Welcome to the Letters

My dear friends,

First: a moment-to-broader-observation spin, just to get me warmed up.

I just heard a trace-around-the-lines-looking young man (he's barely sporting, and definitely not rocking, a short beard and schoolboy-style sheer, much like a depressing majority of these motherfuckers) enlightening his bar date to his "unusual" sense of empathy. From my experiences so far in the glorious South of England, he does stand a decent chance of being unusual in his qualities of openness and compassion, simply through low competition. One thing about the English, they may be more courteous than Americans in their actions, but they are also much readier to insult you to your face if you do something they couldn't understand themselves doing. The haggard old-style American scratchy-chin man in charge saying "he's walking his own journey" around the drops of whiskey in his throat doesn't seem to have visited their firesides; their business appears to lie anywhere but the insides of their own heads. I know it's not just the English who are like this, but there's less of that going around in Vermont than there could be, or maybe I just think so because of the people I'm friends with.

It's not all bad here, though. There are more coats like mine, and jokes like mine. Loads more buses. Trash bins twice a block. Burlington would pale at the cost they must have racked up putting those in place. Oh, and I already sorted out a guitar, a gorgeous Epiphone ES-335 in cherry red with a natural-grain brown fretboard. When I play it on the neck pickup through the rare battery-powered amp I bought it with (a delightful, slightly rusted gem called the Mighty Atom Colorsound), it sounds quite like George Harrison's tone on the "Something" solo. You can't get better tone.

I started this blog for something to do, but also because many of you encouraged me when I told you I was thinking about it, and now I feel a pleasurable chainedness to the task of expressing myself for you all. I can't promise the same glittering psychedelia-tinged gems of good humor now that I don't have any weed to give me shroom flashbacks, but I'll try to at least make this an honest place for me to set down my thoughts, just as soon as I have any. In the meantime, welcome to the first post. Sit down, pour yourself something. (It won't be a long post, but that's a nice thing to do for yourself.)

Oh, and if you don't feel like keeping up with the blog, that's okay :)

Observations section:

Gender fear prowls among these people.

Musicians are all from the same country.

England stays a little green all winter. 💚

Beaurocracy is appropriately impossible to spell.

Alcohol and marijuana are different drugs.

I've seen at least five signs marked "footpath" just on my walk from shitty campus housing down into the town.

The scales we all must balance internally are too many for us to ever attend to all of them adequately--mental self-attention and self-care quickly becomes another harried, endless errand run without friends to help one take a break from feeling the shifts in the balances.

Children are the final hiding place of wisdom.

Sitting down is nice after a long walk.

Adventures are all well and good until one is homesick; home is all well and good until it starts to drive one towards adventure. In the middle, we have everybody, at some point or another--so how come we can't all hang out in the void space? A logistical travesty.