Thursday, April 17, 2014

Baseball, I Love You

Home.

The box score is clean, the standings tied. Each roster trimmed with the 25 best, thoroughly selected and bred, waiting for the gates to open, each city with millions waiting for the same. Empty houses where snow and rain gathered for months on end are once again pollinated with buzzing crowds. In the middle, the grass is creased with military precision, foul lines dropped straighter than a comebacker line drive off the black burn lines of Louisville. The diamond opens its arms, from foul line to foul line, welcoming the white hide and red stitches to land anywhere, just to know that it’s back.

Hope arrives, in the form of nine empty spaces on a scoreboard. Nine stanzas waiting to be filled with poetry. Suicide squeeze sonnets. Perfect meters of perfect games. Dimaggio’s fifty-six line epic. Pining again for titles like Tinker, Evers, and Chance, turning pages of double plays for years on end, until the final paragraph lands on a plaque in Cooperstown.

It’s a limitless game. In theory, it could go on forever. It has no overtimes, no stopwatches, no quarters comprising a whole. There’s no taking knees to run out the clock, no last-minute fouls in a futile attempt to catch up. There is only each inning, each empty square on the scoreboard still full of promise until the last one is filled.

There is room for legends that grow in only the way that hand-me-downs can. It’s been said that Rube Waddell once randomly ran to a fire in a visitor’s city and joined the local firefighters in the effort, showed up late to the game, walked through the crowd, pitched a complete game. Saved a girl from drowning before a game another time, caught pneumonia and died. Or something like that. Bo Jackson hit a ball further than scientifically possible, but not further than baseball legend possible. It’s a sport that doesn’t matter whether it happened or it didn’t, just that it’s remembered in a way that makes the game more wonderful.

It’s all of us and all of our stories.

It’s full of tales of Paul Bunyans and an ox named Babe. Guys named Oil Can and Catfish, Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, Satchel, Wee Willie, Pee Wee, Chief Bender, and Al Kaline. The cream of its crop has included midgets, deaf mutes, and a one-armed pitcher. Its foundations were laid by barnstormers akin to a travelling circus act, built by the hands of coal miners, farmers, Ivy League dropouts and alcoholics from the hills of Arkansas. It was borne into the grind of the things that made America great in a time when America was defining its greatness. That greatness has endured through world wars, depressions, and political upheaval. It’s survived its own cheaters and liars, steroids and Black Sox, and has thrived on grace and goodness, Jackies and Clementes.

As much as it is a team endeavor, the game is still a solo effort. Every outcome begins with one man against another, pure in the way that few sports are. It is a sport built on failure, where no man has ever come close to winning half his battles over the course of a season. Where the best that ever played are only successful a third of the time. But the successes are enough to fuel the desire to come back again and again, in the hopes of that moment that every ballplayer has lived in their backyards or school playgrounds or city streets.

When everything and everyone depends on the bottom of the ninth, from the hopes of a city to the friends down the block. When the ball comes in, just that ball against the batter’s eye, spinning closer and closer until the wooden barrel meets it with a sweeter sound than a composer could ever find, and sends it into the night. And with it, that pure joy that has been chased for so long is untapped and allowed to run, spilling the grandest dreams of youth across the wet grass and the faces of your friends and that moment—just the chance of that moment—is why we all believe.

It’s why we wait and grow restless for the spring. It’s why we endure the swell of summer and the low anticipation of winter. It’s the embodiment of our own seasons and our own successes and failures and the knowing that there is always hope, that our innings are never over because there’s one more Gibson swing we have to give. Even in the bottom of the ninth, with a nearly empty stadium on a September night in last place, there’s still more around the corner.

The end is the beginning is the better season awaiting us all.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

A Band I Love Right Now



The first time I saw Nick Bays (far left in the picture) perform was when we were on tour about 6 or 7 years ago, playing at the New Brookland Tavern in Columbia, SC. The New Brook was always our favorite venue on tour, and for some reason we always knew that there was some good or bad or weird thing going to happen whenever we ended up there. Seeing Nick was one of those good things.

The Farewell Flight move du jour was that if a band sucked really bad (sometimes even if they didn't), we'd go out back and hang out or drink beers in the van. This kind of happened pretty often. Luckily, most of the bands we played with in Columbia were decent, so usually we didn't have to swelter behind the venue in the South Carolina summer heat to escape the endless double-kick beats and hardcore breakdowns of the opening acts.

No matter the quality or perceived quality of a band, I usually always checked out their first song and then played it by ear as to whether I needed to plan an escape route. At this time, Nick Bays was a 17-year old local high school kid playing by himself. I may have only stuck around because I happened to be inside grabbing another beer at the time. But I did. I didn't go back outside until after his set.

Nick commanded the guitar and the crowd and his voice in a way that when I first heard him sing, so low and so quiet, then so loud and so powerful, without breaking or pushing too hard, I knew it wasn't just another guy we'd cross paths with on the road then never see again. The thing about Nick is that he has his sound. And that's what makes a great musician. His songwriting style is his, not him sounding like someone else. I can't put an exact finger on it, but the Nick Bays sound is something that's minimal and slightly dirty, with a huge dynamic range that oscillates between loud and soft, but without doing it too much or too little. Of course there's plenty of other musicians that are like that, but his way is unique to the trinity of him, his voice, and his songwriting style.

So anyway, back when he was a junior (maybe senior) in high school, I got his EP and listened to it and made the band listen to it that tour. Although it wasn't the most polished record (give him a break, he was 17), it was pretty damn good. Nick ended up playing with us a few more times in South Carolina and Chicago and even came on the road with us just for the hell of it for a little while when we were in the midwest. Turns out he wasn't just a great musician, but a pretty sweet dude as well.

All that to say, Nick's all grown up now and making music under the name of Tall Walker. I don't know if this is a tweaked reference to the Fast and the Furious star, but I can only hope it is, and it's not because I saw the first Fast and the Furious six times in the movie theater (I was in a "finding myself" phase).

Tall Walker only has a self-titled four-song EP out right now, but it is solid, and it is something I have been listening to a lot recently. It has all the features of a great musician beginning to find himself and his songwriting in his early twenties and experimenting with some great sounds in the process. Nick definitely has a knack for taking some good pop melodies, adding a dark edge to them, sprinkling in some sultriness and then turning it into a song. The leadoff song on this EP, "Deadbeat," is no exception. It's the strongest song on the EP and one that I find listening to almost daily. It has a strong, driving drum beat over sparse verses that unfold into a dynamically full chorus with a little bit of 80's reverb on the end. A bonus is the excellent hi-hat accents throughout the song. All around, a lot of tasteful musicianship, particularly with the drums. "Clouds" is a great track as well, despite the fact that the chorus seems to detach itself a little too much from the verse. However, the overall melody is great and the bridge into the last chorus is absolute ear candy. Tall Walker definitely invokes some Leagues on this record- which isn't a bad thing- but it's also kind of a sound that Leagues has cornered (at least in terms of their guitar tones). Getting too close to it could elicit some cries of copy-catting, whether intentional or not. That's just a small misstep though.

Tall Walker seems to be a great step forward for Nick, and I have no doubt that he'll be doing some pretty great things with his art both in the near and far futures. There's about less than five bands out of the thousands I've ever played with who I knew immediately would be doing great things in their future, and Nick was certainly one of them. I can't wait to see where this album and his maturation as a musician will take him and Tall Walker. I'm certain it will be somewhere dark and beautiful.

Love you Nick, miss you. Keep still but keep going.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

On Friends


The three-day hangover is the worst.

Everything seems great beforehand. The hanging out, the drinks, the morning sun cracking over the yard, looking at my watch and wow, it really is that time. I know it’s coming every time, and sometimes I can feel it right from the beginning and pretend it’s not going to happen. But then I get out of the car, grab my backpack and roller, give Luke a quick hug and head to the open arms of the TSA screeners. And while I’m waiting to board, it hits. There it sits, somewhere inside of my gut, the place where I’m trying not to cry because it’s just life, and I know that because I’m feeling this I’ve got a good one.

I calm myself and know that Baltimore is home and it is a place I love with a wife I love and it’s all right that I quit playing music and it’s all right that my friends are in Nashville. Everything is all right. It really is, which makes leaving even harder, and the hangover last longer.
           
Needless to say, I came back from Nashville recently after visiting some old friends. Some of the best, truly. The band guys in Farewell Flight and The Young International. Some new friends too. If you’re reading this, you probably know them or have an embarrassing story about the first or tenth time you met them.

Within a couple of hours arriving and a couple High Lifes later, I couldn’t put many of my thoughts into words, but two words that kept coming into my mind were ‘joy’ and ‘full.’ They seemed to be two of those words that describe themselves, tidy packages bursting between the letters. It may have been the impromptu karaoke and singing along with the stories written by Jason Isbell and David Ramirez, or maybe it was the way you meet an old friend at the airport and the hello is kind of off and static but within 10 minutes you’ve settled into the passenger seat of their car and your friendship settles into the driver’s seat of your lives and the road behind pushes and the road ahead is ready to build more, to stretch further.

Our friendships are the way you see someone every day for years and don’t realize they’re older until you look at a picture of them from college or high school. Whenever we’re together I feel the roots that drop down from the bottom of my soul and grab the collective foundation we’ve been building for all these years. That soil mixed with the American highways and the beds of strangers and cigarette smoke and jug wine and dreams turned and tilled with so much care.

I remember once when we were hanging out at a mildly successful musician’s house in Nashville several years ago, and it was a great house, and it had a pool, and drinks, and summertime was a week away in the north, but already steeped in the south. We really wanted him to help us out with our careers, so we thought we’d hang there with him for the night. But the whole time we were hanging out, I really just wanted to be with my actual friends. I wanted to throw knives and quote David Brent and drink Keystone Light on a back deck. That might’ve been the beginning of the end of the band for me. I realized that everything I wanted from music when I was younger was nothing that I wanted when I was older. We never picked the right numbers in the fame lottery, but I realized it wasn’t what I wanted anymore. Instead, I got everything I never knew I wanted—a literal lifetime of friendships that will only stop existing once we all stop existing.

We draw from such a deep well of experiences, from adventures on the road, to the changing of “careers” (i.e. fireworks tent operators and professional medical study subjects), to hiking the Appalachian Trail, to being the groomsmen in each others’ weddings.  We’ve read to each other passages from Sailing Alone Around the World and wished we were on a sailboat in the Pacific with only the loneliness and the stars strung above the stillness. We’ve lived out our worst fears and our weakest selves in front of each other, and have learned that when we give up the shitty parts of us and tame the darkness that will always be there, we become better men, friends, and husbands.

I think my favorite thing to think about is how this won’t ever end. How there will always be post-hangout hangovers.

Someday we will be old, and we will have memories falling out everywhere— out of old jean pockets and rattling in the bottom of backpacks and dropping from the insides of book covers. Some of the memories will be relived so many times that I know most of them will have turned to legend and are probably far from the original events. But I’m okay with being legendary. I know that in the flip of a calendar we’ll be grey and bald and not so cool. One morning we’ll be young men and in the afternoon fathers and in the evening widowers. We may have to go to bed earlier than 5 a.m. and maybe even push a wheelchair or two, and I’m pretty sure someone will have to tell me my own name, but I know that what I feel now will still be there then. And even when we’re flying out to each other’s funerals, when we’re meeting up again for more goodbyes and less hellos, I know it’ll draw us even closer.

We will have truly lived and died as brothers, and dammit that is a great way to spend a day on earth.


Monday, August 5, 2013

My Perfect Summer Song

On a night like tonight, when the air is conditioned for remembering, this is the song that bundles all my summer nights of youth and college and band life and now and makes me relive them all in a few minutes. Even though there were years that went by that I didn't listen to this song or album, it still feels like it fits every moment. I feel like the lines "That's when I knew/that I could never have you/I knew that before you did...I'll get over you/You'll wonder who I am" sums up every relationship I was ever in, except for the one I was finally meant to be in. And I hate myself so much for that. But at the same time I love how the song floats feelings of bike rides on my red Schwinn through the cool night roads of Grantville. Smoking cloves in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn after work. Dreaming of sailing on back porches 'til dawn in some Midwestern city. Loving the way my life is changing in so many ways right now for the better. I think when things are changing in my life is when I love this song the most (The Cranberries' "Dreams" almost pulls an upset here). Because this song is a transitional song. It's leaving things behind and paddling out onto the ocean of the unknown. When you're a teenager, you feel like that's every other week. Your whole life is literally comprised of feeling so alone and so alive. It's less often now, but- as lame as it is- whenever I'm driving at night in the summer, the windows come down and this song comes on, and I'm that mixtape 16-year-old kid driving a Volkswagen Fox again (minus the braces, the chain necklace, the black lights in my car (wtf?), and... so, so many things). And it's kind of cool to still love that. Cause even though I'm almost twice that age, I still sometimes need to feel that age. I need to be naive and optimistic again, even if only for a stretch of highway and a side street and a parking space and the ending of a song collaborating with the turning off of the engine. I need that, just until I'm home.


Sunday, March 31, 2013

The Ocean Becoming Light



Sometimes, when I really get to thinking about it, I have a lot of issues with the Bible. And sometimes, it takes a lot for me to remember why I shouldn’t.
When I step back from it, the Bible should just be stories written by men, and pretty crappy examples of men too. Men who were adulterers, men who were murderers, and men who were both (David, the man after God’s own heart). Written a couple thousand years ago, in a different continent, in a different language, in a different culture. It should just be a religious book, with its thesis centered on a great guy whose main mission was to help the poor and heal the sick. Sometimes, when I find myself away from God for a long period of time, I think that maybe that’s true. I mean, in a completely rational way, it is true. It’s just a book of stories, written by men, who followed another man.
            It’s usually in those questioning times that I feel like I can hold it all together myself. I can rationalize my life, I can determine what I need to maintain a certain level spirituality, and I can go about my own business without letting God mess it up too much. But it always seems like at the end of every day, and the beginning of the next, I’m trying to grasp that next thing ahead of me, or looking for that one thing- that mysterious thing- that will complete me. I know deep down it is all the pursuit of vanity, and yet when I am on my own, doing it by myself, I cannot stop trying to continually fill the sieve that is my life. The days and months begin running into one another, and despite the abundant fortune I’ve been given with a job, a great wife, and amazing friends, I still feel I’m missing something.
            Then somehow I end up talking to a friend about God, or actually opening my Bible (once my allergies let up from all the dust I shake off) and reading, aloud, a passage to myself. And then I’ll do it again the next day. I’ll think about it a little more, and ask God to make me a better person, and help me to be Christ’s kingdom on earth, to be a light in a darkened world. Suddenly, things start falling away in a way that I can’t explain. I start to realize how weak I am, and all that I thought I had built on my own was no better than a couple cardboard stage props for a low budget one act play. I find I have more peace about the once seemingly significant struggles in life. I find myself allowing others more grace (i.e.  allowing the car in front of me one extra second of not moving at a green light before I slam my horn).
            Somehow, when I finally throw in the towel on myself and actually search for God in a non-half-assed way, I find him. I don’t know how it happens, but it just does, and because it does- because of that tangible life experience- I have no option other than to believe. I cannot build a completeness myself, and trust me- I try incredibly hard most of the time. As much as I want to guide this ship every damn day, I realize I can’t do it on my own. My compass’ true north is not true at all.  It is only when I sit back and survey my life as I run it that I realize I’m not at the helm of a sleek cruiser yacht, but I’m standing knee deep in water in a wooden sloop with about twenty holes from the rocks that I’m dashed upon. The same rocks that I dash myself upon about every other day, and sometimes for years at a time.
            But when I come back to God, when I let go of my pride that I love so much, he is still there, and he gives me all that I could ask for, as if I had never left. And he knows that probably at some point again I’ll go on a solitary me-myself-and-I-bender and forget the way he loved me in my darkest moments, how he told me that I am his, that nothing I do can separate me from the way he loves me and wants me to stay, just so that he can breathe life into my bones when they are so tired from running.
That is not something I just recite as religious liturgy. It isn’t proverbs or psalms or words written on a page. It is something that I feel in a gospel that comes to life, inside my life and the lives of so many others who are so much more in love with God than me, people who can only be described as walking miracles. Because it’s those people who make me realize that somewhere in those 2,000 year-old words written by men, the hope of Christ was made clear. So clear, that when read and believed, people who have been locked in decades-long struggles in the gutter of humanity have been pulled out into a new life. Addicts who have shaken horrific addictions are released from their turmoil because when Christ said, “All you who are weary, come and I will give you rest,” they believed those words and the person that said them actually followed through. It is the poor made rich, the blind made to see, and the dead raised to life.
            When I allow myself to realize that, the logical issues I have with the Bible seem to fade away in the light of its true power. I admit it is not a logical book, because its message isn’t logical. It doesn’t make sense that those who are poor in spirit will inherit the earth. A savior dying a horrible death so that murderers, rapists, drug addicts and me can be given a life of hope almost doesn’t seem fair. In those things, the beauty of Christ and his resurrection are made apparent. Nothing we do on our own, nothing we can try to figure out from those words will ever make sense in a rational way. We are asked of so little- to believe in a hope that has been given freely.  So that us at our best is a life of stumbling and falling and forgetting God and remembering him again, and that Christ loves us despite of that. That is the transformative power of God’s word, and that is enough for me to believe.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

The Guns, The Big Guns, and The Screwed-Over Little Guys



        *Full disclosure: I am pro-guns. I don’t think an assault weapons ban will solve whatever social epidemic plagues us. I also don’t think that banning assault weapons would be the worst compromise ever, but I also don’t own one. I also don’t own a regular handgun, but that is mainly because I don’t have the money to buy one, although I would like to at some point in the near future. Basically, I’m middle of the road on all of this, but am open to both sides of the discussion, as long as it doesn’t involve irrelevant pie charts or gun violence graphs posted on Facebook.
I also have a friend who’s been a vendor at the Eastern Sports and Outdoor show for the last six years or so. He owns many guns and puts most hunters to shame because he derives most of his meat from deer he either kills with one arrow or a couple bullets (imagine that, being skilled enough to not need a 30-round clip to hunt). He’s also built his business from the ground up, starting it right before the recession, and nurturing it into a pretty stable business in a pretty unstable industry. I actually helped him at his display the first year he exhibited. This kind of show was crucial to his business in the beginning for a couple reasons: 1) it was local, as was his business, and 2) it jumpstarted the year and brought in many new customers and future customers.
Upon the cancellation of this year’s show, he will lose tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. 



Harrisburg, PA

I guess when I think about the Outdoors show in Harrisburg, I think of it as a tradition just like the Farm Show, one that annually falls only a few weeks after. It’s a lot of country in a little time. As a regular camper and fisherman, I always knew that the hardest fish to ever catch was the farm-raised trout in a liner pool, ignoring a piece of junk bait on the end of a 1-pound test and a glorified stick. There’s was a beauty in the fly-fishing seminars, in the way that the flick of the rod by a trained hand is just as mesmerizing in a convention complex as it is in Montana. Also, there was a beauty in the way the Skoal girls stood in front of the Skoal display, beckoning you to take a dip. Not as wonderful were the clever “Git ‘er drunk and git ‘er done” or “Calvin peeing on whatever truck wasn’t yours” stickers sold every ten feet. But of all the things I’ve remembered from the times I’ve been there, I’ve never remembered looking at Modern Sporting Rifles/assault weapons. Maybe it was just ignorance, but I never even really knew they were allowed there. But I do now.
            This year, the 50-year tenure of the Eastern Sports and Outdoor show will come to a close, for now. It’s the largest hunting and fishing show in North America, generating an estimated $74 million in revenues for exhibitors, small businesses, and not-for-profits, and $44 million for the struggling, poorly managed, and essentially bankrupt city of Harrisburg. The reasoning for suspending the show started a few weeks ago, but really, a month and a half ago, with the Newtown massacre. In the midst of the modern sporting rifle (MSR)/tactical assault weapon (pick your side, then your nomenclature) gray area that developed with that tragedy, the event organizer (UK-based Reed Exhibitions), decided to ban vendors from selling any MSRs or extended capacity magazines, as well as the promotion of either or both. In the wake of that announcement, vendors began pulling out by the bunches. First, the gun vendors, then over 300 more of the roughly thousand slated vendors. The hammer dropped when Cabela’s, the world’s largest direct marketer of outdoor goods, officially pulled out.
            In the case of Cabela’s, the move was brilliant. As the banner vendor at the Outdoor Show, their name has appeared in nearly every news story and every write-up related to the boycott. The money they stood to make at the show should easily rebound as their customer base’s loyalty level will soar higher than the craggy peaks of their in-store mountain displays. The same probably goes for Trop Gun shop in Elizabethtown, which is currently having a “Solidarity Sale” this weekend, giving away an AR-15 to a lucky person who brings in a receipt from any of the vendors that pulled out of the show. Gun shops around the country can’t keep their stock of MSRs, with some models on backorder for up to a year or two.
            This boycott was great for them, in that they stood up for their beliefs, and will still profit from them.
            Much of the boycott is focused on these vendors and the David vs. Goliath storyline, David as the true American rising up to defend his tribe against the tidal wave of reform bearing down on his God-given rights. They were the impetus that defended this half-century institution of east coast outdoorsmen, prying it from the hands of a nameless, faceless events organizer from across the Atlantic. It makes for pretty good news for both sides in this kind of post-Virginia Tech/Aurora/Newtown climate.
However, of all that’s been said about the 300-plus vendors that pulled out, whether good or bad, not much has been said about the 700 that didn’t. Without a doubt, many of these vendors would’ve liked to make a stand in favor of MSRs, because they either believed in it or knew their customer base would take the pro-boycott stance hook, line, and sinker. And probably swivel, leader, and pole. But that 10-day show is a lot of money, as much as some may generate in a couple months of business at their brick and mortar or online store. Taking a stance is one thing, losing a big chunk of your livelihood is another thing altogether. So instead of pulling out, they took the wait-and-see approach.
In the same way, if—God forbid—one of the many non-gun vendors sided with the MSR ban, as a logical business decision they couldn’t possibly announce their views publicly to a customer base that defends the Second Amendment like it’s their first-born son. A stance against the general consensus of your own customers would surely cement your place as next-in-line on the Second Amendment heretical chopping block.
In this situation, in the midst of a “with-us-or-against-us-issue,” the atom splits again, so that the whole things starts to look like a pyramid scheme of epic divisiveness. Pro-gun and not pro-gun. Beneath that, pro-gun, but not pro-assault. Further down, pro-boycotting, but not pro-boycotting and losing money. And so the boycott became a lopsided split comprised of those who voiced vehement demands, or those who stayed mum and hoped for the best.
Turns out, those hoping for the best got a good dose of the worst, from their fellow outdoorsmen, nonetheless.
Albeit, all of the blame for this loss shouldn’t be placed squarely on the boycotters—it is pretty crummy that the MSR ban was made known to them a mere two weeks before the event, after many of them booked plane tickets, hotels, over-stocked their goods, etc. In fact, it seems that Reed didn’t work much with the vendors at all in terms of communication, notification, or compromise. Prior to the current gun control debate, they heavily supported guns and shows of all kinds, and even managed the National Shooting Sports Foundation Shot Show, held two weeks ago in Nevada (note: although they manage this show, all policies and actions are made at the NSSF’s discretion.)
To that extent, surely some responsibility should be attached to Reed Exhibitions for their overarching hand in all of this. But consider this—they’re the world’s largest events organizer, with 500 events in 39 countries. They grossed over $1 billion in revenue last year. Most of their events aren’t attended by the typical Outdoor Show attendee who strolls the Pennsylvania Farm Show complex with a hunk of beef jerky in one hand and a spitter cup in the other, sticking around to catch the log-rolling competition in the Equine Arena. Many of the Reeds events around the world center around sustainable energy, biofuels, the entertainment industry, etc. In fact, Reed’s biggest show is MIPCOM- a five-day marketing and networking event for people in the TV and film industry. Held in Cannes, France, it attracts heads of large studios and networks, as well as the movers and shakers from across the cultural spectrum—from Facebook execs to the cast of hit television shows like Mad Men and The Walking Dead.  Out of all their North American shows scheduled for this year, it appears only two are related to in any way to guns or outdoor supplies. Their world isn’t Harrisburg, PA. It’s literally the world. And in that world outside of this world, MSRs aren’t as widely accepted as they are in Bucks or Perry County.
To put it another way, imagine this, as a corporate business owner:
You own a company that mostly sells fruits and vegetables all over the world. However, in Brazil, there’s a large contingency that eats meat, and loves it, and has always loved it since their country’s inception, since they produce some of the best meat in the world. You have a store in Rio that stocks and sells mostly meats. In the last fifty years, Brazil produced a strain of super meat that was very healthy to some people, produced more powerful flavors, and could be made in a variety of ways. In the hands of a good chef it is not inherently dangerous, but if it is not kept at the right temperature, or if handled by an irresponsible cook at a restaurant, it could poison all the customers sitting down to eat if it were put on the buffet that night. One day, this meat kills 24 people who had no idea it was even in that restaurant. Unfortunately, this incident happened six weeks before the biggest month for meat and super meat sales in Rio. During the interim, a social debate ensues, with a kind of ferocity that hasn’t been seen in nearly twenty years.
Questions arise. How do we know this super meat won’t accidentally get labeled wrong and cooked by a teenage kid with no training? Why can’t people be satisfied with the other meats that are generally delicious? Why is there such a focus on this super meat if it only killed a handful of people in comparison to the deaths of others who choked on the tougher kinds of meats? How can we make sure no one in a restaurant (not located in a poor, crime ridden part of the inner city) ever dies from this super meat again?
Despite the debate, most of Brazil still loves meat and is okay with most of it. Strict vegetarians don’t see the point, because their lives are fine without it. On the other hand, those who had a taste of this super meat, and who have working refrigerators with shelves high enough that their kids can’t reach it, are embittered. And so the fire rages, pulling back and forth between the super meat eaters, the normal meat eaters, the sometimes meat eaters, and the vegetarians.
Back to the store you own that sells the super meat. This store represents about a quarter of one percent of your total revenue globally. The majority of your other stores are okay with that store selling their normal meats, but on the other hand, many of the clientele and managers of those stores are diametrically opposed to the super meat. So, as the owner of a large corporation dealing with a lot of customers on the con side of the meat argument, you decide that sacrificing a small portion of your business will be better in the long run, for you and the majority of your customers. After all, it wouldn’t be prudent for you if the managers of your mega-stores in New York City and Los Angeles see that you’re allowing the controversial super meat to be sold in another store, and decide to shut down until you pull the meat from the shelves. This would be a huge revenue hit for you and for those local economies.
So for now, you decide the super meat should be banned from your stores in Brazil until the issue settles down a bit. The stores can still conduct business as usual otherwise. Some of the contracted in-store meat vendors will have to sell their super meat as street vendors, but will still make almost as much money as they would have selling in-store (if not more, since super meat loyalists will flock to them). In addition, all of the other employees will get to keep their jobs.
Except the management at that store thinks your business decision is violating their rights as all-around meat-lovers, who feel they should be able to eat whatever they want, whenever they want. So they refuse to come into work on account of your decision. As do half the cashiers, and twenty percent of the stockers. If you don’t support their eating habits, you won’t get their money.
Meanwhile, the people who are working as meat slicers want to keep their jobs because they need to provide for their families this month, and February is the busiest time of year for selling meats. Same goes for the bread bakers (Brazilians like bread for a side), who have no idea how they got wrapped up in this. But because so many people stopped working at the store, you can’t hire enough people to fill their spots and the other 70 percent of the workers who still wanted their jobs, are suddenly without work and an entire month’s paycheck. Not only that, but this poor section of Rio is hammered with losses in its struggling business sector (not to mention the down economy in Brazil as a whole), as their meat selection is one of the best in the country and people come from hundreds of miles away to visit here this time of year. Most of the tourists have little to no interest in the super meat, but enjoy the atmosphere of the store and the many other food offerings it carries.
Your store isn’t entirely pleased with this, but it’s barely going to move your bottom line this fiscal quarter. The big-time meat vendors just gained a ton of loyal meat customers for sticking up for their rights. Those people will come back again and again and buy from them. The ban on super meat in the Rio store might have been the best thing that happened to them to this quarter. All the other meat vendors have back orders and will be fine.
Back to reality.
The small archery store looking to jump-start their business in a slow January just suffered a huge setback for their 2013 profits. The fishing guide from Virginia lost possibly months worth of bookings this summer, and will have to crack other shows or regions with which they’re completely unfamiliar. The new business owner from Harrisburg who is trying to sell his innovative RV accessory won’t get an initial surge in revenue, and will struggle for the next year to get his company off the ground, if it even does.
It’s obvious Reed didn’t exactly play the role of the good guy in this disaster, but they’re also a large corporation pulling their PR puppet strings from an office across the Atlantic, so one can only expect so much in terms of cooperation and compassion. It also seems that the original boycotters merely wanted their voices to be heard in the beginning, to gain a little leverage and back Reed into a corner. They probably didn’t see it blowing up into the wildfire that it finally became, and the ensuing cancellation of the show for all involved.
In the end though, the boycotters aren’t exactly sticking it to the man on this one. There wasn’t much to gain for the smaller guys, although the larger ones will have a nice cushion of loyal customers following them through the ensuing arms desert, where lines will surely be drawn into the sand until the winds of some kind of change come along and change them once again. Unfortunately, the boycotters are joining in with Reed in sticking it to the man next to them in line at Bass Pro, the one who’s buying his compound bow there because the store down the street went out of business this year. There's even calls by some to release the names of the other 700, so people can boycott them (their own outdoorsmen family!), an act that would twist the knife even deeper.
There’s a reason when something major happens that affects other people, it’s called a trickle down effect. The river doesn’t typically surge upstream. In this case, it’s carrying a swift tide to those below, and for their sake, and the outdoors trade in general, let’s hope they’re not dashed on the rocks by a knee-jerk swell, for the mere purpose of making a statement.
Let’s hope the collateral damage isn’t so severe that we can’t enjoy this kind of show for years to come, without the controversies and soapboxing that can derail the main goal of these gatherings—to promote the outdoors and the many unadulterated pleasures it provides, without taking away from those who provide us the means to do that.


Saturday, March 10, 2012

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.