2004-04-08

IMPORTANT NEW NOTES FROM JUSTIN:

I�ve been traveling for 234 days! I'm in New York City with my friends Tollef and Skot and Emmett and Ria and Nicki. My new web site: http://justinwinokur.com is live and there are all sorts of things on sale there, including my new album! Go forth and buy stuff, including MP3 downloads of the new record!

I�m converting the diary entries and photos of my travels into a book. I�m still collecting content, too. So, I�m looking for nice, fun people who can put me up for a few nights, host me, and show me their unique flavor of America. I�m looking forward to learning about your world and writing about our times together! If you think it might be fun to host me for a day or two or three, email me.

Please make sure to include your address and phone number in your email.

I am especially looking for places to stay on the East Coast north of New York City and in the Midwest anywhere between New England and Texas.

Please contact me ASAP if you want to hang out!

If you believe in what I am doing and want to help support me, please do so! Check out my web site or donate money to me using PayPal or with a credit card. Email me for more information!

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US Tour Day 207: A Return To My Home

Being back in San Francisco feels so free. Yet there is a loneliness here. I suppose it is the loneliness that I carry with me that I smell in the perfumed spring air—that air that carries so many memories for me. I didn't realize the air was such an olfactory springboard to my past until I got off the plane in Oakland. I've breathed in twenty–eight April the fifths here, and the past twenty seven came back to dance with me—swirling through my mind—coaxed out by this one.

Dave Oppenheim picked me up Tuesday night to drive me to Doug Wyatt's birthday dinner in Menlo Park. I stepped out of Dave's car and into the warm, fresh atmosphere that fueled my lungs for my whole life. I didn't realize how much this specific blend of oxygen and nitrogen would bring back to me—how much it meant to me—until I returned. The East Coast carries nothing for me, nothing except newness and the answer to why some jokes are funny. I finally understand cultural references presented in magazines, newspapers, and other mainstream media. I can chuckle at party conversations now. But, I have no past there, except for the distant, abstract past that my mother and her mother had in New York before my birth. They rarely speak of those times, leading me to wonder if the events really ever happened at all.

I told Doug about the freedom and lightness I felt in the Bay Area. I felt unattached to anything upon my return. It had to do with Andie and being single—living for only myself.

Imagine returning to the house you lived in with your family for your whole life. The house was the same, only it was completely empty—no people, no furnishings. The closets and cupboards and hallways and countertops—all bare. No familiar sounds except for the rare sound of silence that rings through the halls in the way that only happened in stolen moments when nobody else was home, moments so distant that their existence is also doubted. But now nobody else is home forever.

The analogy is accurate in that it is sad yet hopeful, full of possibility. What was is now gone. But the framework remains, and there is ample acreage for newness to blossom—in an environment so fruitful and warm.


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