Living In The Future
Monday, April 29, 2024 Entry #73
My Dear Readers:
First of all, I appreciate you all so much, thanks for being here! Next, I want to explain why this entry is dated just over a year from the last one even though in reality it has only been a few weeks since I posted Entry #72. I started this blog in March, 2023 because I wanted to publish a travelogue (for myself and anyone else who was interested) about the road trip I had just returned from to see the first four concerts on Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s post-pandemic tour. I decided to back-date each entry to reflect my actual travel and concert itinerary, as opposed to recording when the posts were written. As often happens with passion projects, Spirit in the Night took on a life of its own. Besides the planned road stories, concert reviews, photos and videos, I also started to write and include longer form essays on threads and themes drawn from Bruce Springsteen’s music and public life. I was having so much fun that I kept on going, even after the 49 entries it took me to cover the 10-day journey (In “real time” all that writing took me through October, 2023). Though not in such a concentrated period as the road trip, I kept seeing Springsteen along the tour, and I found I had much more to delve into and express when it came to The Boss and the increasing amount of space he was taking up in my consciousness.
My most recent entries (#54-#72) detail my reflections surrounding the two shows I attended in New York City and my jaunt through Springsteen’s places of origin in the Jersey Shore. Those concerts were in April 2023, but the last of the posts about them was completed eleven months later. As of this writing, I have so much more to cover going forward from where I have just left off; more concerts to report on, and a long outline of planned essay topics.
In the midst of all my blog activity, Bruce Springsteen announced last fall that, due to a painful bout with peptic ulcer disease (totally unbeknownst and undetectable to those of us watching him put on consistently poignant, lengthy, and joyful high energy performances-Springsteen is one tough 74-year old!) , he would be postponing all the remaining dates on the current tour until sometime in 2024. I had tickets to see Springsteen at his scheduled two-night December stand in Los Angeles (near the finale of the entire run), and I was going to meet up and see the shows with a friend of mine who lives there. Those were going to be my final two concerts of the tour, which would have meant a grand total of 10 Springsteen shows for me in 2023, starting on February 1 and closing out neatly at year’s end.
Springsteen shifted his attention from music to healing, but eventually the concert dates were rescheduled, and the shows in California were set for the spring. This was intriguing. The original vision for my #SpringsteenSabbatical (laid out in the very first entry of this blog, written months before any official confirmation that Springsteen would actually be touring again) was to leisurely drive west, taking in that beautiful part of the country, seeking adventure and perhaps catching concerts along the way. Then, I would end up in California and see Bruce at every one of his shows there while also exploring the Golden State. Problem was, California wasn’t even on the initial set of concert dates when the Springsteen tour was finally announced. When the western swing of Springsteen’s tour was finally posted, it was months after I had returned from my reconstituted sabbatical drive to see his concerts down south. I certainly could neither justify nor afford another large block of time for more Springsteen touring so soon after the Florida experience. No regrets! I was satisfied with the new California plan of at least flying in and out of Los Angeles and making my 2023 concert tour truly coast-to-coast. Not to mention, the winter season was probably a risky time to drive halfway across the country.
But, now it was a year and a half later, and hoping that the early spring weather would be kind, I decided to make good on that COVID lockdown promise I made to myself and actually take the big trek. I already had work obligations before and after the rescheduled Los Angeles concerts, so that ruled out attending the performances in San Diego and San Francisco or lingering in California much past the shows in LA. However, I counted myself fortunate to have long ago procured GA pit tickets for two California concerts, and I began to excitedly map out the drive. I would have twelve days to road trip out there, see the concerts, spend some time in Southern California, and drive back home.
Spoiler alert—I did it! Sorry for all this “inside baseball", but the upshot is that I am taking all of this blogging fun pretty seriously and I struggled a bit about my strategy. I wondered whether I should write entries about this most recent Springsteen trip to the West Coast as soon as possible, or put them in the cue so the posts could stay in chronological order. In the end, I determined that I wanted my remembrances about this epic journey to be as fresh as possible, hence the jump in time. Entry #74 will be dated just a few weeks back from now, to April 1, 2024.
I’ve learned not to predict how many posts it will take to cover the span of a particular experience (the number tends to grow organically), but as soon as I am through covering the California stretch, I will return to 2023 and carry on forward from there again. I am quite sure the back and forth will be jarring only to me, but writing all of this out has been helpful to the part of me that is hyper-completist. Besides, now that I have established a precedent, you may just see another time jump this summer so I don’t have to wait to write about what it is like to see a Bruce Springsteen concert in Europe!