Audience Participation Time

(Nothing creatively prepared tonight, just some thoughts and ideas I want to try to get off my chest.)

I’ve been in a rather pensive mood the past few weeks. That happens to me in February, even though it has been a rather warm winter it is still gray and blah outside and you can’t really do anything anywhere. This is when I find myself in a rut of getting up, going to the office, going home, spending the night watching television, and wondering why my life just seems so boring. I never feel alive in the month of February, it’s always like I’m just serving those last few months of a prison sentence. Just killing time…

The cool thing is that I now know that I always get in this mood at this time of year and try to adjust for it, which at least keeps me from spending too much time in the dark corners of my mind. Now, last year what I was planning to do right about now is make my way back down to New Orleans since that was the one place on the planet where my life always seemed to make sense. Right now that really isn’t an option since if I went down there I probably wouldn’t be sitting in Café du Monde, drinking coffee and wondering about life’s mysteries. No, I would probably be marching into Entergy’s office and consulting them on how to reconstruct the electrical grid. Or at least trying to do something useful down there. I’ll make my way back to the Big Easy, but I want to give the city a little more time to recover.

This leaves me with the problem of not having any idea where to go on vacation right now. It’s a pretty serious problem given that since June I haven’t been any place that wasn’t Kansas City, Chicago or South Bend. So I want to open this up to my reading audience, any ideas on place for me to head off to for a few days to clear my head and think things through a little more? Preferably a location reachable by Southwest? (I mean, I would love to head down to Sydney for a few days or just crash in Galway but that is a bit more air time than I am looking for right now.) Post some ideas, I need to figure out a good place where I could just hang out for a few days.

Otherwise, I think that this is going to be a rather quiet weekend. I should be able to finally finish my “Best of 2005 Concert Series” CD set. This is a project that I started last year and it is in my mind pretty cool. The idea is that I look at all the bands that I saw last year and I build a compilation CD featuring every one that I actually have some tracks from. Which for 2005 is going to turn into a 3 disc, 48 track compilation (depending on how I finally decide on the “Is Lyle Lovett and his Large Band different than Lyle Lovett” question). My hope is to do this every year and that at some point in the future all I’ll need to do is grab a CD and suddenly remember where I was at this point in my life. It’s documenting my life through music, a welcome addition to my overall documenting efforts. Just wait until I finally buy a digital video camera, then you’ll get video podcasts of my life.

Oh, and I always feel the need to announce this but I am reading another Mike Gayle novel, this one is called “Turning Thirty.” I mention this because reading Mike Gayle novels typically result in my life turning upside down. Could be a coincidence, maybe not, but to be honest, I really wouldn’t mind having my life turned upside down right about now. Could use the change of perspective. Have a great weekend everyone.