I make a lot of notes on my pocket supercomputer. Like, a LOT. Some of them are ideas for songs, some of them are grocery lists. I've had a running one I started several years ago, sort of a New Year's resolution type thing, with some big goals for the year ahead and some smaller things I need to do… a big ole sprawling To Do list. Every year, I manage to cross a few things off the list but I end up adding a lot more. And when the new year rolls around I just change one number. 2022 becomes 2023 becomes 2024 becomes 2025… This year, one of the goals was to update this stupid website and write more here on this blog. And we can see how that's turned out, can't we? I have a suspicion part of my aversion to it lies in the term “blog” itself. I hate it as a word. And I don't particularly care for sitting down in front of my laptop and doing much of anything. Sending out booking emails feels like winning a contest in hell, for instance. Nevertheless, here we are.

All of which is to say, I'm having a fine summer and I hope you are, too. I've been in Montana since the end of May. It's been fantastic. The fishing and time in nature has been good medicine. The shows have been swell. I took a couple weeks off in early August and went down to Colorado to play a few shows and visit family. Nice little mini vacation in what has always felt like a working vacation anyway. I've got 2 months left up here and then it's back down to Oklahoma & Texas for the fall/winter. I'm really looking forward to playing some rock & roll with my bands again after months of this solo folk singer nonsense. Need to suck it up and get to work on firing off booking emails. 

You probably need a band for an event, don't you???

I routinely get asked where I stay when I'm here in Montana, by the tourists filing in and out of Yellowstone, by the bartenders at the venues, by guys at the fly shop who begin to recognize me because I'm in there way too often buying flies to replace the ones I get stuck in bushes and trees and the occasional trout that breaks me off. And they all look at me strangely for a few seconds when I say “I live in a van down by the river…” but after those initial seconds they all, without exception, say something along the lines of “that's so awesome/you're so lucky/I wish I was doing that.” And I say, well, you can just do things. But they're right, it is awesome. And I am lucky. 

But maybe it's not luck?

Anyhow, where DOES the time go? If you think too long about the nature of Time, its passage, how we measure it, etc & so forth, you'll go insane. And you'll waste a lot of time. This summer has flown by. This whole year has. Every year seems to go by faster and faster. I was talking about it with my dad a couple weeks ago and he said "Son, you ain't seen nothing yet. Wait til you're my age…" Of course, this is the same guy who, when I turned 24 another lifetime ago, said he didn't think I'd make it that far. And I'm still not sure if he was joking. Either way, though, barring some radical advances in medical technology, I can't really imagine reaching his venerable age myself. Not being fatalistic, either. Really it's just that my leg hurts and it has me feeling like an old man every single day, hobbling around, silently cursing the body breaking down on me. It's my fault though. I wiped out on the rocks on the riverside in early June. Probably cracked my shin, according to the good doctor Steffan May, but by the time I complained about it to him, it was already 2 months later, and not much could be done at that point. So, carry on with a hitch in the giddy up, old man. There are fish to catch. And maybe I'll get a robot leg one of these days, in the not too distant future. 

Ok, I'm gonna go send out some booking emails now. The Dango needs work in the cold months. And these blog posts simply do not pay the bills. Maybe I'll write more in 2026. Who knows? Probably not, but then the future is largely unwritten. Hoho. Indeed.

See ya when I see ya…
JD