That’s my mouth behind the camera under the funny hat. Missed my calling as a paparazzi. I know… Your not impressed. But my mom IS, so kiss off…

- Staley Out

I was gonna write a post about the last week of my life, I was gonna drop a lot of names and talk about a lot of stuff that happened but I changed my mind. Name dropping is annoying and now I don’t really know where this is going except that I haven’t written in a while and I have a lot on my mind, a lot of things I’m trying to make sense of.

I’m on  Freemont street in Old Las Vegas last Friday night. There’s a free concert going on, over 20,000 people crammed into a couple blocks. It’s insane. The biggest thing they’ve ever done down there. I’m exhausted, on 3 hours sleep, I flew in that morning and I’ve been shooting over 12 hours. But the real work is done, the headliner is playing and I’m resting in a tent behind the stage, waiting for the rest of the crew so we can all leave together. And I hear the first notes from an acoustic guitar and then the beginning of the first verse and it sounds so familiar. It seems to pull me onto my feet and out of the tent toward the stage and I push past a group of people chatting at the base of the stairs leading up and onto the back of the stage so I can see the artists playing. They are apparently the top grossing act in the world in the past year. A country act with real crossover appeal. I can only see their backs as they’re perched on stools at the stages front but I know the song now. It’s an obscure Hank Williams song. A song I LOVE. I love it so much I had placed it in a movie I was working on, silently hoping that somehow I would be able to obtain the rights. It’s a song that completely inspired me with it’s simplicity, it’s beauty and it’s perfection. So now I really want to see this performance so I push back down the stairs and around to the side between the stage and the steel barricade keeping those 20,000 people at bay. I just stand there and watch and I feel very lucky. I feel like I’m in the right place at the right time. You can tell most of the audience doesn’t know the song, they are uncharacteristically still and quiet.

And then it’s over and I go backstage again and with the rest of the crew we shoulder our gear and push through the cops and drunks and wanna be groupies out onto the street and back to the parking garage and take the rental car back to the MGM for 5 or 6 hours sleep because the next day will be even longer.

Sometimes you have a dream or a goal and in the beginning it’s all possibility and magic and excitement and then time goes by and it becomes a chain around your neck. And you can hardly remember what you were excited about. You wonder where the magic went. You wonder how you could have let this happen. You search for the meaning of it all and the lesson you can learn so you never have to feel that weight around your neck again.

But maybe you need the weight. Maybe if you didn’t have that weight you’d just float away to the Moon or Mars or Saturn or some distant unknown place. Or like some strange, pale fish at the deepest parts of the sea you would rise and rise until you exploded from within due to the absence of that weight. Maybe. I think for me, not having that weight is a distant unknown place. Maybe that’s okay. I guess it is.