After spending the better part of three weeks traveling, I’m home and I’m not happy about it.
I should be glad to be here, as traveling has been hot and, thanks to migraines and related conditions, exhausting and occasionally barftastic. But two days into being home, I’m bored and restless. There’s plenty to do, and none of it holds anything new and enlightening.
What’s worse, I don’t have any trips scheduled until November. Ultimately, this is probably good. I need to rebuild my finances, spend time with CJ before they return to school for their senior year next month, and deal with these migraines. Which is happening.
The day after I returned home from eight days on the road to Massachusetts and back, I spent three hours in exhaustive and exhausting testing for my vestibular system with hopes of finding out why I’m never not dizzy and why I throw up frequently and with little notice.
The day after having my head flung around and riding in a contraption they lovingly call “The Washing Machine,” I had a horrible headache.
Then I celebrated Independence Day sicker than I have ever been in my life. Over the course of a dozen miserable hours I vomited more than I have in any single period of my life. I lost count of how many times I puked. Which wasn’t just my commentary on the current state of the country, but an artifact of the tests.
My vestibulars are fucked, y’all.
A week ago today, on my way to Oklahoma, I learned just how fucked. Honestly, the test results were more hopeful than I expected, especially after having a day when I was convinced I had died and gone to Hell.
In addition to having severe migraines in the part of my brain closest to my inner ear that make me dizzy and nauseous, I also have two other disorders happening in the depths of my inner ear.
Of the four organs that control my center of gravity, only one of mine works. That’s why I always feel like I’m about to tip over.
The organs next to it are encased in bone and, likely due to a concussion I got the day Kurt Cobain died (unrelated to his death), that bone has either thinned or developed a hole. That lets too many electrical zaps hit my brain, which then assumes I’m falling and acts as such.
It’s a lot, but the good news is that treatment for the two weird disorders has a pretty good success rate. I start my seven-week course on July 27. As for the migraines, getting the busted stuff on track should help. Traditional migraine treatment should help the rest.
By the time I go to New Orleans in November, there’s a chance I’ll be able to dance through the Afghan Whigs show, run amok in the Marigny and on Frenchmen Street, and generally act in the dangerous and foolish ways I’ve missed so much in recent years. Hallelujah!
But let’s go back to the Berkshires for a bit, where I did not get to run amok on the second day of Solid Sound. I thoroughly overdid it on the first day but honestly? Worth it. I wasn’t horrifically ill like I would be a week later, just tired and a little headachy, enough to make the decision to skip the day with The Breeders and Wilco in favor of being in good shape for Sunday’s Jeff Tweedy and Friends set.
It was a good move, because I got to spend Sunday afternoon with my new friend Geri.
Now this is the kind of Solid Sound camaraderie I experienced in 2019 and had been missing! Geri and I connected on Facebook a few weeks before the festival when she posted in the Solid Sound group about her visit to the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa. Of course, I had to jump into that conversation.
Turns out, Geri’s also a writer and we have lots in common. She tracked me down shortly after I arrived on Sunday, and we hit the ground running.
Not really, because running makes me puke.
But we sure did hit it off immediately, gabbing until Jeff’s set started. She couldn’t find her people, so I offered her my plus-one seat in the nearly-empty ADA seating area where we were joined by my Belleville neighbors Alicia and Paul.
Between songs, Geri and I pointed out the best outfits and t-shirts as people walked by. Solid Sound ‘28 Fashion Extravaganza. Let’s make it happen! Jeff! Call us!
I always love a Jeff Tweedy solo set, and I missed last year’s tour with his backing band of youngsters that included his sons Spencer and Sammy, and their childhood friends Liam, Macie, and Sima, who all grew up to be stellar musicians. This is what happens when you don’t say not-in-my-backyard to rock n’ roll riff raff.
My favorite part of the Solid Sound final set is always the cover songs and guests, and Jeff didn’t disappoint. Not only did we get a weep-worthy “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” but also a blazing cover of Donna Summers’ “Hot Stuff” with a very pregnant Sima Cunningham exhibiting some dangerously warm fertility mama goddess bump and grind. More of this all the time, please!
And so it ended, hugging my new friend and my old neighbors before hobbling out with Donna and Carol. They invited me to dinner, but I had been thinking about ice cream at the Stewart’s Shop between North Adams and my place. Still not sure what state it was in, but it was just right for the perfect summer dinner capping off a perfect summer day before hitting the road yet again.
The trip home didn’t take quite the leisurely pace as the trip out. Not so much because I was tired (although I was), but because I needed to get home in time to get a decent night’s sleep before the vestibular tests (I didn’t). I stopped to sleep in the northeastern corner of Ohio after plowing my way across New York’s I-90, only stopping to investigate the local food vending machines at a rest area near the Finger Lakes where I was told that I look like a pinup girl. Tired, encrusted in festival sweat that doesn’t come off in a single shower, and sporting a too-fancy sundress because all of my comfy driving clothes were dirty, I rode that high all the way to the Pennsylvania border. Or maybe I was just jacked up on the locally-roasted coffee-infused dark chocolate bar from the rest stop.
I slept again in Indianapolis, even though it was only three and a half hours from home. I’d hoped to make the drive home with only one overnight, but the drive out proved to me that, in my current vestibular state, seven hours on the road is my hard limit.
Plus, I wanted to hang out with Aimee, a Woody Guthrie researcher friend in Indianapolis who I met once in passing at an event in Tulsa years ago, and again before Billy Bragg’s Friday set. Our plan to catch up again at the festival went the way those plans tend to go. There’s just too much happening, too many people to see, too many shows, to make much of a plan. And that’s fine.
Aimee is part of the Teaching Woody Guthrie Collective, along with my friends Gus and Court, a professor named Michele I’ve only met in passing, and our recently-passed friend Mark. He wanted us to connect, which I learned after his death. Far be it for me to deny that wish, especially when it means spending three hours talking Woody Guthrie stuff with … another woman!
In a lovely little Danish church-turned coffeehouse and community space, we told our Woody Guthrie stories—how we came to study him, the people we’ve met along the way, the magical things that have happened because of it, and how we can maybe combine some of our experiences down the line.
Did I mention how awesome it is to finally have a woman to discuss these things with? Because it really is. And Aimee feels like a kindred spirit. How could she not?
And that’s what Solid Sound—and music—is all about. Connections. Clicking. That magical combination of finding someone who lights up when you say, “No way! Me, too!”
Spending eight days on the road, driving around 2,500 miles by myself, gave me lots of time to think. Not once was I lonely. Driving by myself with my own company? Absolutely entertained me to no end. I’m a damn riot. I wrote whole books in my head, performed my own Mermaid Avenue concerts. This was the longest solo road trip I’ve ever done, and now I feel confident that I can drive anywhere by myself. Even with Solid Sound, I had plenty of solo time at my little guesthouse tucked into a clearing in the woods.
Solid Sound in 2022 was lonely. I was with people, and felt the love from some who remain tightly in my life. But there were a lot of times spent with others, feeling very alone.
In 2024, I don’t think I was in a position to accept any connection at all. I went through some shit in late 2023 that left me questioning everything about myself. That continued until just recently, when one day I realized it had been a bit since I beat myself up for things I had done in the past that I now view differently.
I can’t remember where I read this. Maybe Levon Helm’s biography This Wheel’s on Fire or the Greil Marcus book The Old, Weird America, which is also about The Band. At any rate, one of them has a quote/story that’s always stuck with me:
After The Band toured as Bob Dylan’s backing band on his first electric tour, enduring night after night of hostile crowds, Helm hit a wall. He just couldn’t do it anymore. He went home and, as he put it, spent some time in the shed, by himself, to regroup. Find himself, find his confidence.
We all need to go to the shed and get ourselves together for a stretch of time.
I feel like I’ve been in the shed since Covid began. I was well on my way there already, thanks to going into my third year of hobbling on busted knees. But in the time that followed—Covid, knee replacements, CJ striking out on their own, social changes, changes in myself—I needed to hibernate and incubate. The vestibular shit threatened to keep me in the shed for the rest of my life.
I’ve been working through my cocoon goo, emerging with some necessary growth and knowledge. I’ve been in the chrysalis, dangling in a dusty, web-stretched corner of the shed, so close to the crack where sunlight leaks in.
And now I’m out, having grown into myself, shedding what I’ve outgrown, fully embracing what I love: good music, good people, good food and coffee, good quiet, and a good, long stretch of road. Writing about these things over the last 14 months has given me a chronicle of just how much these things fulfill me, making me able to be exactly who I am.
I’m ready to keep going.
Who wants a coffee?
I love your writing!