maniac between frames; going to Gregg’s Frozen Custard in Vernon Hills and talking about music video ideas in the parking log over banana splits; springtime bike rides cutting through Northwestern Hospital just south of my house, tandem with 41 South, eventually connecting to Deerpath Road and riding east out to the bluffs overlooking Lake Michigan; backyard summer barbecues with longtime family friends with whom my dad would watch pay-per-view boxing in our downstairs home theater with after grilling steaks, corn, and baked potatoes.
Scattered throughout all this are some beautiful tragedies I had completely forgotten about: my 19-year-old overdramatic agonizing in a group chat over my inability to unfriend a situationship from Facebook, thinking about “all the post-it notes she’d left on my monitor when I’d come back from class”; reading back a high school conversation with a kid who regularly bullied me clearly using me as a chauffeur to go to GameStop, my 17-year-old self thinking we were friends the entire time; fraternity-related activities I had apparently attended my freshman year of college when I was a pledge at Psi Upsilon, a year spent in the wrong place at the wrong time with people who, had I been more prepared for college life, I might still know today.
That all of these events happened and that I remember virtually none of them gives me hope: all of the bad memories I’ve made and will make will, indeed, be completely forgotten by the ten-year mark.
My mom never did see my career and audience grow. In fact, she never even saw any of my bands perform. By the time she died of colon cancer, we had been practically estranged for years, having spoken no more than four times after I left Chicago to go to college until news broke of her diagnosis a few months before her death. She may have listened to a few songs off the album my old band The Merry Go Rounds put out called Recess, but by and large, she did not consider the music I was making to be anything more than a waste of time and a distraction from my studies. To this day, I have never met anyone who so vehemently discouraged me from pursuing a passion.
If she were alive now, I’m not sure what her reactions to all of the life decisions I’ve made over the last ten years would be. I’m not sure what I would tell her, or if I would tell her anything at all. Would she be pleasantly surprised by how far I’ve taken the music thing, going to Europe multiple times a year to play sold out shows? Or would she double down on myopic spitefulness, angered that I disproved her notion that the most I would ever amount to is a music teacher? Regardless, would she accept that this is my life?
There’s a distinct moment in my archaeologically excavated Facebook chats where my big life quandry stops being my frustrations with my mom’s increasingly unstable and erratic behavior and the household tension created by my parents’ failing marriage, and starts being about an unrequited crush, followed by musings on desperate attempts to turn a situationship into a relationship. Given the timeframe - age 17, 18 - The astute amateur psychologist might reasonably surmise that the parental warmth I had been denied in my childhood, I tried to seek in a romantic partner in adolescence and early adulthood. There’s also a distinct moment in which all conversations of that nature abruptly end: late autumn 2013, coinciding with the time I started playing in bands and started familiarizing myself with the DIY scene in Atlanta. The same astute armchair psychologist might also surmise that what I had been looking for as a child would better be found in a creative outlet.
My bandmates did eventually pay me back the $7,000 I fronted on those minibus and van rental expenses, but our working relationship never was the same after that. It wasn’t just the money - it just stopped being fun. Though the shows were plenty of fun to play, the constant setbacks and overall lack of returns most certainly were not. At this point in my life, if my mom were still alive, she’d be ecstatic that she was right in telling me I’d never make it as a musician.
Four months after that tour, and right off the heels of another one, I would find myself band-less. Coincidental circumstances in my personal life compounded my unceremonious dismissal from the very band I started five years beforehand, and my ego and superego were as good as gone. Many nights, I’d stand in the shower trying to work out in my head what to do next. Released from the constraints of a band that I had more or less centered my life around, I realized I was completely free. Free as in freedom, free as in recording a solo album, free as in starting a slowcore band I played guitar in, free as in planning a big, long vacation to Japan the next year. By that point, my dreams of a sustainable music career were over. My biggest aspiration was simply to open for Horse Jumper of Love someday, and maybe be Nordista Freeze’s drummer for a tour or two if he asked. My life no longer revolved around seven-hour band practices and saving up PTO for tours, and my lifestyle drastically changed accordingly: I went to every party I was invited to. I’d get belligerently drunk and record 1 AM jam sessions in my friend Austin’s attic with whoever else was hanging around. I went to Los Angeles for a few days on a whim. I started experimenting with drugs I never thought I’d do. I started flirting with people again. My highest priority was leaving work early to get stoned at my regular hangout, my friends’ backyard porch on State Street.
In a way, that era of my life represented a sort of surrogate youth to make up for my highly sheltered and tame teenage years; a second chance at puberty, this time armed with the knowledge of a decade of lessons learned and just enough frontal lobe development to make navigating it all easier. Unencumbered by any real responsibility, I developed an unreal level of confidence, living 100% in the moment but also thinking deeply about the future, because the moments of the future are identical to this moment right now, which is when the most wonderful things happen, like meeting someone new, or being passed a joint and a beer, or listening to WREK on my friend’s porch. All simple things, but nonetheless the things in life that matter the most; the things that won’t be forgotten ten years down the line.
🤎