Selfies.

I keep reading and hearing people's comments regarding 'selfies', and it strikes me as hypocritical in the extreme, when a commenter labels someone who took a selfie as "obsessed with themself."

Here's why:

I take selfies. I'm putting that out there right now. I don't take them at funerals, but I do take them.

When I was growing up, I was intimidated by the complexity of SLR cameras, and the pictures I took with disposable cameras were just terrible. As a result, I don't have many photos of my history.

And this saddens me.

I like to look back and see where I was, who I was with, where I was at. Especially now I'm older, it sure is nice to see back when I had no visible body fat!

Enter Instagram.

I have an Instagram account and an iPhone, and because iPhones take pretty good pictures and don't cost anything to develop those pictures, it's easy to archive your memories. And that's all it is- a way to look back and see what life was like before.

And time and time again, I hear absolute fucking morons commenting on other peoples Instagrams, selfies, or pictures of their lunch.

Person A takes a pic of whatever they want, because it marks a moment in time they would like to remember.

Person B says "Look at that self-obsessed asshole! I don't want to see their fucking lunch!"

Then don't fucking look, Person B. 

And the point here is- Person B is so self-obsessed they think that Person A should only take photos that person B wants to see, when it's Person A's Instagram, to fill however they please (within Instagram's stringent guidelines).

So the next time you want to rave on about how people who take selfies are entitled narcissistic millennials, maybe fuck off and let them harmlessly enjoy and remember their lives, because they don't exist for your benefit.

Gaussian Blur.

I spent twenty years on the road.

You drive or fly or ferry all night, across seas, over borders, down highways, to cities everybody knows. Up at dawn or no sleep; hotels, airports all fade into one gaussian blur.

It's the relationships you make, the fleeting bonds and the back room wisdom, that's why we do it. But no matter how close you get, once the tour ends, we all scatter in other directions, and form new bonds. Basic physics.

So you arrive, you check the gear, get the sounds right. Lay everything out, try to make it home. But if you're honest, you can't remember home any more. And if you're more so- it's the place you go to, to sit and miss the road.

When the show unfolds, and the energy blasts out into the crowd, and back from them... that's the drug. That's the feeling that utterly owns you. You can't get it anywhere else, any other way. It's the definition of magic.

And when it's over, and the gear is cased up and rolled away, the trusses come down, the arrays grounded, you look at where the stage used to be, and there isn't a trace of evidence to show any of it was even real. 

The house lights are so harsh. The lines on the faces of the crew the opposite of glamour. This process strips a person down to the bones, road people are like reptiles. They know, it's ok.

And once the party is done, and you drag your aching body to the transport, the scene has been scrubbed clean, no DNA, sanitised. It's just a stage, or a patch of clean grass amongst a sea of trash and dirt, semi trailer tracks and patches of gaffer tape. Nothing you'd put on a poster.

And then you drive or fly or ferry all night...