Earthling

A Love Letter To Movement

I don’t miss airports. I don’t miss buses, passenger vans or trains. I definitely don’t miss random security checks and or having to leave toiletries behind because beyond a certain amount of shampoo apparently one can concoct a weapon of some kind. (?) I don’t long for random hotel rooms, soggy eggs and cold toast or pre-dawn “knock-knocks” checking to see if the mini bar needs refilling. I certainly don’t miss the acquired ritual of peeling back the top layer of the bedding upon entering a new hotel room. (Trust me…before you lay down, face first onto that enticing, neatly made hotel bed, peel that shit off and kick it into the closet.) There are multitudes I don’t long for among the mélange of traveling.

But I miss traveling.

The imagery constantly shifting, the people you meet, the joy of hearing a new accent, the sensory orgy that occurs when you first step into a new location and take a deep breath. The moment you realize you’ve overcome your jet lag and you are officially acclimatized to your environment, and when you know you are lost in a new city because you got lost on purpose. (Once again, trust me and try it. It’s fucking amazing.) New food, new faces, new sights, new smells, new dreams.

It’s a little planet we live on but it is miraculous, the weather is mostly hospitable, and should you have the stomach for the inevitable discomforts that are synonymous with living out of a carry on suitcase, the rewards are infinite.

I’ve been touring with Incubus since I was 19 years old, and I can say with a relative certainty that I am overjoyed and deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to see our little planet. I’ve had fantasies about other worlds and interstellar travel, but I have contented myself therein with dreamtime jaunts, imagined escapes and the occasional psychedelic journey. But I always come back to a deep fascination and admiration of this place. Earth is where it’s at! We are blessed, and the more of it I see the more blessed I feel.

So, with all of that being said, I hope to be able to travel again soon. Who knows, maybe after this two year, forced pause I might find some new kick out of getting toiletries taken away. (Donated?) What do they do with all of it at the end of each day!? I like to imagine our diligent TSA agents going home with bounties of single use shampoos, conditioners and toothpaste tubes that dare to weigh beyond the three ounce limit. I can see one of them now: still in uniform, hair pristinely clean and soft and billowing in slow motion in front of a high powered fan and saying “yessssss!!” into the grated blades and giggling at the way it makes one’s voice sound like a low budget Darth Vader.

Just maybe, after 25 years of frolicking around the world, I’ll learn to enjoy paying $20 for 20 gummy bears out of a mini-fridge. I might even acquire a new found hankering for some strange hotel comforter sniffing. Probably not, but after the last 23 months I am learning that it is still possible to surprise myself. Hopefully I will see you soon, thousands of miles from home, breath, armpits and hair stinking to high heaven, but with a smile on my face that indicates an implicit understanding: I am an Earthling, and anywhere I find myself, I am home.

Brandon Boyd