Seventeen shows left, but it feels like the home stretch, especially with a stack of books and gently swaying palm trees in my near future.

And then it’s, well, who knows? Not in the sense of will there be an Allen Stone band (there will be, of course), but maybe it’s that I’ve already experienced my life change due to glorious, unforeseen circumstance and, thankfully, had the good sense to leap giddily into the unknown - should a similar opportunity get my spidey sense tingling, I don’t want to miss it. So, at the end of every year, I take stock - where am I going, where have I been, and do the pros of waking up in a coffin-sized bunk still outweigh the lower back pain?

I don’t foresee a change of scenery any time soon, but it’s comforting knowing I respect this journey, and the people I share it with, enough not to become a curmudgeonly sack of crap, and that I trust the personal work I’ve undertaken, and the man I’ve become.