I was thinking today about the tour I accompanied Chalk Talk on back in winter 2023 into 2024 . . . I can’t believe it has already been two years. I was their driver and roadie and we visited something like nine cities in as many days. And then I left Savannh after the final show and drove through the night back to Virginia, a long long drive.

And today I remembered also this interview they did before the tour started:

Aw :,)

For a while now I have been writing a novella-length piece called

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING
TO ST. STARSAILOR

. . . which is about those two unmoored periods of nonstop travel between August 2023 to February 2024 (which includes the Chalk Talk tour) and May 2024 to February 2025 . . . now I am on track to rack up another chunk of my life doing the same sort of thing. It has taken so long because there is so much to say. Like everything else I ever publish here, it’s OK if no one else ever reads it. I just need to write it down is all.

There are certainly worse ways to get on with the business of living as I have chosen to live if you can endure the near-constant exhaustion and occasional bouts of aimlessness. Sometimes it can be a little lonely. Still, my solo tour of the world has been my way of cooling down my brain and warding off the Darkness . . . of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Once I start thinking, I’m doomed . . . it’s better for me now if I carry on in this way until I find some other means of saving myself . . . otherwise I’m just staying up till sunrise in my vampire tower in Berlin, all the while recalling disasters despite all my efforts not to. Truthfully, I think I know what that future thing will be, the thing that will yank me out of the same Swamp of Sadness that swallows up Artax the horse in THE NEVERENDING STORY . . .

. . . but then I guess we’ll all find out together. Believe it or not, I am optimistic about getting out from under the shadow of this thing. There is some use in me yet. When I was going through a particularly rough period a few years ago, my good friend Tombo in Spain reached out and said something very nice to me, though I am not sure if he was fully aware of its life-saving potency and the effect it had and continues to have on me. I very nearly cried when I read it. He said: “You are definitely more valuable to other people alive than dead. Your sensitivity is a virtue. Everything that you have done and has happened to you, and your awareness of it, makes you more of a wonderful, unique, and precious human being, not less.” I think about that every day, specifically the first part. It really does keep me from going down to Skeleton Town, so to speak. Thanks brother.

Artax is eventually rescued from the swamp, by the way, once he is released from the prison of his own despair. And afterwards he and his best friend Arteyu ride freely and happily once again upon the plains of Fantasia. So perhaps there is hope for me still after all. It will be more difficult for me to get out from the swamp on account of my best friend has died. He has gone someplace that, at least for now, I cannot follow. So saying, I will continue to go it alone, but I will do my best all the same. Perhaps I won’t always be alone. I have to find out . . . What else is there?