I’m off to Memphis Tennessee on Wednesday to play Folk Alliance. It will be a weekend of great music and with any luck we’ll make some new friends and maybe see the ghost of Elvis strolling up and down Beale. Things are heating up with gigs in Calgary, San Francisco area, Montreal and Ottawa over the next couple of months. In between those I am also going to visit the other Memphis (in the land of the Pharaohs) in April with my sister. It’s amazing how small the world has gotten. Not long ago it took months to get from one side of this continent to the other. Now we can be at the other side of the world in a day. Having said that I’m the first to whine about the long lineups at airports and the invasive searches yada yada. I heard a comedian the other day talk about how we complain that the seats on planes today are so small. His punch line was “yeah but you get to sit in a chair 30,000 feet up in the air that’s traveling 500 miles per hour…and you’re complaining?” I guess a few hours of restless leg beats a month of stale biscuits and saddle sores  :  )

We just got back from Peru where we had intended to visit the historic ruins of Machu Pichu. This is an Inca site built over 500 years ago by the great Inca Ruler Pachacuti who with his son Tupac Yupanqui are compared to Alexander the Great and his father and whose empire at its peak stretched hundreds of miles into Ecuador to the north and Chile to the south of present day Cuzco which was its hub. We did get a chance to see some of the impressive ruins of the Inca’s and many artifacts but a day before we were to take a train to Machu Pichu there was a torrential rain and resultant landslides took out the only two land routes in (the train tracks and the Inca walking trail). At one point our troupe was mulling over the idea of hiring a helicopter to fly us in (this of course before we knew how bad things were and how many people were trying desperately to get out). What we didn’t know was that those caught there were sleeping on a field in the cold rain with no shelter and that the water supply had been contaminated and food supplies were insufficient. On top of that, the landslides had killed people and evacuations were limited to a hand full of helicopters taking victims out a few at a time leading to riots. If we’d gone a day sooner we would have seen Machu Pichu but the price would have been high. Sometimes you have to thank your lucky stars for un-granted wishes.

Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin and wunderkind of my generation, is offering flights to space starting I believe as early as 2011. I was only a kid when I watched man take his enfant steps into weightlessness. I’ve never for an instant thought that this would be an option for me in my lifetime. Not even a year ago would I have entertained the possibility but it will be possible in 2011 although prohibitively expensive at $200,000 per seat. Most people would have to mortgage their house to raise that kind of money but its about one twenty fifth of what the Russians were charging private businessmen to take them into space only a year or two ago. Is it really that hard to believe that ten years hence we’ll be able to hop onto a Virgin space ship and experience weightlessness and view our blue globe from 60+ miles up for the cost of a first class ticket or less? We truly are living in very interesting times.

“Life is grand” is what Harry my fine Irish friend used to say. My mom’s version went something like “Don’t take life so seriously. You’ll never get out of it alive”. I still do but I think Harry was right. All you have to do is look up into the infinite and realize how small we are. Even the greatest of the greatest of us will be forgotten in another million years, which is only a spit in the time continuum. Hell our whole lifetime is but a hundred years give or take a few decades. How significant is that compared to the thirteen odd billions years that have passed since the Big Bang and the thirteen billion more before the lights go out? That may make some feel small and insignificant but it actually is kind of liberating if you think about it. Even if we do the unthinkable and erase ourselves from the food chain it won’t really change much in the universe. Life will go on and the generations that would have been will never know what they lost. We won’t either because we won’t be around…so I guess that leaves one thing…now. Now is all we’ve got. Better make it the best now we can. What an amazing confluence of events it was that brought us to this point in time and space to frolic on this rock for a few decades. We can argue about how that happened or by whose hand but the fact still remains here we are and… “Life IS grand.”