Living on the road

Twenty-two days ago I packed everything I own into my car and hit the road with only two rules: head west. And have no expectations.

I’ve been living out of hotels ever since.

Don’t bother asking. Giving you an answer would require having one. But after a few years of splitting my time between the entertainment capital of Los Angeles and my native Florida in a never-quite-so-tightly-controlled yet still fairly clockwork fashion, generally spending the entertainment seasons in LA so I could best cover them and then spending the off-seasons working from the east coast just because I could, this time around there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it. Wrong time of year to be out here in LA, from an industry standpoint? Check. Traveling alone during the holiday season? Check. Relying on nonsense like hotel wifi and coffee shops to get my work done during one of our busiest editorial stretches of the year? Check.

The inspiration for this craziness is purely my own. But when it comes to making sense of it, the only thing I can point to is something that Keane’s Tim Rice-Oxley once told me when I asked him why, after two successful albums, he and his band ripped up the blueprint and went in a seemingly randomly different direction for their third: “If it feels wrong, then let’s do it.”

Not that I’ve been pursuing things quite that dramatically. I’m not out playing in traffic, or buying a Zune, even though those would both certainly feel wrong. But when it comes to expectations, or what I’m theoretically supposed to be doing, no dice. I spent three days in New Orleans and never left Bourbon Street. Spent my last day in Austin sitting in a sports bar watching a Dolphins game. Spent the night in Tucson but didn’t look around the town because I didn’t feel like it. Stayed in a town in west Texas that might have had eight people living in it. None of these things are to be found in any tourism manual, I’m sure. And I don’t care. Even after I arrived in California, I spent the first week staying in the various outskirts of Los Angeles County, nowhere near the action. Now I’m finally here in Hollywood, on Thanksgiving week, when there’s nothing going on in the industry at all.

Good. I don’t care.

Actually, I do. I care a lot. I’m not sure this publication has ever been a more vital time in its six year history. And that’s why I’m out here, on the road, not plotting out tomorrow until I wake up, not even sure how long I’m going to remain at this particular dot on the map. Don’t ask me to explain it, but this is what makes sense right now. And if anything, I suspect my editorial contributions have actually benefited from it. I conducted two different cover story interviews, two hours apart, from that hotel room in New Orleans. Sometimes the schedule just works out like that. Back in the day that would have had me spun around, worrying, trying to rearrange things to not let the schedule play out like that. But this just felt fun.