Quiet

Or...Talking to Hear a Voice

It's been a while (two weeks) since I've written anything, and to be honest it's been a while since I've had anything to write about. This has been my longest stay at a campground yet (all said and done it will be 8 nights), and I'm ready to move again.



Something about having wheels under my house makes me feel like I'm not utilizing the RV to its fullest potential when the scenery doesn't change every few days. This is going to be problematic come July, when I have no reason to move except desire, because desire costs money.

Slowly, I'm starting to get into the rhythm of living here. I'm starting to instinctually know where things are, what parts work and what doesn't. I've got the park-and-unfurl routine down to a science, and the batten-down-and-leave. I'm learning what it takes to cook in the limited space I'm allowed, and what I need to work on. Things that I should have packed, things I should have stored, and things I should have gotten rid of. New challenges and projects come to mind daily. Thank the gods for digitally stored to-do lists.

It's lonely out here. This campsite is the farthest I've stayed away from Lexington yet, and though it is by far the most closely packed, and the most populated, I can already feel the isolation from the live I've been living. It's now been, I think, and I am too lazy to check, three weeks since I made the move, and I've yet to have a single visitor. In my, to use the RVer parlance that I've picked up, stick-and-brick house, I'd sometimes go months without a visitor, but for some reason it feels worse living in the RV, more lonely, more isolated. It will take some getting used to, or some distracting adventure.

In a little more than a week, I'll be storing the RV, and most of my belongings, and hitting the road with the Tinderbox Circus Sideshow. We'll be gone for a month, and I could not be more excited. This marks several large milestones for us in Tinderbox. This will be our longest tour yet, with 18 shows in 18 cities, and more coming through every couple days. It's our first tour on our own, rather than hitching a ride on someone else's tour. And, we'll be traveling in OUR tour van. Not one of our personal, daily runners, but a proper tour van, that we bought, with money from our shows. My life will get smaller in size, but for the month of June, and a healthy portion of July, so much larger in grandeur, and the RV will be waiting for me when I get back, for more adventures.

I guess I should include at least one concrete update in this rambling mess, so I'll parrot an announcement that I made a couple of weeks ago on my Facebook page. I'm going to be leaving Bleed Blue Tattoo, and in truth, the body piercing industry as a whole, at the beginning of this tour. Some of you may have suspected this was coming, and some of you knew, because I talked the idea out with you, but it's been final for a while now, and it's pretty damn scary. Tinderbox will be my primary income, but I won't be wasting the idle time I'll find between shows.

I have several side projects in the works to supplement my income, several hobbies that I'll be able to devote time to, and no small few things that I want to study and learn to fill the space in between. There are adventures to be had, sights to be seen, experiences to...experience, and after I return from tour, I'll finally have the time to pursue them.

Finally, I'll leave you to digest this poorly written rambling mess with a couple of updates about the RV itself. One, it has a name now, which will soon be etched on the side. The name I've chosen for my ship on land, which I was inspired to by my latest reading of Walden, is The Wealthy Savage. Second, I fear that the roof is getting worse, and replacing and repairing it will soon need to be at the top of my to-do list. And last, the god damned water system still isn't working.

-Z

P.S. Apologies in the Post Script for the rambling and disjointed nature of this blog post. With working on the tour, and working on the RV, and working on not going mad, I've not been inspired to write very much. This attempt at rectifying my absence did not come out all that well.