flying & arriving

not the worst coffee I've ever had

I read somewhere how someone said something like: “…don’t complain about air travel because you should be amazed and joyful, shocked and astounded, transcendent, even.  You’re sitting on a chair and you’re going 600 miles an hour seven miles above the ocean and you’re having wine and watching a movie…”, or words to that affect.  It’s an effing technological miracle.

must think...why can't this be multiple choice?

6749 miraculous miles, to be more or less precise about it.  The closer we get to our destination, the more our posse increases, topping out at eleven people including one Air New Zealand employee who tagged along with us in Auckland to make sure we got to the next flight.

Steve Vai discusses logistics over the seatback

New Zealanders are generous.  Accepted wisdom says that to get acclimated to local time you’ve got to stay awake until local night.  And I’m facing a rehearsal in three hours with about four hours’ sleep spread across the last thirty-six.  I’m keeping the hotel room temperature cold and I’m not going near the bed.  I take a walk in Wellington, where it goes from misty and warm to sunny with thirty mile an hour wind gusts in ten minutes.

just behind the hotel

Just behind the hotel is a large grave site bisected by a six lane thoroughfare necessitating the removal of about 3700 bodies in the early part of the 1960′s.  There they all are, in that lightly marked, barely discernible rectangle of green grass (see photo above).  The graveyard continues on up above the freeway, a riotous jungle of living green and carved stone, the rush of cars and the whine of cicadas, loud and disconcerting.  I follow paths wet and empty, occasionally very steep.  The hillside around the harbor has endless viewpoints.  This is a beautiful place and the city does not detract.

a view of the surrounding neighborhoods from the graveyard

I struggle to stay awake.  I’m reminded sharply of how far I am from home.

imagine the parties in that place

in which a day is lost

there's a lot of blue in between

It’s an odd thing about the thirteen hour jet ride from Los Angeles to Auckland, NZ.  We’re crossing the International Date Line (and the Equator – a first for me) and traveling for long enough to lose a calendar day.  We’ll depart from California on March 21st and arrive in New Zealand March 23rd.  March 22nd, 2012 will never happen to us.  It’s like we enter a stasis field on an interstellar trip where spaceships travel just below the speed of light and when we arrive at our destination forty-four parsecs across the galaxy our friends and family will be long gone.  On our return to Earth civilization (if it exists) won’t even be understandable.

Okay, that’s overstating things a bit but still: yow.  I’m told we’ll get the lost day back upon our return.

in which my career is revisited in a dream state

New Zealand!

In this dream last night I’m in a well-lit basement, a rumpus room, Seventies style, East Coast suburbs and I’m holding one of those goofy Charvel Explorer type basses, cream colored with that absurdly elongated hockey-stick headstock.  Joe S. is kicking in to a song, thrashing some big power chords, and I’m going to play too but I can’t find my skinny little audio cable – the kind that comes with those all-in-one-rockstar packages you get a kid on his seventh birthday.  I go over to Joe, who’s lying on his back on a sectional sofa, banging away on his guitar and wearing sunglasses.  I try to get his attention because I’m not ready and I want him to know; I’m not plugged in and I want him to realize this, but he plays on.  Massive electric guitar chords roll through the low ceilinged rooms lit with bare incandescent bulbs and I rush over to a ping-pong table covered with boxes, books and the normal detritus of the unused area of a home (a First World problem).  I find the cable and I plug it in but the amp is small, covered with dust and clearly not working.  So while Joe plays on I sit down on a bench by a brick wall that supports the fireplace of the nice living room upstairs and in walks Keneally, looking like Professor Marvel, the carny huckster in the black and white intro of the Wizard of Oz (1939).  He’s carrying valises, suitcases and bags and sports a tweed overcoat over a proud vest and thin bolo tie – like a fashionably turned out Don Van Vliet.  He sits down next to me and begins to unpack.  I wake up.  I’m in my room and my own bed.  It’s 6am and I gotta get the kid to school.  The G3 tour begins in two days.  Have I arranged to have my phone function in New Zealand and Australia?  Have I gotten the bank to allow access to my account from ATMs on a foreign (to them) shore?  Do I have extra batteries for my noise cancelling headphones for the 13 hour plane ride to Wellington, New Zealand from Los Angeles?

Do I have it together???