Leaky Buckets

  Heli-golfing New Zealand with new friends           It was spring of 2016 in the USA, autumn on the South Island of New Zealand and I was taking a break from hitchhiking. I had been recruited by a wealthy family to help with their elaborate gardens in return for lodging and food. When I say recruited, I mean “accidentally employed,” but that is a story for a different time. For the past month, I had been spending a few hours every day revitalizing the fifteen foot wooden boat for the neighbors of my hosts. After a morning of songwriting and gardening, I would ride my bike down the hill to the shore of Lake Hayes, where I would grind, sand, caulk and repaint the inside and outside of this antique boat in return for grocery money. When I needed sanding discs, I would climb in their jet black Maserati, and cruise down to the New Zealand version of Home Depot. Clad in a respirator and safety glasses, life was good. One day, I arrived like I always did ...

  Actual Hawaiian Waves, Maui, 2015 I have an elaborate bedtime routine in the winter months. When darkness lingers for extra hours at both ends of the day, I need a routine to tell my body when to wake and when to sleep. There is no set time for the routine to begin, it all depends on when my creative brain is tired. Some nights it is barely 6:30 and I find my eyes drooping. Other nights, 1am will slide onto the clock dial as I look up from my typing in astonishment.  I stand up carefully, making my way towards the bathroom trying to step on the less creaky spots on the floor. Toothbrush in my mouth, I return to the kitchen, tidying for morning, putting away any leftovers from dinner that remain on the stove. I tiptoe across the living room carpet and grab a few chunks of firewood for the stove then throttle down the damper, taking a moment to bask in the warmth of the cast iron. I slip on muck boots and let the old dog out, careful to not let him wander too far. Too much tim...

  Cooking kangaroo meatballs on Thanksgiving 2015, Melbourne, Australia I am on a quest this morning. Sitting here at my kitchen table, firmly planted in my chair with a box of peanut butter pretzels and a cup of tea, I am going on an adventure through time to find a lost piece of writing. I woke up this morning with a wriggling thought in my head about an idea that I had back in 2015 while camping in Tasmania. My sleepy brain thought that it would be a great idea to write today’s column about this really cool idea, except my awake brain demands more accurate information. What I meant to be a thirty second trip down memory lane has become a full fledged archaeological expedition into my distant past.   Cue the hurtling credits of Indiana Jones as I plug my external hard drive into my computer. I have opened a portal to the past and there is no telling when I may return to the present. This hard drive is my Holy Grail of memories; telling the tales of all my great adventur...

XC Ski Mission w/ dogs   I set off on a cross country ski mission to clear my mind, but I forgot my ski boots. So now I am walking on the side of the groomed trail. I’ve got my late 90’s pop punk blasting from my jacket pocket and a belly full of candy from the Yule Night parade last night. I found the perfect spot in the parade at the first turn where every float would throw candy. But the majority of the spectators were waiting a block down, including all the children that would be my competition for gathering candy. Seeing all the candy thrown and laying on the street like litter, I reckoned it was a public service to clean up Main Street in my designated area and no one complained. When I put on my jacket to go skiing, both pockets brimmed with candy and I have very little self control. So here I am, My Chemical Romance screaming in one pocket and a pile of Hershey kiss wrappers in the other, plodding my way through lodgepole forest under a leaden sky. Not that it matters what ...

  A few years ago, I was wandering through Tasmania using my thumb as a bus ticket. Some days were incredible; meeting wild haired strangers, going on insane adventures and living in the way that motivational speakers tell you to dream. Many of those stories found their way into my book Never Homeless ; all night jam sessions with instant friends, wilderness explorations full of joy and sleeping under the stars on the white sandy beaches.  But in between those postcard moments were just as many days when nothing exciting happened and I questioned my life choices constantly. Days when I was so exhausted that I lay in my tent and stared at the ceiling. Days when I sat alone for hours and waited impatiently for more amazing stuff to fall out of the sky so that I might find distraction from inner demons. Days when I was fired up and ready to go and then all I encountered was the doldrums of a normal life. On those days, my confidence waned and my viewpoints soured.  Sometime ...

I took out the trash this morning, cramming the piles of plastic wrappers down so that all our waste could fit in a fifty gallon trash can. Was this two weeks, or three? I couldn’t remember. I would like to think of myself and my housemates as fairly eco-conscious at least in comparison to some of our neighbors, but at least once a month, I haul a truckbed’s worth of garbage to the town transfer station. There it is collected with everyone else’s refuse and trucked up to Missoula to be piled on a literal mountain of garbage.  The garbage in my truck consists solely of food wrappers with the occasional packaging from a replacement tool. Everything comes in a wrapper these days, from our eco-friendly organic tea bags to our carrots and celery. We bubble fizzy water in reusable containers and drink milk from cardboard boxes rather than plastic jugs. We compost all of our organic waste and recycle all of our metal cans, and yet we still create a truck bed's worth of garbage every month...

  Seeking wisdom after listening to Craigie           We were driving home the other night from a gig in Dillon. The interstate was ice and the headlights were fogged, so we drove slower than normal. After two days of shouting lyrics in bars and shooting pool until the wee hours of the morning, we needed some good laughs to stay focused on the road. We turned to our old friend John Craigie, folk singer extraordinaire and his live album Opening for Steinbeck. We have listened to this masterpiece of sad songs and bashful wit easily a hundred times and each time, like all masterpieces, I gleaned something new out of it. In the passenger seat of the Honda Fit, munching on Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips, I heard the tale of the leaky bucket for the umpteenth time and this time, it struck a new chord. Before I go further, this is the tale of the leaky bucket, paraphrased by me, myself paraphrasing John Craigie, who heard the story from a stranger on the park be...