now playing: shane nicholson, “nice to be here”
dylan stated this week that he wants me to move to nashville so that he can come with me.
interesting that he brought it up…i talked to charlie for almost an hour on sunday about this and other things. and the fact is, it’s been on my mind ever since the near-miss audition i didn’t have a few months ago.
i’ve given some mental space to the inevitable ross geller, pro-and-con, “she’s not rachem” list* that i haven’t made yet, but have outlined in my head…in both directions, even. pros and cons of staying, pros and cons of going…since it wouldn’t necessarily be the same list with the columns reversed in my case.
hell, let’s take a stab at this. the pros and cons of staying put, as it were…
jayda and i haven’t really talked a lot about it, but it’s a given that she wouldn’t move there. and the thing that would prove to be equally distressing is that there’s no clear cut plan that wouldn’t create animosity on her part. she has a very tight social circle at school, and i couldn’t pull her out of that…and i don’t think she’d be very open to jerking her summers around either. were this to happen, it’d probably be the building of a wall between she and i that would never come down. this (along with the loss of the situation we currently have, in terms of proximity and visitation and such) is the single biggest factor in this decision. none of the others even come close.
wendy has a very real shot at a full time job at the library where she’s working – she enjoys working there, and it’d be a huge feather in her cap. i don’t think wendy harbors intentions of living here the rest of her life by any stretch, but i think this job would be a huge factor in whether she opted to stay here or not. and, of course, i’m somewhat gainfully employed at the moment, and there’s no guarantee that this would continue to be the case…the first thing i did when this possibility came up was to scan the job listings in nashville, and there were seven pages of listings under IT. As such, it doesn’t look as though it’d be terribly difficult to find something for me – but i’d have to go down there prepared for the possibility that this might not be the case.
the fact is, i’ve been here for fifteen years now, and i’ve put down roots. i have a healthy circle of friends, i have a job that i enjoy most days, my kids are here, i have a musical community here that includes a great band, a lot of fellow musicians who respect me and my abilities, and a top notch guitar tech and an amp repairman that i’d probably be lost without…these are the kinds of comforts that one accumulates as they linger in one spot for a length of time.
i don’t think that it’s so much a fear of change as it is a sense of impending loss. not just loss of a great chinese food place and a guy who knows all my guitars inside and out, either. whether i want to admit it or not, i’ve grown pretty comfortable here.
maybe too comfortable.
the ass-kicker here is that the only thing that makes it necessary to leave is that i need to be where the work is doled out to be considered a serious contender…that’s the way it works. in places like nashville, there are so many talented players that there’s just no reason to consider an out-of-towner unless there are mitigating factors that make them attractive for some reason or other. charlie and i talked about this, too…he was telling me about his friend mark prentice, who played on his record, and a conversation they had about what happened when he moved out from arizona. he said that he had a lot of talented friends back home who were constantly asking him if he could get them work on sessions or on the road, etc – and inevitably, he’d have to tell them that he couldn’t, because they weren’t in town, and that the work didn’t wait for them to come to it, they had to be here and ready to work. i can’t imagine that any other employer would be that much different – why hire someone from a thousand miles away when a perfectly suitable candidate is right down the street? someone who’s packed and ready and can be on the bus tomorrow, as opposed to someone whos’ gotta get into town from somewhere else before you can even suss ’em out?
the fact is, you gotta be there to play the game.
but the question that raises is – is this a permanent thing for me, or is it just something that i want to experience before i shuffle off this mortal coil? and, if it’s the latter, how much am i willing to sacrifice just to have that on my resume?
hell, what if i hate it? what if i think that road work sucks ass?
boy, oh boy…not hard to work oneself into a frenzy over shit like this, is it?
* the list, as made and discovered in the episode of friends that lead up to ross and rachel finally hookin’ up….you know the one…
...from the rear view mirror 