January 15th, 2026. Making the Sausage.

Completely unrelated. That weird moment when someone from your open mic (The War and Treaty were semi-regulars at Teavolve) shows up on your television shilling for Ozempic. Is that success? Is it not? I guess at least now I know they're actually hiring "real people" for their commercials?

I haven’t written in the Journal in far too long. I’ve been distracted, I’ve been frustrated, I’ve been frightened. Minnesota is madness, my mom is working hard, my band is quiet, my writing is fragmented.

But my sausage game is strong.

Many years ago – and I could look this all up but I shan’t – many years ago we went to Austin for SXSW. The music was incredible; the TOWN is really cool. Perhaps a little too wrapped up in its own weirdness (it’s not THAT weird) but with a particular glam to it that makes the centre of the city feel like David Bowie striding through a 70’s Western. Prismatic armadillos and psychedelic cowboy boots and – especially during a festival – the music is EVERYWHERE. Walking down the street the songs just flood out of every door and strolling down the road is like slowly rolling your radio dial from station to station to station, but with a fade rather than static.

And every morning you go to a different random food truck and have the damn best breakfast tacos you’ve ever had in your Life.

After that trip I came home kind of obsessed with Mexican Breakfast. I hunted local tostados and cilantro and interesting sauces and salsas… and I hunted chorizo. And I found really crappy chorizo. Every once in a while, something would surprise me, but generally speaking, it wasn’t until I started (ironically) discovering VEGETARIAN chorizo sausage, soy substitute products, tofu chorizo sausage, that I started finding a chorizo that I really liked, and so for many years I have been satisfied, if not entirely happy.

Recently I moved my mother to an independent Living community close to us in Ellicott City. I think it’s been a really great change for her, but the area is ABSOLUTELY intimidating to drive in. Route 40 is chaos and it’s all new to her and for better or worse, her car hasn’t left the parking lot of her new apartment complex since she got there. I feel more relaxed knowing that she’s not driving, but I know there’s a LOT that’s really hyperlocal that she could reach if she wanted to that would NOT involve the hyper urban challenges of Route 40’s Route 1esque madness. I just sort of need to explore stuff in advance, but if she could visit the shops, boutiques, markets and salons that are all within a mile of her, on THIS side of Route 40, it would probably feel like a LOT of freedom sans a lot of travel.

Yesterday I hit up a teeny, little market that’s about half a mile down the road from her facility which would be an AWESOME and easy place for her to reach if it had anything she wanted (graham crackers and club crackers). I finally took a moment to explore it, and it’s got an excellent little deli and pizza and all the Indian and Mexican spices you could possibly want, fresh fruit and vegetables – but nothing that would be up Mom Alley (again, just graham crackers and club crackers) so alas, it is useless to her.

But it is not useless to ME.

It has Guatemalan Chorizo.

And this is what I shoved into my breakfast this morning and it was like I’d woken up in Austin, TX – or better yet San Antonio! And walked down to a random truck and gotten breakfast tacos.

See? Stick with me and I’ll eventually get to the point.

Tonight, we’ll have our first band practice in over a year (December 24 was the last time we gathered… that’s December **2024**) and I have very little else on my calendar for today. It literally can be just a day of getting my head and house ready for my band to come over and play together. We’ll have some grown-up conversations too, because collectively we’re going through some pretty grown-up shit. It’s going to be a day of ups and downs despite its surficial simplicity.

But I face it full of really, really good sausage.

And that goes a LONG way.