New Orleans, Nashville, Atlanta

It has been a good few weeks. I've been getting used to traveling light. Shedding the non-essentials has been a wonderful exercise.

I arrived in New Orleans on Halloween night and met my friends Mickey and Emily there. All three of us stayed with our friend from Wesleyan, Howe, who was gracious enough to offer up his multi-bed guest room to us for almost a week. We saw a bunch of music on Halloween night (and all week), including a country band with a T-Rex playing fiddle and a friend of ours decked out in devil horns playing in a Radiohead cover band at midnight. A man in a blue wig and a short skirt tried to fight Mickey in the most passive-aggressive way I've ever seen - the sentences that escalated things all ended with periods, not exclamation points. Luckily Emily walked over and said, "Hey, how's it going over here?" or something to that effect and I said "It looks like he's trying to fight Mickey" and she said "Oh, don't do that! That's so stupid!" and the whole situation was diffused immediately. The man in the wig with the dead eyes wandered off to find someone else to fight and we all laughed about it.

Mickey had heard a story about a Gator at the End of the World, so the next day we went to investigate. So we walked with a few beers (it is the Big Easy, after all) through two holes in the fence of the old navy base and made our way out to the peninsula known as The End of the World. Unfortunately, there was no gator there (apparently we had missed it by a few weeks), but we did find an old fisherman who had been catching catfish there every day since 1960. He has a cool story, but I won't spoil it - Mickey made a podcast about the whole thing. Check it out: his podcast series is called "Sidewalks." I'm sure the Gator at the End of the World episode will be out soon.

As we walked back towards civilization, away from the End of the World, we came upon a second line for the recently departed Fats Domino. If you haven't seen a second line, please google it. I can't do it justice with words. Musicians were coming and going, mostly coming, and the brass and percussion sections swelled as hundreds of people walked through the streets. I got some recordings of it if you want to listen, under the "Recent Sounds" part of the website. I really like the idea and energy of second lines. Rather than crying about the death of an individual, they celebrate their life.

Other highlights of my time in New Orleans included seeing Jackson and the Janks, a local band that has no recordings at all! They mostly played old spirituals, like the music played by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and they did it incredibly faithfully to the old recordings. It was very cool to see a band commit so fully to that aesthetic, without worrying if the music was too old to be cool or something like that. I will say, they were REALLY cool. We saw them play in a backyard, and as soon as they had hit the first chorus, many people had partnered up to dance. I think partner dance in the 2000s is a thing you can only find in the South in the USA. There was no expectation of sex, just a bunch of twentysomethings who wanted to dance having a great time together. Very refreshing to see people dancing hand in hand, not freaking like you see on dance floors in the Bay Area.

Howe also took me to the Music Box Village, a large interactive installation sound art piece. It is made of many houses, each of which has a different sound-generating capability. One had a modular synth connected to a TV, one had a bunch of metal oil drums, one was full of chimes, etc. I had a great time twisting knobs and banging on things for about two hours. And then I drove his car home! It was only 5 minutes but it was the first time I had been behind the wheel since the accident. Good to get back into things slowly.

Mickey was making his way up to Chicago for a radio conference of some sort, and had planned to stop in Nashville. I had planned to go to Nashville after New Orleans, and he was kind enough to give me a ride. We made it to Nashville just in time to see another friend's band take stage in the East Room. I mean, Mickey dropped me off at the bar and went to look for parking and as I walked in, the person announcing the band was walking offstage and they were playing the first few notes of their set. The timing could not have been more perfect - especially considering it had been a six hour ride beforehand! Thanks to the music gods for making that work.

After their set, we went to meet our friends (also from Wesleyan) Molly and Atticus at a Velvet Underground cover show at the Basement East. They are part of a really vibrant community of East Nashville musicians, including a dynamic frontman named Taylor, that I was very happy to be welcomed into. I stayed at Molly's house for four nights. That time included some rest (we had been out til 4 am on the Velvet Underground night), some music, a movie or two, great food, and a day exploring downtown Nashville with Atticus, who was nice enough to use his day off to show me all the tourist spots.

I loved seeing the Ryman, which is where the Grand Ole Opry used to be (and, after a several decade hiatus, it's back there now!). That hall has had everyone from Teddy Roosevelt to Harry Houdini to Johnny Cash perform (OK, Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft didn't "perform," they talked politics). The acoustics are incredible, and you can practically feel the ghosts of the past walking through the halls. We also spent some time on Broadway at the music bars that dot the street. The typical set, Atticus told me, is four hours, 95% covers, and mostly country. You just have to play the music right. The level of musicianship I saw across the board was quite remarkable. It wasn't that everyone was mindblowingly good. It's just that no one was mediocre or bad. I can't remember the last time I saw six bands and didn't have a critique of any of the members.

Mickey was headed from Chicago back to the Bay Area. When he left, I had him bring a suitcase full of clothes and a laptop and a few other odds and ends back to the bay, to be picked up by my mom or something. That left me with a backpacking backpack and a small backpack. That's all I have now. All my possessions fit in two bags. It's refreshing to know that I need so little to be happy: some clothes, a mini guitar, a computer, a recorder, phone, wallet, a few books, my toiletries, and a pad and pen. That's all I got. And I've been just as happy as when I had a lot with me. It's a good lesson to learn.

I got on a Greyhound to Atlanta and since then have been staying with the family of my housemate back in Oakland, Ayliffe. Neither of her brothers had ever met me before, but both showed me around Atlanta like they had known me for years. Her mom bought the food that she remembered me liking when she had come to help Ayliffe move in more than a year ago. It's the little things. I am so grateful.

I went to  Stone Mountain while I was here, a mountain near Atlanta with something akin to Mt. Rushmore carved into its face. However, instead of American Presidents, it features Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson all on horseback. A tribute to the Confederacy. I don't see a lot of Confederate monuments in California (obviously), and it reminded me that that part of history is not just in the history books in the South. It is lived and remembered viscerally.

On Friday night, I went to the Emory Planetarium to hear a program called "Bach Under the Stars." A quartet played Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven, and eventually the lights went down and the stars were displayed overhead and a professor of astronomy gave a lecture about the stars we would see that night. I learned why the eye of Taurus is red, and the reason Sirius is the Dog Star (spoiler: it's the nose of the dog constellation).

On the entirely other side of things, we went out clubbing (!!) on Saturday in a way I hadn't been in many years. We went to a party where everyone was wearing white and there were hookahs everywhere and Hennessy in buckets of ice for the pouring, and a nice big dance floor where everyone was getting down. It was classy and we were up late and damn was I hung over this morning. I remember now why I don't do that. Good to experience the vibrancy of the city, though, and not just the history.

And I leave tomorrow on a Megabus for Columbia, South Carolina, where my cousin Claudia goes to school at USC. From there I will make my way up the east coast until I get to New York - but all that will be experienced and detailed later.