Tales From the Road

Sometimes I turn around and realize it’s been three months since I last posted on my blog. I have a very active social media presence between Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, each of which has its strengths, but I’ve missed the luxury of being able to more fully explore my thoughts.

As a traveling performer, I often repeat my schedule from year to year and therefore have a large number of friends I see only when I come to their area. We do keep up with each other via social media, which means that each of us has a grip on the key events of the other’s life, but it does drive home what I’m not posting online when I find myself repeating the same conversation to catch people up.

I pushed myself this year. It was a deliberate choice, and one where I weighed the risks fairly accurately, but I was definitely getting crispy in the fall. I didn’t burn out, thankfully, which happened in 2011, but I got closer than I’m comfortable with.

At the end of 2011 (which I still call “Black ‘11”) I was tired and questioning a lot about my life. I questioned my career choices, life choices, and even my continued existence in my first suicidal ideation since my twenties. In response, I made a few ground rules for myself that have served me very well in the meantime.

Some of them were creative choices that I’ve described elsewhere, a decision to prize artistic vision over potential commercial success, but some were very practical. My European tours that year had been overwhelming, and I decided to cap my busking tours at eight weeks. The intervening years have shown this to be a good rule, but this year I got ambitious. I was turning forty, after all.

I figured I had something to prove, and so I booked a three-month tour of Europe. It was fantastic, and I was very careful with my spoons, but it was still very tiring. Around week ten I realized that eight weeks was a good tour limit, but I wrapped up the tour on a high note and was looking forward to returning to Italy even as I left.

This is where I got careless. I landed Thursday night and I was at Pennsic Friday morning. Pennsic is a two-week immersively-medieval event in southwestern Pennsylvania, which I’ve been attending for over fifteen years. The quick turnaround hadn’t been my original plan, since I had intended to take a few days off, but someone in our group couldn’t fulfill their commitment to deal with the bureaucracy and I was the only person physically capable of stepping in (for SCAdians: we lost our Land Agent and I was only two hours away).

From there things started to cascade. As is my usual habit, I played music at Pennsic for the week before leaving to open the New York Renaissance Faire, returning to play again Monday through Friday and then back to New York for the second weekend. I’ve been doing this for years with little difficulty, but coming immediately on the heels of an already-overlong summer tour was a bit much. Looking at pictures taken of me that second weekend, I’m pretty confident I know what I’ll look like in ten years having seen such ravages of fatigue on my face.

I don’t regret any of my choices, and taking long breaks from music during the weeks between New York Faire weekends was deeply restorative, but it’s not a lesson I’m eager to repeat. I’ll try to keep that in mind as future birthday milestones parade toward me.

1997 was twenty years ago. It's a little hard to believe.

In June of that year I had what I still regard as one of the worst days of my life. It had been a joke that I and the woman I was dating were both spending a day with our respective exes, showing both that we were able to stay friends without hard feelings and that we trusted each other.

My visit went poorly. There were more hard feelings than I suspected, and I was hit really hard by the situation. Since her visit was also over, I decided to seek support from my lover, only to be told upon arriving that she had gotten back together with her ex.

That was a bad day.

It also involved a lot of driving. Ninety minutes to my first visit, ninety minutes home, and two hours to my second visit which wrapped up around midnight. Half delirious with grief and fatigue, it occurred to me that no one would ever know if a fatal car accident had been intentional.

I chose not to try. And now I've lived half my life since that decision.

In moments of stress, facing hard challenges and difficult decisions, I still think back to that night. Part of me wonders if I did actually go through with it and if everything since has been a glorious dream. Another part of me sees that moment as a turning point, the last serious consideration I ever gave to suicide (though it was many years before I firmly discarded the possibility). Either way, I'm in the bonus round of my life, and grateful for every day.

What an amazing trip. It's been a week and I'm still marvelling.

I turned forty a few months ago, and to celebrate midlife I made the decision to double down on my traveling. So I spent the beginning of the year busking my way around Chile before heading to Peru to spend the big day in Machu Picchu.

I also scheduled a 3-month European tour for the summer, two months in familiar Italy, a few weeks in too-long-neglected Croatia, and a week breaking new ground in Bosnia. And then I learned that my favourite musician was hosting Lost Evenings, a 4-night concert series in London.

Frank Turner writes about life on the road in a way I've never heard from any other artist. From the glories of travel to the challenges of friendship and the disintegration of relationships, he covers it all, and he's an expert because his tour schedule makes me look like a homebody. And I was scheduled to be an $80 EasyJet flight (round trip!) away from one of his performing highlights.

Of course I bought it. I ruthlessly budgeted out the costs, and decided to see the final two nights (Sunday and Monday) so I would still have 3/4 of a weekend to busk before heading out. I caught a 5:30am train to Milan after a very short night of anxious sleep, grabbed a shuttle bus from the train station to the Linate airport, flew into London, grabbed a train into the city, wandered around a bit, checked into my hotel (Hotwire found me a 3-star room for just a few dollars more than a hostel bed), and took a nap.

And then had my mind blown by the best concert I've ever seen.

Sunday was acoustic night, where Frank headlined with a solo show following Beans on Toast (who I'd seen open for Frank in New York in 2015) and Scott Hutchinson of Frightened Rabbit. It was incredible. I'm not a big fan of the acoustic versions Frank has recorded, but live they were breathtaking. His song introductions were intimate and vulnerable and everything I could have wanted from a favourite artist. He truly captured the flavour of an open-mic night in a venue of over 3000 people.

Monday found me again wandering London, meeting up with an old friend for drinks before the show. Skinny Lister opened for Frank, a band I fell in love with when they also opened for him in NYC in 2015 then whose Brooklyn concert I had caught the following Thursday, and who I saw headline a small show in New Orleans last fall. It was a fantastic concert and I hugged a stranger at Frank's prompting, but I don't think anything will ever compare to that "Sensible Sunday Revival" lineup the night before.

I took a long stroll around the city before flying out early Tuesday afternoon, and I was thrilled to discover my budget had been dead-on. Of course, I splurged on meals and a concert t-shirt (which I never buy but which was too good a commemoration to pass up), but the credit card statement is a problem for August. The entire experience was a case study in how to feel alive.

I do my best never to take anything for granted.

I refer to shows where I don't have contracts, even longstanding parts of my schedule, as "prospective" or "tentative". I'm very careful to label spreadsheet columns as "projections" rather than "expectations". And I'm literally religious about giving thanks when those formal hopes come to fruition.

I have a bit of a complex about the whole thing, if I'm honest with myself, and if I'm even more honest it's because I'm both leery of commitment and distrustful of expectation. I am the most optimistic cynic you will ever meet, and a proud Pollyanna. I fear, every day, that my business model will crumble even as I make plans for two years in the future.

So when people say, "I'll see you next year!" my response, unless I'm equivocal on the idea, is a firm "you will if I have anything to say about it!" I'm a fan of "see you down the road" as a goodbye. And so far it's served me well. For which I'm thankful, but make no assumptions about what may happen tomorrow.

I've found a favourite coffee house to hang out in! It's a pity that it's a significant drive, so I only come once or twice a week when I can combine it with other errands, but it's a pleasant morning to sit and write.

The Sherwood Forest Faire is going very well for me so far! I'm really enjoying Austin audiences, they're a musician's delight, and it's a real pleasure to be surrounded by friends again after so much time alone on the road. It's one of the great luxuries of my life that I can alternate periods of intense isolation with times of brilliant socializing. Two months alone, two months with friends, three months alone, and another few months with friends: I'm a creature of extremes and this delights me.

I'm going to a New Year's Eve party and I just read the invitation; it's a wake for a brutal year, and we'll be bringing sentiments to burn and wishes for the new year. It's a fairly standard Yule ritual, and not my first rodeo. But like everything else, as I approach my fortieth birthday, it carries a lot of memories.

1998

I had just finished my first season at the Ohio Renaissance Festival and I was informally engaged to my girlfriend of two years (no ring, but she had asked and I said, "yes"). I was on top of the world, and when it came my turn to express my thoughts on the passing year and wishes for the next I stood tall.

"It's been a year of music and love, and I hope for even more to come!"

It was a sentiment to remind me to be careful what I wished for. My relationship ended in early April, but I booked my first full summer/fall season of renaissance festival work and was very much on my toes with launching my career. This meant that I was fresh meat on the circuit, and I call that period my "summer of love".

A dear old friend still makes fun of me for breathlessly calling every week to exclaim, "there's this girl!" as I repeatedly fell head over heels at a dizzying rate. I look back on that time with fondness and I'm on good terms with several of the ladies involved, but while I'm glad to have lived it I would never want to repeat it.

What a wild ride it was, and now I'm a lot more careful with my wishes. I'll let you know what I come up with.

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.

I am thankful, today as every day, for the many blessings in my life. I'm thankful for the love of those who surround and support me. I'm thankful for my parents, who nurtured my wild side while instilling a strong work ethic. And I'm thankful for the opportunities that have come my way, without which all my preparation would have been wasted.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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 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.