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I’ve got too much to be thankful for to write about in one post... it’s been one hell of a year and one of the best I’ve ever had. Thanks a ton y’all. 🇲🇽 🌅 Vacations are sweet, and we’ve gotten to do some incredible stuff here in Mexico, but for me a trip like this always comes with a little bit of a hang up about the fact that my family and I have the means to vacation in a place where the residents often have a whole lot less than we do. On this trip, we’ve been witness to some stark contrasts, between the comfortable hacienda we’re in, and the disrepair of the beachy streets outside our door. At times, it’s felt like we’re fresh meat for the people here, like our bank accounts are ripe for the pillaging. At others, it’s felt like a situational symbiosis that makes for instant friendship. We’ve met some seriously excellent people here; totally capable, knowledgeable, insightful, full of life and funny as hell. I guess for most people vacations are supposed to be about shutting down their brains for a while, but I’m stoked to leave here with a lot to think about. For sure, I won’t forget any of this week in a hurry. He was a giant After that massive Hitchcock-esque bird gathering in my trees, the yard looks sweet I’m so pumped to play with the incomparable @jonathonjircitano tonight at @rxsongs #8off8th Come on!! I’m goofing around with portrait mode for the first time while @golden_gloria does real work. 🤓 nerd It was a fantastic and soggy time with @sofarstl, and we can’t wait to go back, right @oliviarudeen? Good morning, Twelve years ago I played my first paid gig. It was at a shady bar in Gunnison, CO and I was 18. The night before I had taken what was to be my last drink after 6 years of hell. Though my withdraws weren’t as severe as they had been a year prior when I was committed to an inpatient rehab, my hands shook and my head swam for four hours while I played three identical sets of the only 12 songs I knew how to play at the time. When I finished, the woman at the bar slid a bottle of beer over to me and paid me fifty dollars. I don’t remember for how long I stared at the beer or by what desperate miracle I got up from the bar without drinking it, but I left with my money and a tired heart too heavy for someone my age. The next morning I attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and began rebuilding what was left of a life that I had resigned to the kind of end that only addicts can know. In the intervening twelve years of sobriety I have built on the shaky foundation of that undrunk beer the kind life of which I never could have dreamed at that time. I have known gratitude and peace unforeseen. In those same dozen years I have contended with a dozen kinds of pain and shame, and the itch that always wants scratching has never strayed far from my side. I was never supposed to make it to twenty years old, and so many of my friends from that time have succumbed to the disease that should have killed me so long ago. For every story like mine there are ten thousand lives snuffed out, like T.S. Elliot said, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Celebrate your fucking victories, and never forget what they cost.