Sometimes the Dark Road is blessedly uneventful. A grind, but a predictable one. Other than a few bumps, the time on the Canadian East Coast was like the following: the grind to get where we were obliged to be, the grind of set up, the updraft of The Night, the grind of teardown and so on. There seems little to write about, but you know that’s not true. What seems uneventful is actually a compacted series of high impact events and you just get used to that as “normal” or “even” or “uneventful”.
The Nights find me in the stratosphere and falling gently back to earth when I leave the stage. A strange and vulnerable state, there’s no bravado. I’m soft, I’m open…maybe a little too much. I run into a few folk still lingering outside the theatre doors. They try to tell me what they saw, they try to find the language, and I end up imploring, “Write it to me. If I could ask for 15 more minutes of your time, at some point in the next few days, write it to me. We could use a break from having to describe ourselves,” I say.
There are promises made in the humid night and then I’m back on stage, on my knees, wrapping cable with Charlie.
The last thing I see when I am falling asleep in the motel a few hours later are the faces from earlier, looking like SJ and I just kicked in the door of their house. Not a violent act, but more like a storm wind might do. It’s a look of shock, sort of.
“You can be the weatherman, or you can be the weather,” SJ says to me our first morning in the UK.
We’re talking about something else entirely, but he makes it sound like a permanent choice.
“Sometimes you’re one, sometimes you’re the other,” is what I end up thinking.
I think he and I are mostly the weather. I am, anyway.
gh
Gregory Hoskins 