It is day 50 of my current tour. I have not shared anything on social media in a week, and I have not posted a blog in over a month. There is a part of me that cherishes the freedom to live my life without sharing it immediately with the rest of the world.
I realize that I could get a lot more attention by sharing every little facet of my trip through pictures, comments, and whatnot. However, I believe that we as a society, myself included, spend way too much time on our phones. When I’m in a place where I have never been and may never be again, I prefer to give the time that I am in that space to be in that space rather than working to give a mere glimpse of it to someone else.
Perhaps it may seem like a hedonistic streak of selfishness to live in the world and not catalog digital proof of my existence for any willing spectator to acknowledge and publicly scrutinize in real time, but I still sometimes prefer my journey to be my journey.
But I do have some great stories to tell, and I may or may not ever have the chance to tell them on a stage as I would like, but this blog should be serving as a platform where I can tell those stories. So, although I didn’t share much about the journey to get here, I do intend to share more on the journey back.
I put aside three months to make this trip. Theoretically, the halfway point was five days ago. I will reach the northernmost point of my tour tomorrow when I ride to Quebec City, but because of today’s rain, I am staying another night at a hostel in Magog.
It was built in 1948 after the last prespty for the church next door was burnt down.
It was a convent for a couple of decades before it became a hostel in 2016. Magog is a cuttle little town on the northern tip of Lake Memphamagog, which is bordered at the southern tip by Newport, Vermont, where I wrote my 17th song and offered poetry at the farmers market.
The downtown area has a number of restaurants and shops, with everything in French. It’s kinda fun figuring out what things mean even if I can’t figure out how to produce it. You’d think French would be an easy language to learn since you don’t pronounce a third of the letters. Anyway, I thought the benches were clever.
Yesterday, after a misty walk to get some Rain-x for my helmet, I sat on the porch of the hostel and write my 19th song of this trip. Well, the music and lyrics were written on the porch, but I didn’t find out what the song was about until went for a walk in the lakefront park after a dinner of mushroom poutine and a chocolate stout. It’s sort of a breakup/empowerment anthem called “After”, the gist of which is after all that’s happened, “things just ain’t the way they were before.”
When I get a decent recording of it, I’m sure I’ll post a blog with they lyrics and all. I’ve been releasing videos of the songs I’ve written so far along with videos I produced using footage from last year’s tour to accompany my songs and selections from the Hamilton soundtrack. I have no good reason for why I chose to release them daily as I travel instead of when I produced the Hamilton and Music Across America series a few months ago.
I seem to have an aversion to consistency. That’s probably one of the reasons I’m still single. Anyway, I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do, and my legacy will become whatever it will be. Considering that my endeavors seem just as fragmented as the average 2023 attention span, I figure things are bound to line up one of these days.
But for the time being, the fact that I can’t upload these images is frustrating and convinces me to just go back to reading my book.