Spinning yarns and wheels

I arrived in Siem Reap around beer:thirty, just before sunset, when my friend-in-residence and Siem Reap pick-up band mate, K. calls it a day and heads for the one and only local supermarket to knock back a few cold ones. 

I spent two weeks in Siem Reap playing in clubs with K. He sings and strums. I sing and add bluesy lead fills. We've been playing together on Siem Reap's backpacker pub streets for the past four years. We know each other's stylings well enough that we can keep rehearsal to an hour or so, and get on with the business of getting up on stage night after night with only chord charts to guide us and keep it all together. So where's the story here?

Writing about my two weeks warm up for my Southeast Asian blues scene tour has me spinning my wheels in brain gravel because I always have a great time doing this each summer. Where's the story in that?

The only value of travel writing that assures an audience’s curiosity is misfortune. That’s the hook. A captivated audience seeks commiseration and appreciation for hardships which look a lot like their own.

I am wracking my brain and decoding notes trying to assign dramatic meaning to what appears to have been a really good time, but a time filled with the not so desperate, predictable moments. 

I feel I am obligated to recognize drama and to see the humor in it. I could fiddle with this part of the trip until unease and dread resolve into something attention-grabbing.

I must show moments when endurance prevailed, where I endured one cosmic joke after another, moments in which I always take it on the chin.Here I must escape self, reinvent self, isolate a façade of self from self then reconstruct and reflect self in a fun house mirror.