It’s been months since I really wrote anything here. My friend Jake tells me that it’s important to write, because writing is the only real indicator of time passed. He says that writing is the witness you give your future self in order to remember the details – I suppose the defense, or the opposition, is that maybe the details – when they fade into obscurity, the fog around them adds the magic that makes all the best memories worth remembering. I heard someone say that people will only remember the way you made them feel. I think that some memories are best left without details, then your feelings and the nostalgia are left to captain that memory into all the places that make good memories better – usually with a good helping of exaggeration and imagination. I think all good writers exaggerate, the best must be liars – the ones who are always writing have to enlarge the details before they’ve even gone through the graces of forgetting them.

Here is the feeling of the past months. I finished tour – sat on the beach for a month and wrote songs and rode my bicycle and tried to figure out home-life and home-work and I tried my hardest not to spoil the romance of the place I’d created while on the road.

When the fog came I was in Utah with Randy and Bobo and a good crew of Young Life people and there was no snow there to speak of but it was good and cold and sunny like an 80’s film about the mountains. I spent three days alone in the Salt Lake City Red Lion Hotel and walked all over that city, speaking with nobody. I found a book under the table in a McDonalds downtown, considered it providence and read the whole thing. It was a good story and I still don’t completely understand what happened in that story.

I spent a week at home for Christmas and it was everything a week home for Christmas should be.

I came back to San Diego and the sun welcomed me in. The waves were good for a long, long time. I surfed with Dave and by myself and got the barrel of my life at Blacks and seawater ran out of my nose every time I bent over for many, many days from the much more common barrels that detonated on my head and spun me across the ocean floor where air, sand and water are all churning together in a big noisy blended roar. Another couple good friends visited, we sat in a circle on the hardwood in our living room and we talked and sang old songs loud and said goodbye to people who weren’t leaving yet and then we all cried and hugged one another and forgot it in the morning. I drank coffee in a strictly regulated group of locations.

I played the Casbah with a band called NO that I like and then I played the Copper Door with a guy named Ethan who I like better. I built a space with lots of musical instruments and plastic boxes with recording equipment screwed into them and I made a new band called Seafarers where all the members are me and none of us sing.

www.soundcloud.com/seafarers

The picture from the top is called “The Chancellor Sorely Tried” and it’s what comes up when you search the internet for Seafarers. It’s sort of like “inspiration.”

 I’ve made very little money since tour, and I made no money on tour. 

LA or OC, this is a show I am very excited about. If you came to the Detroit Bar show, you’ll remember Ethan Hulse headlining that one. He’s doing it again but at an all new place. I’m so excited about this one. After the Casbah being such a roaring success, this show is promising to be an even better followup.