Today, we packed up Old Trusty, my beater Prius, with an elephant's worth of music gear and started off towards Ruidoso, NM, where our manager Bradshaw is donating us a cabin to record something new. Last night, we put the finishing touches on a fourth record, “happiness is easy, pt I,” the first half of a 30-song garble of my last few years of trying to figure out what it means, for me, at least, to be happy.

I know we’re moving quick, but we have so much to do, still, and it seems like the Powers That Be don’t let us have the magic forever. And even if they did, we die.

I am sitting up in a hotel bed. It’s 3:34AM. Sean is trying to fall asleep next to me with futuristic blue earplugs in his ear holes. Ted Nugent’s Spirit Of The Wild is playing on the hotel TV in front of me. He is thanking his sponsors at the camera, crouched like a gremlin over a deer with a prolapsed wound on its chest. He pulls on its antlers, puppeting its head, to gesticulate. Now there’s an overlay of somebody—presumably Ted—in full Native American headdress. Brendan is asleep on the pull-out couch in the adjacent room. There were Hot Cheetos and a cockroach underneath the mattress, but he drew the short straw on the straw drawing app we use to snowshoe the squalor, to distribute the unpleasant things like good friends should.

Musicians are funny. We don’t have a choice but to love it, and, when you’re really doing it—doing it for the right reasons—the grittiness becomes a tension that makes the beautiful moments beautiful, or, as the great songwriter Mason Jennings put it, “the darkness between the fireflies.”

Before we loaded in our gear to the hotel, we sat in a gas station parking lot, calling hotels. Everything was booked. When I asked why, the hotel employee said, “Oil people.”

We hung up and Brendan said, “I think I might be getting sick,” and then, all matter-of-factly, “Oh—look, there’s actually a stray dog eating out of that trash can.” It grabbed what looked like a whole slice of pizza and then strutted by the car, its humongous balls swinging from side to side.

Life is good, mostly. It’s a circus in which I’m happy to be included, even if as a spectacle.