Living in Public

180,000 miles in the air last year. 88 nights in hotels. Innumerable tagamet and maalox. I feel like the guy they made fun of in the onion sometimes - in case you don't know, the domestic terminal at SFO has great chow mein by the delta / northwest security gates.

Travel is weird. I have friends in rock bands, they travel even more than me. But they travel with other folks, a shared experience, with varying levels of support staff and stuff from the sublime (major label) to the ridiculous (my couch). I travel alone for the most part.

The last few months I've done a lot of thinking about it. What's good, what's bad. Why it's worth it. Why sometimes it's fun and sometimes it sucks. The fun part will define another post. This one's about some of the reasons it sucks.

For me it's about living without privacy. I like people. I like to talk to people. It's pretty much what I do for a living - go around, talk to people, try to get them to agree with what I'm doing and either join the movement or give me some funding to push the movement forward. But I'm a deeply private person and travel, for work or for play, rips privacy to shreds.

I love my apartment, my peace and quiet, my instruments, my pots and pans, my staple foods. I really like my own bed and towels. I like having a full set of clothes around. I don't really like houseguests, and the band couch above is one of the only exceptions to that rule. They don't come around a lot and I get a lot outta them.

I don't like the hours and hours of non private travel time. Right now I'm alone in the airport terminal, blogging because I don't want to watch TV in the airport bar or run through my book before the flight. The airport is a public space like the subway - no one talks to you unless they're drunk or think you're cutting in line. So we all pretend to have some privacy, we pretend not to smell the farts or notice the nosepicking. There is ubiquitous taupe, grey and blue carpeting. Ambient noise. I hate it. It doesn't stress me out anymore, but I still hate it.

Two nights ago, at dinner with a board member who travels way more than me (actually two of them, both of whom put me to shame) I heard him say that when he gets to the airport he enters a timefree, stressfree zone in his head. Never gets tense about lines, never thinks of where he is as being grounded in a specific time zone. It's a good way to think about it. I've certainly lost the habit of being stressed at the airport. But can't quite grip the time concept. He flies from Japan to Germany twice a month, so perhaps that's different.

This is all just carping because I wish I were going home instead of another hotel in another town. Ah well.