They tell you there’s a first day of the rest of your life. Nobody tells you it’ll be a Friday, in seat 14C, on a flight from San Diego to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, so I can go play a music festival in a forest outside Cedar Falls.

That’s the job. That has been the job for almost ten years now.

Here’s the part that would’ve broken twenty-six-year-old me: it’s a good gig. Lost Woods, out in the trees, people camping. Somewhere in a folder on this laptop there are photos of me at Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza, and I love that those happened, and I’d be lying if I said they felt more like arriving than a Friday flight to Iowa does. Arriving isn’t a place. Nobody warns you about that either.

I was born in Miami, which is less a birthplace than a diagnosis. It’s a city that raises you on late dinners and loud families, on Latin heat and beautiful women who are fully aware of what they’re doing to you. You don’t acquire a taste for that life. You’re issued it at the hospital.

And I come from two grandfathers who seem to have split the job of making me. One built his own airboat — built it, by hand, out of parts and nerve — and raced it through the Everglades. The other had polio. He was a quadriplegic, and he became a famous psychologist, made his own money, and saw more of the world from a chair than most people manage on two working legs. One of them couldn’t sit still. One of them couldn’t move. Both of them went everywhere. You can probably see where this is going.

The grandmas fed me. Southern cooking on both sides, the kind that takes all day and is not remotely interested in your opinion. And Emeril, on the TV, hollering BAM into a kitchen in New Orleans —which is how a kid in Florida learns that cooking is a performance, that you can make people love you by feeding them and being loud about it. I’ve been running the same con with a loop pedal ever since.

I’ve moved for exactly two reasons in my life, and a job has never been either of them. I lived in Buenos Aires for a year because of a girl. I moved to Montana because I fell in love with the mountains — and, fine, another girl. Twice I have relocated my entire existence to be nearer to something beautiful that had made me no promises whatsoever. Nobody who knows me finds this surprising.

The band started because the Coconut Grove police made it start. I was a one-man act on the street with a loop pedal, playing to the party crowd, and they gave me the choice every artist should get exactly once: knock it off, or go do this in a real bar. So I went and did it in a real bar. Then Pat and John showed up, and then it was a band, and then it was albums, and then it was a tour bus, and then it was a decade — a sentence that takes ten seconds to read and took ten years to live.

I can’t say I have any regrets. I want to be careful with that, because it’s the kind of line people say when they haven’t looked. I’ve looked. Most people dream of building a life like this. We built it. We made records I’m still proud of. It’s been a helluva ride.

It feels stupid to call myself a rockstar. But what else do you call this?

What they don’t put on the poster is the arithmetic. Years of 4 a.m. in studios, drunk and high and certain we were onto something, occasionally right. Burning through relationships the way the tour bus burns through tires — steadily, expensively, and with nobody in the front lounge suggesting we slow down. We made so much love. We broke so many hearts. Never on purpose. I’ve stopped believing that’s the defense I thought it was.

I’d love to tell you it was all hot tubs and blowjobs. Some of it was. Some of it was real pain, and some of that never leaves, it just moves in and stops paying rent.

It feels like a horcrux. Like I tore my soul into pieces and handed one to every person I ever loved, and they’re all still out there, walking around with a piece of me in them. Because you don’t stop loving someone — that isn’t a thing that happens. You separate physically, and you numb it, and you wait, and one day you realize you can’t remember exactly what her face looked like, and you’re not sure whether that’s mercy or the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.

But to keep reading the book, you have to turn the page. So it goes with a life.

I’ve wanted to write this one for a long time. I’m going to write it here, in public, in pieces, whenever it comes — which means you’ll catch me mid-thought, and you’ll catch me being wrong, and I’ll rewrite it in front of you and leave the old version underneath where you can read it.

I’m doing it now for two reasons. One: if death takes me early, these stories should exist somewhere other than my head. Two, and it’s the real one — I can already feel time taking them. Not the big ones. The small ones. The green room, the diner, the exact thing she said in the parking lot. Those are the good ones, and they’re going first.

So. Here’s to the first day of the rest of it.

Seatbelt sign’s on. We’re starting our descent into Cedar Rapids.