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Music can take me back more than any other media. Or sense. Even new songs that are of a certain familiar style. It can happen very suddenly that I’m a productive member of the human race, working away diligently and with contentment in my soul, and then Spotify will switch to a song and the work drops away as I listen closely to the lyrics. An hour later, I’m in a music spiral, with the door locked and nothing to show for my time except for cheap thoughts and scribbled out sticky notes. This is one of those sticky notes. What does it mean to be fucked up? It can …

The young Scotsmen waiting to board their flights all have the same haircut: buzzed on the sides, cropped short to middle length on the top. It’s jarring only in its mass coordination, as if an entire demographic decided to replicate a specific footballer. The officer working passport control is friendly and chats with me about his trips to Minneapolis.   “Welcome to balmy Scotland,” he says, as he hands the passport back to me. The taxi drive into Glasgow is shockingly colorless. And it’s only after I’m dropped off at my hotel and I explore on foot that I begin to get a feel for the place. All the buildings …

I like to think that the evolution of Germany for me over the past three years, is like a microcosm of my human experience. What started as an antagonistic place that I tolerated (at best) in order to be with my daughter, has become a place of recovery. It’s a strange place to get clean, but that’s what it’s become for me: I eat well, work out regularly, write, and meditate. And that’s only the time that I don’t spend with my daughter. When I first started coming here, I would leave as a husk of a person. I was mentally and physically demolished, and it took weeks to readjust …

You get tangled up with all the travel. You see a clock and you don’t trust it. It should be light outside and it’s not. Today I’m staying on the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation outside Phoenix (which resembles Phoenix in being one large construction site in the desert), tomorrow I’ll be in Memphis. Last week Aruba. Alien places. But it’s -28 in Minneapolis at the exact moment that I’m writing this, so whatever.  I can’t decide if time moves fast or slow while traveling. The days are more distinct. At home, they can pass without me looking up from my desk. And yet, when traveling, a week somehow gets lost …