When The Xanax Wears Off…

I’m on JetBlue Flight 126 en route from Long Beach, CA, to New York City. The monitor on the seat back says that we’re cruising at 603 miles per hour some 32,000 feet over Ohio. The plane is dark. The young family next to me is fast asleep. The Xanax has worn off, so I’m staring at the plane icon slowly tracking across America…

L.A. was fabulous. Suffice it to say that the weekend didn’t diminish my interest in moving (as any normal reader would surmount). I’ve had the opportunity, these past months, to approximate normalcy there. That is, I’ve spent enough time out of hotels, working with and hanging out with actual Angelinos, so I feel like I have some idea what it would be like to live there. The weather, the outdoors (Runyon Canyon), the pace, the opportunities — too sweet. I will live there. Someday.

The wedding itself was a lot of fun. Like a wedding anywhere else, really, excepting that it was on a Sunset Boulevard rooftop and was buzzed by helicopters. That and Peter Bagdonovich stepping in the elevator. It was such a quick trip that I left my guitar at home for the first time in a long time. And while it was nice not to lug around, I had some prime songwriting downtime Sunday afternoon. It was encouraging, anyway, to feel the itch to play at all.

For now, then, it’s back to NYC, crazy, I’m sure, with holiday chaos. Land around 5:30, car service home. unpack, go running, and be into the MTV by 9. Back to my concrete reality…