Forest or Trees?

I'm in Saint John, New Brunswick. It's an off night and Super Bowl Sunday, which as I age, is looking more like any other Sunday, except it seems I'm supposed to have more fun tonight than usual, and drink more name brand Beer and eat more name brand Pizza. I'm suffering from the Blah's tonight. I'm not sad or happy. I'm not elated or down. I'm just Blah and fortunate that my Hotel room has wireless.

New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are two Provinces I did not know that well before doing this tour. I'd been to Halifax and Northern Nova Scotia, but that was a drinking vacation, and memories are not meant to arise from such journeys. This time my eyes are open, but my mind is somewhere else. Sometimes I forget where I am. I've been to so many places and have so many more places to go that it is begining to blur into one. Every city has the Gas Station with the Certain Bank Machine and the certain kind of one-of-a-kind coffee and a toliet that smells like urine and chlorine, which is sad, because I like the smell of chlorine and now my mind is registering urine as 'hopeful good smell' in it's processing.

There's trees and rocks and hills and old buildings and semi trucks and hotels with nice people and motels with jack-asses. There's the restaurant that's thankfully clean, the diner that's surprisingly good, the cafe that's surprisingly open and the nearing town that's closer than you thought.

There's the audience that loves you, the crowd that didn't get you, the room of people that were fun to talk to, the venue that won't have you back and the show you'll never forget. There's free beers, two dollar pop and staff menu to order from. There's the Manager that drops names, the bartender who drops glasses and the comic you're working with that picks-up the groupies that are not nearly as numerous as you would have thought.

Every new place you go is so much like the place you left that, if you're lucky, you start to see it all as the same thing. You're no longer in a new city or a diffirent country; now, you're just over here, and at some point, you're going to go over there.

At the same moment, you begin to see how every place is incredibly unique, too. The Factory Workers that bought you a beer and told you about their factory closing and how it affects the town is tought to forget, and even though bad things happen everywhere to everyone, when you can put a face to the misfortune that you only ever hear about on the News, you realize that life is real, and so are the people in who serve the bitter coffee in the greasy spoon that you swore you've been in before.

I have so much I want to see, and I guess I'm on the right path. I'm just wondering if there's not another angle to view it from. Saint John, New Brunswick is a nice town and the people have been cordial and I have been uncaustic, but even though this is my first trip here, I can't help but feel I've been here a hundred times before.

One more day in New Brunswick and it's back to work. Until then, it still feels like Groundhog Day.