Chili in Fort Mill

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Fort Mill, South Carolina (while on my walk)

If there are reasonable amounts of chili to be consumed, I know nothing on the subject. It only occurred to me after 10pm rolled around and I felt a bit drowsy. I had worked up quite the appetite on my five hour drive between Woodstock, Georgia and Fort Mill, South Carolina, which is nestled slightly below the community of Charlotte, North Carolina—right along the border of the two states: this is where my aunt hangs her hat. My aunt Ruth. It’s around 8am at the moment, the next day. She has a lovely home and I’m thankful for her being kind enough to allow me a place to sleep, for the good company, and naturally, the enormous bowl of chili that greeted me, nearly the moment I arrived. I have been fairly religious about maintaining a ketogenic diet while on this tour—however—exceptions have been made in some sort of slightly freckled fashion on my clean bill of health in that dietary department, if one were to subscribe to such beliefs. The diet seems to work for me, however, I also enjoy chili, cowboy toast, and a few slices of pie from time to time.

There was probably a 17 year stretch where the two of us did not see each other, because she moved to the east coast, along with my younger cousin Ryan. On my first United States tour last year, they both came out to see me perform while I played in one of the bedroom communities surrounding Charlotte. I drove to North Carolina on two separate occasions last year. Once this year. Three times of visiting is a gift.

My house concert in Woodstock, Georgia. Thank you brother John for having me.

It feels of fall here. It’s around 47 degrees outside at the moment. I have spent the better portion of the past several weeks in the lower south, where it still feels of summer water amusement parks, shorts, flip-flops, tank tops, koozies, BBQ, and the like. There were a few occasions of folding lawn chairs to enjoy an outdoor concert, or to dip one’s feet in the warm water of Gulf Coast. My bare feet now, are cold, as I write this. I am thinking about hunting for my socks in a moment, while I ruminate on the next several words to put in front of the other. The cold is not uninvited, unwarranted, or unwelcome to me. I can recall purchasing a jacket, mere weeks ago, while in Austin, Texas, waiting for any opportunity to wrap it around myself, should that opportunity had ever arisen in the first place; Austin had other plans, none of which involving jackets.

Apache Junction, Austin, Houston, Mobile, Panama City, the pan-handle, Leesburg, Dunedin, St. Petersburg: Fall almost seems to be a rumor in such places—maybe even a lie told to those with cold cold hearts. I have been reading about it in books—well, for the sake of accuracy—listening to it from narrated books. It has been a lot of driving, and a lot of listening.

Because no great story ever started with someone eating a salad.

I just devoured what could be one of my new favorite books of all time: “The Passenger” by Cormac McCarthy. This has revitalized my interest in his cornucopia of literature I have yet to read. So, after the two day consumption of this new book of his (it was recently released on October 25th 2022), I went back to the year 1992, and started to read his classic “All the Pretty Horses.” There is much talk of Fall, Winter, snow, and the many traits that are cold weather in there—so I know it exists; well, from his literature—and my cold feet. More importantly: Cormac McCarthy is a national treasure. Someone give the man a Nobel Prize. He deserves a monkey trophy. His writing is beautiful. His story telling is exquisite. His conversations are organic and deep and unbelievable, yet within the realm of possibility. I can’t stop thinking about what he writes, for days on end after consumption.

I have decided to take a long stroll around the neighborhood—if just to walk off the copious amounts of chili and pie—and, perhaps to garner a remedy for cold feet. Excuse me for a moment.

This wouldn’t have been an issue yesterday in Woodstock, Georgia. However, there is news of a hurricane in Florida; yet another, above and beyond that of which was previous and has since disappeared with a wake of destruction: Ian was its name, if memory serves me correctly.

No, this yet still, a new hurricane, the one that is brewing over the entirety of Florida at the moment, is a Category 1. It has a name from what I understand, as well: Nicole. I hope Nicole is a lady of easy demur, and that she smiles with only light tears over the coastline. Her breathiness could be to a minimum, however, reports are suggesting otherwise. No matter: I cross my fingers for those who are in its headlights as it drives up the interstate, along with myself. There is no doubt that the cold storm I am feeling on my feet, are a result of Nicole’s currents. May the weather buy a vowel using Wheel of Fortune rules, and give us all the sweet currant of fruitfulness, rather than the rags of battered sails, as we both traverse together.

Some of my extended family in Mobile, Alabama

And yet, only the day before my arrival in Woodstock, Georgia, I found myself in Mobile, Alabama—along the Gulf Coast. I could have sworn that it was swimming weather, sure as it was, also a day for Church for the residents of the area. Even the Flora-bama had a service, flanked as it may be, by the endless shelves of alcohol, to be dispersed shortly after service had concluded (maybe even during for all I know). Speaking of church services held in a bar, and subjects that straddle the line of propriety. The Flora-bama: it straddles the line of the Florida and Alabama border, right along a coastline, freckled with high-rise resorts and the whitest of fine demolished sand one will ever have the privilege to crawl between their toes while walking the beaches of a red neck riviera. I found residents apologizing to me about a place I had yet to visit, and others continued such a trend, well after I had visited the place. I rather liked the joint. There where multiple stages for music, and quite the well-spring of libations to socially lubricate even the most rusted jointed gates of good times to be had. The remnants of feminine approval to musicians world wide, hanging from clothes lines above one of the audience congregations adjacent the stage: enough bras and varieties of which to fill a department store inventory.

Me at the Flora-bama on the Florida/Alabama border.

There was a 1.9 billion dollar jackpot for Lotto, and line of folks standing in line to buy tickets at the Florida/Alabama border. Alcohol and Lotto, given equal billing on the sign outside of the establishment. A line of Alabama residents, buying tickets, as the Lotto is not a legal privilege in their state. Loop holes. Good on them.

It was a jackpot, having the opportunity to play for my friends and family in Mobile, the night before. Playing music I wrote, for cousins I didn’t know that I had, save for the past several years. My cousin Mia, is a musician herself and is very supportive of all my musical whimsies and storytelling tendencies. I love my family dearly, and between you and I: my family is not as close as we used to be. I wish it were not the case. I have tried to make it not the case, through choice phone calls to an aunt, voicing my concerns that we are not getting any younger, and are only becoming more comfortable in our own bubbles of social interaction. This rings true of not only my immediate family, but also of my extended family, much to my chagrin.

The Frog Pond. A house concert venue outside of Mobile, AL.

Were I man of more means, perhaps I could invite them all over to my place for dinner. I am hesitant to think that they would make the trek to Los Angeles, albeit being 4 hours away from my home town of Visalia. My younger brother and I both live here in southern California. My mom refused to make the journey to visit for Thanksgiving. I spoke to her yesterday, and she is open to being picked up by my brother and driven to southern California to stay with him for a week, before the Christmas holiday, something that excites me a great deal (she hasn’t been here to visit me since I moved to southern California to go to college in 2002, and when I graduated from college).

Perhaps the key to this discussion between family, is to truly try to understand the schism between all of us—or that we were never really that close to begin with… I am uncertain. I do know that the cost of being close, is our time and our energy. While I may not be very rich, I do have time and energy to provide to anything that fills my heart with joy.

I am not here to complain either, or to point fingers. I take responsibility for myself, and also wish to make as much effort as possible towards accomplishing whatever I can. I am not afraid to work hard. I am not fearful of being the first to reach out. I do that often, whether it is in friendship or insofar as family is concerned. It does get a little tiresome feeling like no one meets me halfway, but I suppose that is relative—if not also my responsibility to recognize when I am overexerting effort on the wrong people, or that my love is not being put in good places.

Parallel lives. It was something that someone said to me once when I apologized for not reaching out more often. He simply said: no worries my friend; parallel lives.

I can dig that also.

There are numerous ways to look at life. I do my best to choose the methods that feel good, and do not create suffering, where it is unnecessary in the first place. Believe you me: we create our own suffering.

Perhaps we should simply be thankful to be greeted by a bowl of chili and to hug our aunt and our cousin when we can. Be thankful when our mother comes to visit. Be thankful when we discover we have cousins we never knew about. Try our best to get to know our family—and be accepting of parallel lives as well.

I am not a perfect specimen. But then again, neither is anyone else around me, either.

Upcoming Show Dates

New Orleans and the South as Filtered by Numpty Abroad

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I am not accustomed to the foreign affairs of the common folk walking the French Quarter adornments of Bourbon Street with open containers, nor am I in equal measure accustomed to the cobblestone stumbling of the before mentioned, namely myself enjoying alcohol laden libations as I meander down River Street in Savannah, Georgia in search of secret treasures for the senses, whether they take the form of old buildings, old stories, proposition in prostitution, voodoo and hoodoo gift shops, tales of ghosts, passing relic steamboats and modern freighters alike, live music, and Catfish—the later breaded to perfection, a fluffy, light, and delicious surprise with every bite. Both places have become tourist powerhouses akin to an ancient dinosaur innocently walking into a tar pit. However, I can’t help myself for being both predator and prey to a location that allows me to do nearly all of my favorite things, simultaneously, or at the very least, in rapid succession of one another.

There is a magic to seeing places I have only read about since I was a child. I absolutely have had the assisted lens of television and the silver screen to paint pictures of false pretense in two dimensional simulacrum, but the real treasure is to walk amongst the bonanza yourself. “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” is largely responsible for the second gold rush of tourism afforded to Savannah, Georgia—while New Orleans has obtained the golden age of post-Lent celebration, Mardi Gras, from its predecessor Mobile, Alabama, which celebrated this holiday long before it became the staple character of New Orleans demographic. My second cousins who all live in Mobile, Alabama shared this interesting fact with me while I had the privilege of their company for a few days, playing a house show at my cousin’s place. What a privilege this has all been. To see the Redneck Riviera, as my cousin Bill put it, was a treasure: Bayou La Batre. He punctuated my visit with jokes such as this: 

“What do you call a beautiful woman in Bayou La Batre?”, he asked me with a small grin.

I said, “I don’t know, Bill.”

“A visitor.”

… and speaking of beautiful women.

I was briefly the prey of a lady of the night while in New Orleans, operating with a charisma that was quite intoxicating, far beyond what I had been pouring into my person throughout the evening. She was dark and fit and lovely as a mistress as she passed by me with compliments accentuating my masculinity, and initiated the conversation with an assurance that there was nothing in the direction that I was walking in—I asked her how she knew that. She assured me, “because I just came from there.” I playfully mirrored her approximations by assuring her that there was nothing in the direction she was heading. She asked me why I thought such? I assured her, because, “I just came from there.” And while she did shower me with peppered compliments of “gorgeous” and the like—I could not help but feel the salt seasoning being poured in unscrupulous quantity and appetite on my wounded wallet for her consumption. I will however, kindly accept her bouquet of accolades and admire their freshness of uncut potential. It would be a small feather in a hat that I wasn’t necessarily wearing anywhere else, aside from my own imagination.

I became the second-hand tourist on a musician’s budget, listening to ghost stories told on old and ancient streets described by Anne Rice, yet narrated by a young lady, her congregation of paid acolytes, following her every word and movement down a dimly-lit thoroughfare. My ease-dropping was brief, for I never wish to overstay my welcome, especially when it involves the livelihood of another, so it was to be only brief punctuations of dread and fright for me on that evening—both in the realm of storytelling, and gambling for that matter. You can do that in New Orleans as well—and I pursued this vice, if only momentarily in the one casino afforded to the city by ordinance. However, with a $25 dollar minimum buy-in on a hand of Blackjack, my appetite went un-satiated, aside from being given a brief form of entertainment watching many a gambler bet away or receive their fortune for an evening. However, when my interest ran its course, I was back out into the evening to sponge up more of what was to be had in the French Quarter. 

Frenchmen Street gave me a bit of what makes my heart sing: jazz and groove music being played by the best musicians that the United States has to offer. I drank my wine and listened to the language of their improvisation with an eager ear and appetite for cold drink and warm jams on a breezy night. Jazz Fest had been cancelled this year, and I tried in vain to use this as returned selling point for booking a few house concerts in the area for myself—I was initially turned away by house concert hosts because of Jazz Fest’s occurrence during my planned occupation. Despite the demise of the festival this year, I had a small taste of what it would have had to offer: a large assortment of college-age students playing inspired renditions of the theme song from the movie “Halloween”, as a groove tune, leaving no stone unturned with tension and release and old scales rarely heard in the realm of pop music. Heaven can be found in the mustached-villain twist of a half-whole scale, modal variations, diminished and augmented approaches over altered dominants, and any number of other fanciful music being spoken, with the effortless of conversation, that are common place when listening to an art form, under appreciated in its difficulty and mastery by the performer, to the common listener.

However, despite all of this goodness, and badness: my first order of business when arriving in New Orleans, was to find The Natchez. I speak eagerly of this vessel. It is like an old friend. It’s a steamboat on the Mississippi River, named after a city. It is still functioning, and still doing its good work for fine folk wishing to see the splendor of the great Mississippi River. I had no greater wish in my heart that to see it with my own eyes, after reading of its exploits in the words of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Alas, my efforts were to no good effect, satiated. There was an empty dock. My inquiries (only after further strolling down the river, mistaking another smaller boat for The Natchez) proved to be found with the sad news of its repair for several weeks in maintenance, perhaps from the recent hurricane.

There was evidence of this everywhere, in the neighborhood in which I stayed, which was just outside of the French Quarters: large piles of tree trunks and branches piled to the 15 or 20 feet high, occupying precious sidewalk and street space, the later with tremendous water damage. The drive in to New Orleans, was the most revealing evidence of heartbreak, as I witnessed tremendous amounts of homes, left to Lucifer matches, with little evidence that the pile of rubble was ever a living quarter for a loving family. Entire roofs missing. Tremendous holes punched into the sides of both commerce buildings and residence, alike. Given that it has been months since the original occurrence of the event, it can only be said that I feign the sight New Orleans and its residents at the storm’s recent precipice.

I have, dear reader, been a sponge. A murky little sponge that perhaps belongs on the bottom of the ocean, but has found itself meandering amongst new places in search of joy. It has been my wish to see new things while I play new things for new people. I have done all of these things, and continue to do so today. I am off to go explore Charlotte now. May this find you smiling and well.