chris must depart

there's a lunacy, an absent minded eccentricity, a goofiness, if you will, that comes to the aid of artists and helps them to step outside of the veil that hangs before the comings and goings, the conventions, niceties and ordinary, workaday garden variety hypocrisy that forms the landscape of everyday existence. in order to form the kind of observations that must be made to create something new in this hackneyed and worn down world, the person who would make a song or a painting or some rendering of some portion of this sometimes mundane world must stand apart from it somehow and in this act of standing apart, perhaps overstep the frontier of what many would normally call normal. this special (and hopefully mild) form of mania is often marked by a blissful ignorance and sometimes the victorious ecstasy of creation. however, there are times when it is a burden.

lindsay, my girlfriend, asked me if i should maybe call the airline and see if i could change my flight to the next day but i absolutely had to try to make my flight.

that's just how it is.

if one has a gig and one wishes to maintain the perfection of rock and roll chivalry, there's no way to bend on these kind of things. already, my mind was bending itself to the task of finding the hole in the fabric of the world, which in this case was new york city's evening rush hour, through which i would reach newark airport, my flight, stavanger, norway and the writing workshop.

samantha, my nine year old daughter, in the full flower of her priceless manner said, "well, if you make it you'll have a good story." (for the sake of anyone reading this, i hope that is the case)

i looked at the upturned faces of my pretty daughter and my pretty girlfriend and realized that i would have to say goodbye to them right there and then.

goodbyes at the best of times are not a specialty of mine.

i looked at the upturned faces of my pretty daughter and my pretty girlfriend and i felt a pang, a bone longing from my heart that tightened in my throat, stung my nostrils and pinched the inside corners of my eyes.

"i have to go," i told them.

this was not how i had planned to say goodbye to them before an absence of twelve days.

the afternoon had grayed somehow. what had seemed a lively and merry come and go of traffic, waiters and patrons became, for a moment, a shapeless, shambling mass of static, teetering meaninglessly around a vacuum of love and imagined loss on the verge of an adventure.

i had to tear myself away.

scandinavian airlines flight number 910 wasn't going to wait for me. scandinavian airlines' pilots, executives and flight attendants, the air traffic controllers and the other passengers tend to get a little shirty, they take it amiss, they positively look askance at this modern laxity in singers who feel that they can just traipse along to the airport whenever it is they feel like it. no amount of talk about adorable daughters and sweet, curly red haired girlfriends will appease their inclination to depart without these sorts of singers and fly to stavanger, norway leaving them to fend for themselves and cross the atlantic ocean some other way, they care not how, as long as it doesn't involve their (scandinavian airlines' pilots, executives and flight attendants, the air traffic controllers and the other passengers) lollygagging about waiting for chuckle-headed rock and roll singers to say goodbye to their daughters and girlfriends, no matter how adorable, sweet, curly or red haired they (the daughters and girlfriends) are.

i kissed my daughter and hugged her, never wanting to let go of her and then i kissed and hugged my girlfriend, never wanting to let go of her either. then i hugged my daughter again and kissed her sweet, bright forehead that sits in front of her wonderful mind and with a tearing in my ragged, rugged heart i turned and ran down the street.