Eight days off and I spent most of it in the Adirondacks with my family; swimming, fishing, canoeing, hiking, hunting for frogs, being attacked by deer flies by day and bats by night…perfect.

We flew in to Denver yesterday, met up with Kieth (our driver) and the bus and headed off to Aspen through Independence Pass. It was probably one of the most beautiful and terrifying bus trips that I have ever had. A winding two-lane (in name only) road that skirted the cliff edges way up above 10,000 feet, with no guard rails and no pull-offs, up among the deer and elk and eagles and unsullied mountain faces and wild, untamed rivers tumbling down the mountainside. Every now and then we’d spot a lone tent pitched beside a perfect trout pool.

Aspen is such a weird place. It is located amidst some of the most spectacular natural beauty in the world, but it is about as un-natural a town as one is likely to come across. I’m not sure what it is. They have preserved many of the original 19th century buildings and obviously have some pretty strict zoning laws that have kept the village, village-like, but it is just too damn perfect, quaint, comfy-cozy. Most of all it just reeks of wealth. The type of wealth that has a G4 sitting on the runway at the local airstrip and a 4000 square foot house on the slopes, sitting empty for all but two weeks of the year. The type of wealth that makes it hard to distinguish the 55 year olds from the 25 year olds until you get up real close. The beautiful people, the beautiful people.

Over the break I had the opportunity to revisit Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World. I hadn’t read it in close to thirty years and I had a nagging feeling that it was time. While wandering the tidy cobblestone walkways of Aspen I couldn’t help but feel a little like John Savage, the novels protagonist, an “Indian” plucked from the wilds of his New Mexico reservation and set down in the perfectly controlled, unblemished, civilized, modern world.

Where catchy slogans pass for art, where the mood balancing drug Soma is pushed as the panacea for any emotion or situation that might cause discomfort, where consumption is seen as a societal duty, where ones social and economic position is pre-determined at birth, where the outward physical signs of aging has been eliminated by science and medicine, where being alone with one’s own thoughts is considered subversive, where meaningful human interaction has all but been eradicated. In the novel, John, takes to self-flagellation (and eventually suicide) to try and break free of the mind-numbing, monochromatic sameness of the world in which he finds himself trapped.

I have left all of my whips and ropes back home so I didn’t go that far, but I could certainly relate (this book was written seventy-five years ago, don’t you love the power of art to reach through decades and centuries, grab you by the throat and shake you around) and I couldn’t help but think of those lucky souls back up in that mountain pass, who were probably, just about now, lighting their campfire to fry up the days catch….O Brave New World.

The gig tonight was at the Belly-Up Tavern, a relative newcomer on the Aspen scene. A very well designed club with good sightlines and decent production. Unfortunately it seems to also be the grazing ground for the local geese population. It has been a long time since we have had a gig where a critical mass of the audience was this inattentive and disruptive with their blathering. A big gaggle of them yakked throughout most of the show until they finally grew bored and left for the next groovy spot to hang out and talked about their newly purchased Dior bag or the current trend in slope-side real estate. I thought that we played pretty good tonight, we dug a little bit deeper to fight against the din. We apologize to those of you who were there to listen. Next time we will try and get back to the Wheeler Opera House, a beautiful little theater just up the road and a no-geese-zone.

We drive overnight tonight to Boulder. We have discovered, since our journey through the pass, that there is a much easier and safer way to get here. People were shocked and astounded that we had actually come through Independence Pass with a bus and trailer. The problem is that most bus drivers these days use their GPS systems at the exclusion of the good ole fashion road map. They plug in the coordinates and whatever their computer tells them they follow, no matter how insane the route may seem….O Brave New World….