The Close

To all,

I’m leaving/have left Farewell Flight. I’ve moved to Baltimore. I’m getting married in less than three months to Kimi, the coolest and most amazing person I could ever meet. I currently am running a boat cleaning/detailing business with my best friend, and Rabbit’s brother, Andy Campbell. I’m looking forward to going to many Orioles games and starting this new part of my life with as much excitement as the last one.

To everyone who was there in my life over the last six years, thank you for being there. I remember all of you and everything you’ve done.

This is where I finally close the chapter on the most amazing journey of my life:

 -

These are the things I will miss.

The way old and unwashed jeans felt in the morning when I rolled out of a sleeping bag on a stranger's floor, filled with loose change, Arby's receipts, guitar picks, wallet, crushed cigarettes, Bic Lighter, iPhone, belt, and/or dice. How I would put them on and feel the last several weeks soaked into them and the next day waiting to fall onto them. How on some days the air of five different states would pass over them before being taken off and thrown in another random corner of another stranger’s floor. How the next day would start the same way, minus the loose change I lost to Timmy and Ali on the kitchen floor the night before.

The nights in the van, in a Wal-Mart or hotel parking lot, or even outside the house we were staying in.  How we would settle into the dirty seats and homemade bunks falling down and how the crack of the first Natty Light gave us permission to forget or remember that night. How the van carried every piece of us inside of its stripped metal walls. How when we would sleep inside of it in the winter, our breath would drip down the walls and smear the ink from the “hello my name is” tag picked up at some show, somewhere, sometime last year. The Polaroid of us after the Margot show that hung on the wall, the kind of picture that is the last on a slideshow at a funeral. The "never, ever, give up" written inside. I still sometimes wish I could apparate to there and just talk, because that was the living room of our home, where friends would come in and sometimes stay, where we spoke in tongues of hope and struggle as we wore out the night the best we could. Those nights layered themselves, and somehow have become the sediment that so much of my love of good friends and conversation rests on.

As brothers, we had a bond that is unlike any other I’ve experienced with another group of people. Like in Florida when in the middle of the night from a hundred yards away on the beach, we could tell it was Marc walking towards us. Or when driving for hours without talking, two of us would start a conversation at the exact same time about the exact same subject. Or the way we could hold a friend as he worked out his inner demons, and how that rope between two people pulled tighter. And how I could punch that friend in the face and the next day it was just a good story. Or how I could accidentally drink that friend’s piss out of a water bottle lying in the van, and even that was funny.

So right now, I’m a little ways into writing this and I feel like I’m hitting a wall. I know I'm a decent writer, but there aren't really words to describe who we were together or what this journey has meant to me. This whole thing I’m typing right now seems ridiculous cause it’s not what I feel or mean because it’s just words. I know it’s cliché, but there’s no words that I can use to describe this six year period of my life that smashed together both unbridled hope and crushing defeat in the same day or even hour at times.

For me, it was an ultra-marathon, and the pavement would reach up every third step and try to break our ankles. And we’d be running through the night, only ourselves, hallucinating and wanting to get to wherever and whatever the finish line was. So that the dark before the dawn just seemed to keep getting darker and the only sound was the sloshing of our toes pooling blood in our shoes, looking for someone to save us in the wasteland of the music industry.

Also- how can I describe avoiding family members cause I felt like I was failing them, then the next day play a festival and sign a hundred autographs and the next week listen to Jack White demos in his engineer’s sound room who was also mastering our album? And then going home and waiting on a table in Grantville, PA and have a customer smash a piece of broccoli in my hand that was too cold? How can I describe the hamster wheel of the end and beginning of every day, always fueled by myself convincing myself that some day it’ll all be worth it?

How can I describe the way every amazing and terrible thing that happened in my life for six damn years always had a footnote at the bottom of the page that said, “Source: Farewell Flight?”

I can’t.

I can only state the facts. These were the places I’ve been, and these are the people I’ve known, and I am a better human, friend, and a man because of them. You might see me light up or choke up when I run into them again, and maybe that will say more than this does.

Here is where I’ve left my horcruxes:

Our first night at the New Brookland Tavern, and every one thereafter. The door marked Diagon Alley, the Ugly Organ piano art on the walls. How Magic John knew us by name, how Sean would always play Minus the Bear at the end of the night, how Margie cried right before she moved away because she knew she might not see us again. How Jeff and Sarah opened their house to us every time and we'd have the best food and friends that anyone could ask for. How Luke met his (soon-to-be) wife there. How those people kind of want to make me want to move to South Carolina someday.

Finishing out the last week of the worst tour ever riding in the back of a Penske box truck with all our gear, traveling from Indiana to Michigan to Ohio, where if we were in an accident, we would literally die.

The way I still am tempted to check dumpsters with vegetable oil, just to see if it's good enough for our van. The mundane and countless hours we spent driving around looking for grease and pumping it out, seeing the backs of so many Taco Bells and Chick-Fil-A's and strip malls. How it is such a weird thing that we could get kid-in-a-candy-store excited to see a dumpster brimming with clear grease. For better or for worse, I will never forget the way my sleeping bag and pillow continually smelled like cooking oil and how Farewell Flight turned into the Leatherface Four after riding in the van all day with veggie vapors encircling us.

Then there was Texas and its weirdness and pepper-sprayed fist fights and Dignan-ness and flags larger than the yards they were stuck in. The tiger in the cage at the gas station in Louisiana. Skinny dipping in a muddy creek in God-knows-where Oklahoma. The way the Michigan sky loomed right before the border, like the entire direction of north stood before us. Eating fresh-caught tuna steps away from the beach in San Diego. New York City and rooftops. Ice storms and literally crazy girls with crazy pets in Iowa. Tile floors and carpet floors and pavement floors and sometimes beds. Grand Rapids and how so much of our past and hopefully future was wrapped into those amazing friends and people. House shows in Texas and Wyoming. Our forever friends from the beginning in the The Tide, Taking Lottie Home, Lorien, and Plu. The people who would just be love and nothing else to us when we needed it. Who would pray for us and show us how to get back to ourselves when our spirits had been sitting on the shelf too long.

Nashville, our other home, when outside the venue I told Luke that I would stick with him through everything, because this was his gift, his life calling. That writing songs is what he does best. No matter what else happened, I'd grind it out with him. And how I’m walking away and how even now he’s becoming a shadow as he moves forward to whatever distant shoreline awaits him.

The night on Lorien's back porch when Timmy left the band. I remember leaning on the wooden railing, facing the house with him silhouetted against their porch light and I remember how for a second I tried to laugh or smile about it but instead I just cried and cried.

The night on Timmy's back porch when I told Luke I was leaving. And how after our next tour, slowly, we'd all begin to drift away from each other. How the last day of that last tour was the closest I'd ever be with my brothers. Even now, I feel it happening. I've only seen them a couple times in the last few months. And I miss them and will always miss them.

There are only a few people in your life who you meet who you would literally die for, and those few were these few. There's a million ways to die while staying alive, and I started to feel like I was fading away. I gave everything that I could for something I always knew was a pipedream. In the end, I took a risk, and I reaped rewards that have nothing to do with album sales or sell-out crowds or Grammy’s. I never became famous. But dammit, I've met some famous people, and I'd rather hang out with my friends over them every time. I went six years making less than poverty level, but I lived more than 99% of people will ever live in their lifetimes. I have friends who are true. They won’t leave me, no matter if they leave this band, this area, or this life. 

This is my favorite.

When we played a show in some basement of a building in Riverview, Michigan, where about 75 friends packed themselves in, those friends who somehow knew every line of our struggles and who looked like us and felt like us every day of their life. Who would make us so happy to see them again and again and who were faithful and kind the way you wish all people were. At the end of our set, we played "Indianapolis." Luke didn't even sing because everyone rushed the stage after the first line and took over the microphone and we danced with these people hundreds of miles away from home and my fingers bled all over my guitar and I cried (almost as much as I am now) and I wanted everyone to run into me more because our lives weren’t the past or the future but just the now, and how wonderful of a life is that?

In that basement, there wasn't a stage, but just a stale, dirty, beer-soaked tile floor. There wasn’t a light much brighter than the power light on Luke’s amp. But there was a fullness that hung from the walls and drop ceiling and laid its hands on us. So we could just play songs. So we could not worry about eating that night, or whether or not some label wanted us, or whether or not we’d have a job when we got home. We were just allowed to be young and do something that we loved and we could keep the weight of everything we felt all the time out in the cold to tend to the howling winds coming down Wyandotte. And we just played well and pure, for them and for us. That’s all.