Today we woke up to the sound of waves
Yesterday we took a seven hour bus ride through the winding mountains of Sierra Sur — without throwing up once! Today we woke up to the sound of waves and I went out to rent a scooter.
I rode motorcycles as a kid but I don’t remember it being as much fun as tooling around Oaxacan beach towns on this thing. Maybe I took going fast for granted back then — it was how I did bikes, skateboards, skis, everything.
Now I’m very aware of speed, the aches of every past injury, and the cost of every future injury. Pain and heartbreak have made me cautious, and not just on a scooter.
In the last couple weeks I’ve been thinking and asking and talking about doing a Patreon. I don’t just think twice anymore. I think a hundred times. I plot out the possible pitfalls, as if the world was a bully waiting in the bushes to shove a stick in my spokes and send me flying.
It’s a bad habit this way of thinking, born out of years of desperate survival. In truth I believe the world is holding me, encouraging me, teaching me, giving me what I need to become stronger.
I will fly not because the stick in my spokes has ripped away the thing that supports me. I will fly because my wings have grown strong enough to hold the wind.
At this point, though, I’m pretty clear that I still need the support. So I think I will do the Patreon. I need the help morally, logistically, creatively, for sure. And it’s not like I don’t need it financially.
One of the reasons I left Bozeman was that I couldn’t afford it anymore. We live very cheap, but Mexico is in the middle of its own inflationary spiral and living a creative life down here represents constant trade-offs (see: 7 hour bus ride).
A big part of my fear is that doing a Patreon means I have to work. I’ve written a lot here, but doodling out ideas on guitar and in notebooks is different than producing work, even preliminary work, that I can show people.
Producing work is hard. It’s an agonizing grind. And it’s slow, slow, slow. But riding this scooter reminds me of how much I like to go fast. So maybe with your help and a bit of a push, together we can speed things up.
…
#singersongwriter #easyrider pic by @enexilio
