New Year Wishes – happiness, health, music and adventures

The trip will definitely have music and these 3 amazing American artists I’ve recently discovered will definitely be part of the mix tape/i-pod under the helmet ...

Aloe Blacc -  wow ... what a soul singer, rapper & musician from California 


and ....

Gregory Porter – Grammy award nominated jazz vocalist with blues, gospel and soul influences      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAC8UMMeSQo

Pokey LaFarge and the South City Three - From St. Louis, Missouri, their creative mix of early jazz, string ragtime, country blues and western swing rings  makes them among the most innovative of all the purists performing American roots music today. It’s wonderfully infectious, and all laid down in front of a big, big swingin’ beat.  Thanks Jools!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOzmOZQdcYY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MveLErNJvJE&feature=player_embedded

And adventures ... just read this amazing book of a trip across America in the 60's ....

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.  When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.  In middle age I was assured that greater age could calm my fever.  Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.  The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of the stomach high up under the rib cage.                                                                                                                                          

In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum.  I fear the disease is incurable.  I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going.  This to the practical bum is not difficult.  He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. 
Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination.  And last he must implement the journey.  How to go, what to take, how long to stay.  This  part of the process in invariable and immortal.  I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.

Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process; a new factor enters and takes over.  A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys.  It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness.  A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.  And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. 
We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.  Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip.  Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-grass bum relax and go along with it.  Only then do the frustrations fall away.  In this a journey is like marriage.  The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it.”     John Steinbeck – Travels with Charley (not forgetting...The Grapes of Wrath / East of Eden - Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1962)