Terlingua Texas.

Load in @ The Starlight Theatre in Terlingua 2/15/2010

We have decided to join the 20th Century and begin keeping a Blog.

We will try to write interesting things that y'all want to read. A random assortment of Dutch oven recipes, hidden campsites, Landry's new art projects, and all the rad people we meet on the road.

No more will I write in my journal with the weird feeling of someone reading over my shoulder in the distant future when they find my mispelled scribblings at the bottom of a Goodwill bulk bin. So now all our exaggerations and forgotten memories have a new space called:

Vantastic...

It's a concept that predates the World Wide Web for me (most everything predates the World Wide Web for me.) It's some sort of Walt Whitman wanna be Jack Kerouac compulsion to drive through the night and sleep on the side of the road with cars rushing past, afraid of bears, insane truckers, ghosts, or whatever, so that you can wake up in the morning and discover something new and distant, and feel like perhaps for that moment all your rushing was worth it, because you are living inside a postcard.

Here's our postcard from this morning:

It was 22 degrees when we woke up this morning at a "roadside table," as we call it, somewhere outside Balmorhea TX. There was ice on the ceiling of the van and Landry and I were safe and warm sleeping in our clothes under two down blankets.

A few months ago we toured down the East Coast in a snowstorm in our sweet old van Helga, with no heat, no cigarette lighter to charge our phones, a very out of date Blackberry, and no worries beyond getting to the next gig.

Now we are in the new van with a palm pre broadcasting the internet as we go... seemingly carefree...

So to misquote old Uncle Walt a bit:

"Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, [Ipod, palm pre?] the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

[Not to the world wide web, but we will embrace it at least till the first bill,

Then return to our mispelled scribblings on napkins]"

- A very poor adaption of Walt Whitman's:

"Song of The Open Road."

from Leaves of Grass

read it here: http://www.daypoems.net/poems/1957.html

Yours trully Rich