The Perils Of Touring - 4: After The Goldrush

When I woke up in my own bedroom after six long weeks on the CC Special a wave of relief washed over me that was so profound and physical that it literally paralysed my brain for about four hours and left me slow-witted and forgetful for days.

But after a week or so of pottering around my apartment in a bath-robe normality had well and truly reasserted itself, and along with it a vague, cloying sense of disappointment and longing for the various manic kicks and satisfactions of the road.

Suddenly I felt like a water-headed teenager from some dust-farm berg, so desperate for new horizons that one summer he goes wild on sugary red wine and runs away with the circus.

He finds a whole new world. Life on the road, big cities, elephants, bi-sexual acrobats and fearless lion-tamers with 3-gram-a-day coke habits. He mucks out the horse-floats and runs the shooting gallery and sneers at the seemingly endless parade of goggle-eyed rubes packing the big-top with their fat children, all ripe to have their pockets picked by the Russian cigar-smoking midget who reads him bed-time stories and tells him he has found his true home.

But after a few months he starts to miss his parents, his bed, his buck-toothed, illiterate girl-friend. You know, the little things. He pauses while scooping up mounds of gently steaming elephant poop and leans for a moment on his shovel, staring whistfully into the blank blue sky. His thoughts drift back in time and space to home. Home. Home.
 

Then, one night the Ringmaster and his amiable three-breasted wife invite the kid out to a bar for a few stiff drinks and some friendly talk about his bright future with the troupe, and the last thing he remembers is that strange, charismatic old man leering at him over a glass of black rum.

Then he wakes up, dumped like a bag of garbage right back on his parents doorstep at five in the morning on a teusday- no wallet, no shoes - in the middle of a blinding hail-storm.

Next day he is sitting back in school with his slack-jawed, hay-seed class mates who now treat him like some sort of freakish cross between a convicted rapist, a mythical beast and a failed entrepeneur. He reflects on the totality of his personal journey into the unknown and he realises it was all a kind of technicolor bullshit. 

The angst and itchy adventurism that launched him into the world was just as much of a trojan horse as the weepy nostalgia and insecurity that made him long for home. That big wooden horse was full of lazyness and fear. None of it made any sense or served any purpose at-all.

There is a point to all this drivel, by the way. I'm just working out what it is.
Wait......it's coming.....

Well, I suppose this is all just a bloated, wide angled way of repeating that old saw "You Can't Go Home Again". The routine sense of displacement and the constant, grating anticipation of a return to normality that sets in towards the middle of a long tour are things that you can learn to miss, no matter how perverse it may seem at the time.

It's not so strange, really. Some people chop their own legs off because of a nagging sense that the legs just don't belong to them. Is it wisdom to hinder these people? Can we really tell them they are wrong?

I suppose we can, but who wants to take responsibility for keeping a close eye on a loved one who really, really, really wants to chop off their own legs? The Reverse-Phantom-Limb crowd make everybody nervous, and why not? They are wierdo royalty. They fly a flag of wierd that makes necrophilia look like a gimmick, a cheap attention grabber. When the forces of wierd turn on each-other and make wierd war for strange supremacy, my money is going on the cats who want to dismember themselves, but have difficulty explaining why.

Oh Christ, what the fuck am I babbling about now? Have all these anti-inflamatories shrivelled my brain down to a little grey nut? Did the bowel churning drones of the MRI machine fry my reason? It may be so, but that's another story.

Fuck it, this is a quasi-humorous, mostly depressing rock'n'roll blog, not a scientific journal. I'll make sense when there's sense to be made and not a moment sooner. Everyone go back to your meals. Nothing to see here.