I'm booked through July, here's where you can find me!

January 10 - March 7
Busking tour of South America (Santiago de Chile, Valparaiso, Concepcion, Temuco, Valdivia, Villarrica, Vina del Mar, Antofagasta, Calama, Arica, Cusco, and Lima)

March 12 - 16
Gulf Wars (SCA)
Hattiesburg, MS

March 17 - April 9
Weekends
Sherwood Forest Faire
Bastrop, TX

May 2 - July 27
Busking tour of Europe (Genoa, Vicenza, Cremona, Modena, Orvieto, Gubbio, Foligno, Pisa, Dubrovnik, Mostar, Sarajevo, Split, Rijeka, Ljubljana)

July 30 - August 4
Pennsic War (SCA)
Slippery Rock, PA

It's one of my greatest strengths. The world is full of brilliant artists and sharp business minds, but being competent at both is likely my greatest competitive advantage.

I just said "competitive advantage" in describing an artistic career. I rest my case.

I called it a career, which is also a strong argument in my accountancy. But I'm overselling my case. The key to my success has been knowing when to temper practicality with art, and vice versa.

For example, I just booked a completely frivolous trip to London while I'm busking Italy, since I could keep expenses under $300 including the concert tickets for the show I wanted to see (two back-to-back Frank Turner performances in his concert series "Lost Evenings"). I booked the plane seats now because I wanted to guarantee my attendance once I had my concert tickets, but I haven't yet booked my flight from Cleveland to Milan because it's a business expense I want to be deductible on my 2017 taxes instead of fiscal 2016. By flying out on Sunday morning and returning on Tuesday, I'll only lose a single day to busking, minimally impacting my work schedule.

And so I've put my accountant brain into action in an artistic goal. This is my career write small, from busking tours of amazing places to working festivals where other people go for vacation; I'm not here to make a buck, but to support my own happiness. I've been deeply lucky that it's still rolling along, and I consider the soul of an accountant to be another lucky break.

Many thanks to you all, without whom I could never have made it work!

It's funny, but I've been conceptualizing my return to Chile for so long that is hasn't felt real. Ever since I caught a bus out of Valparaiso in 2014 it has been my intention to return, and even buying a plane ticket didn't add much more than typical money anxiety.

But now I've got an itinerary and I've started booking housing. For some reason, the reality of the trip only starts to really come together in my mind once I've done all my googling for busking info, when I've read my guidebook and marked the places to go, and when I've looked at bus routes in order to map out a progression from city to city in a way that makes practical sense. So now I have it, and it feels like A Thing. I'll let you in on the details next week; I want to give my Patreon patrons a bit of a head start on the details since they're helping finance the trip.

Interestingly, the high-profile Macchu Pichu visit isn't really my focus. At a friend's prodding, for which I'm grateful, I've explored my options to get there beyond just putting the nearby city of Cuzco onto the appropriate part of my calendar, and I've asked my parents for a very luxurious Christmas/birthday present to bring the details together. Beyond that, I'm too busy focusing on January to really give my full attention yet to March.

Don't get me wrong, I expect to be floored by the ruins and I've heard legends from fellow travelers. Still, the busking side of things is what really gets my creative juices flowing, possibly because I unhealthfully define myself through my work. Regardless, I've worked through the first phase of anxiety (though I'm sure there will be others), and now I'm eager and ready!

Having experienced my first Renaissance Festival at Baycrafters (see Origin Story Part I), I went off to college. I was dating a girl in Dayton, Suzzi Bibby, while going to school in Columbus, and I accumulated a lot of miles between the cities. It was she who introduced me to the Ohio Renaissance Festival.

We went as patrons, and soon were going in costume. We would treat the admission fee as a cover charge and spend all day in the pub, watching band after band. Soon we were playing together the music we were hearing, with my experiments on mountain dulcimer (no relation to my now-primary instrument, the hammered dulcimer) being accompanied by her playing on recorder and bodhrán (an Irish frame drum).

We called ourselves the Tweedford Minstrels, since our music straddled English, Scottish, and Irish traditions just as a fictitious ford on the River Tweed would straddle the countries of England and Scotland. Our first and only performance was at the Ohio State University Medieval and Renaissance Faire in May of 1997.

We had broken up the previous January, and the band outlived the relationship only briefly. I was branching out into new music and we weren't getting together to rehearse as often now that we were dating other people more local to us. I had taken up the cittern, a ten-string instrument that had more volume, more flexibility, and more of a renaissance image. And so I went solo.

In 1998 I played a madrigal dinner, and my hosts Mac and Cheri Corbeil insisted that I audition for the Ohio Renaissance Festival. I didn't feel myself to be ready, but I played the Ohio State Medieval Faire again on my own and gathered the courage to audition for ORF that summer.

To my amazement I got the gig.

Everything else I've done followed from that moment. I discovered that my love of performing went deeper than I had imagined, and I learned that there were people who made a living by traveling the country and bringing joy to their audiences. I investigated the Renaissance Festival circuit and began plotting a future, even as I commuted to North Carolina to fulfill an internship with IBM. A stark choice lay before me, and I was strongly considering Option B.

I have never regretted treading the path less taken.

I have my strengths and my weaknesses, in friendship as in everything else, and my greatest strength in that arena is in supporting my friends who are going through big changes. I see opportunities in difficult times and find them exciting, and with my life experiences I like to think that I'm good in easing people through abrupt trauma. Job changes and divorces are my specialties, in light of my own past.

What I am not good at is offering emotional support in coping with longstanding but unchangeable hardship. I'm not good at coping, in general, preferring to effect big changes in response, but not everyone has such freedom. Kids, finances, and strong senses of commitment, in particular, hold a lot of people in a course they hope and expect to get eventually better but will be unpleasant in the meantime.

This is not my forte. I'm great with a late-night call that says "I left him" or "he left me" but I'm terrible with cocktails over "I'm miserable but can't do anything about it". I'm not good with "I need to suffer through this job another year", but solid with "I just quit/was fired". I am sad to say that I have offered insufficient support to friends who needed it because I can't hear those stories for long before being the voice for radical change.

It was a casual conversation that got deep very quickly, which is my favourite kind. She led with, "the way you live and travel means you'll have no regrets on your death bed". I responded, without thinking, "no, I'll just regret not taking better care of the relationships I sacrificed for travel".

I then expounded, "I'm an egoist but I'm not a narcissist: not a user, just neglectful". Harsh truths at the end of a tiring weekend.

I'm not good at openness, at sharing my deepest thoughts and feelings. I very much feel that it's my role in life to act as an inspiration, to encourage by example other people to reach far beyond what I'll ever manage. But there's a dark side as well.

A lot of what I share is built around the idea of "this is what it looks like to accomplish your dreams". I want my life to serve as a goad, giving permission to people who are questioning their own paths, but having reached my dreams brought problems as well; I was so used to striving that I didn't know what to do once the heights were attained.

It caused a pretty serious personal crisis, and it's only five years later on that I'm really open to showing my pain. It was 2011, and I had everything I ever wanted. My festival career was on a solid foundation, I had eight tours of Italy under my belt, and a good relationship to top it all off.

But I was miserable.

I had spent years building my life and I didn't know what to do with the edifice I'd created. I understood my basic problem so I set new goals for myself, but since they were artificial I didn't care enough to exert myself and then I had a failure on top of the previous dissatisfaction.

So I took a vacation.

Having achieved one dream, maybe it was time to find a new path. I loved traveling for work, but if I liked hobby travel better then maybe it was time to find a new career. And I knew where I had to go: Buenos Aires.

My great-grandfather had emigrated from Italy to BA, where my grandfather was born before the family moved back to Italy. When his children all went to the US, my great-grandfather retired to Argentina, where he is buried. Having spent significant time in Italy and with a visit to Ireland accomplished, Buenos Aires was the last significant family place I hadn't seen. The last entry on my bucket list.

And that was a part of it, as well. Maybe I wasn't done with my career, maybe I was done with living, and by going to Argentina I was giving myself permission to commit suicide. This wasn't ideation, I wasn't having fantasies or plotting methods, but acknowledging the possibility as a legitimate choice.

And so I went, and spent ten days wishing I'd brought a dulcimer; I enjoyed the trip, but wanted to be a busker. I realized that my career still had heights to ascend and side roads to explore. And I embraced my latest challenge: difficult music. I had spent much of the fall banging my head against an Elizabethan lute tune, Dowland's Lachrimae Pavane, and decided that such music was my new goal.

But it wasn't for several years that I took suicide off the table. As someone who sees his Purpose in setting an example to others, I realized that I would undermine everything I ever achieved, everything I ever wanted, if I pulled a trigger. Instead of acting as an Inspiration, I would become a Cautionary Tale, and anyone who might have been encouraged by my life would be, instead, warned away from bold choices.

I can't have that. I won't have that. And so I'm on this ride until something else brings it to an end.

Identity is a tricky beast. One of the most fun topics I studied in grad school was the development of group identities, and it's still one of my favourite concepts to read up on. And, of course, there's no purer expression of the conundrum of identity than a name.

I go by a few names, these days. For many years I was exclusively "Vince", militantly even. As a child, I was offended by my grandfather's insistence in calling me "Vincenzo". As an adult I came to embrace "Vincenzo", using it as my SCA monicker as well as during my travels in Italy. In the SCA I wanted a "persona" (character) name that I would remember was me when shouted across a field, and in Italian "Vince" is actually a word ("he wins"). So Vincenzo was the obvious solution in both cases.

Except that Vincenzo was more problematic than it felt. After a few tours in Italy I stopped using it: I had an answer when I'd be asked (pale ginger that I am), "but what is your *real* name", but it took too long to explain my family history. Also, I started traveling in South America, where Vincenzo was a less elegant solution to the "he wins" word problem and where I had no emotional connection to "Vicente". And so I began, for the first time in my life, to embrace "Vincent".

I'm getting to know "Vincent" and growing to like him. It's no different a process than any other name I've adopted, and Mr Van Gogh has done a beautiful job in paving the way. It's easier to make a reservation, in any language, for example, and he feels a little more grown up. I'm still fond of "Vince", which is very much my default, but it's an interesting expansion as I embrace further possibilities entering my forties.

But "Vinnie" is right out.

It's been awhile since I posted anything; I've been busy on other platforms. I get occasional ribbing for my loyalty to Livejournal, but I'm not a fan of WordPress and all my archives are here. I can see a time coming when I might port or mirror my blog on Tumblr, but I'm not quite there yet.

I feel besieged by politics, and living in Ohio doesn't help since blanket advertising is the norm, so surfing social media is off my radar tonight. I've puttered through the various books I'm reading (I'm typically switching between three books at any given time), but haven't been able to sink my teeth into any of them. Then it occurred to me that my new bluetooth keyboard just arrived and that I could write words instead of reading them.

So here I am.

I've been delightfully brainstorming lately. I'm planning two potential busking tours abroad for next year, learning music for my next album and plotting out the one to follow it, and bringing my Patreon campaign to life: I'm very pleased with how well it has been received, and I'm having a lot of fun doing the work involved. Plus, of course, living my life and sharing liberally of it on Facebook and Twitter.

I just spent ten days visiting friends in Canada, which was incredibly refreshing. I had two weekends free so I filled them with an SCA event and a Halloween party, with lots of visits in between, and in general had an amazingly-conversation-filled interlude. I seem to have nailed the balance between socializing and down time, and I'm feeling really well and happy, if somewhat full of Halloween treats.

I'm having a rather wonderful year, though I feel guilty as I watch so many of my friends struggling, and I'm superstitiously looking around to see when another shoe might drop. I'm repeating my mantra of "improvisation is my contingency" as I keep on keeping on, and thankfully my anxiety has been fairly calm since I'm spending so much time plotting interesting scenarios that I'm too busy to contemplate worst cases.

So far, so good, and here we go again!

It started with a simple question among friends: do you consider yourself a SCAdian?

For those who don't know, the term refers to a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, or SCA, and my answer was equivocal: "yes, but with an asterisk".

Identity is a very tricky beast for me, especially since I've woven my own from many disparate strands. There are very few identifiers that I ascribe myself unconditionally, while claiming each as a part of my whole self. Rennie? Asterisk. Busker? Asterisk. North American? Asterisk (growing up among certain Old World Italian rituals left me with a sense of otherness).

Musician?

Asterisk.

The one label to which I could wholeheartedly ascribe, through the course of the conversation, was artist. Part of that is the vagueness of the term itself, but more probably lies in my longstanding efforts to embrace the term. "Artist" is so culturally loaded that I spent years adapting and shaping my conception of the label until I could embrace it as my own.

Apparently those exertions worked, and I can't decide whether I need to expand my efforts to other characterizations or to accept that I'm neither fish nor fowl in the other dimensions.

I'm leaning toward acceptance.