You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked.
A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?
-Dr. Seuss, ‘Oh The Places You’ll Go’

Oh, the places you’ll go. And the places that you could have gone. The possibilities in life seem endless: the friendships you can have, relationships you can be in, experiences you’ll remember forever. Imagine if you had decided to move to a different city at some point in your life. Your group of friends would be completely different, your memories and daily routines something unlike the life you have now.

I first realized this boundless potential of life when I was a junior in high school. During my first semester, I lived with a family in Scotland as an exchange student. After my first day of school there, I went to bed wondering what I had just done—for some reason I had volunteered to be swiftly pulled away from my familiar and comfortable surroundings and plopped down four thousand miles to the east in a foreign country with a bunch of people I didn’t know. My only saving grace seemed to be the fact that it was an English-speaking country (though very different English, of course).

But my initial misgivings passed and, as we all must do, I started to adjust. I began making new friends and exploring completely novel new surroundings. I took a much-needed break from my “normal” life and by the time I had to go home that winter I didn’t want to leave. Overall, it was one of the best experiences of my life, and I made many close friends that I still talk to today.

I often reflect on that trip and realize that if I could go to one random new country and come away with these amazing friends and experiences, the same thing could probably happen just about anywhere. This has been confirmed time and time again when I visit new places on tour or vacation. In fact, the sheer number of locations there are the world make the potential possibilities almost intimidatingly vast.

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Logic would have me believe that I’m a mechanical wiz.

Every once in a while, we all get filled with hope for some romantic notion in our lives. It could be about a personal dream, an ideal, or, more literally, an actual romance. It’s inevitable, really, but it seems to be in our genes to romanticize and fantasize—why else would we have entire industries (the film industry for one) built around it? Most of us would claim that we want to be realistic, but there are certain moments when we don’t want to allow ourselves to let go of that romantic notion we’ve created. Usually it’s because we’ve actually seen it happen in some way, shape or form in other people. For every person who has repeatedly said that life events simply don’t happen like they do in the movies, there is someone else who has seen a real “Hollywood moment” that seemed to be plucked straight out of a screenplay.

I myself live on both sides of the coin. I claim to live my life on the general principles of logic and rationality, yet continue to find myself embracing the fantastical. I’ve always wondered where to draw the line between keeping my feet on the ground and my head in the clouds. There’s obviously no hard and fast answer (although I love Will Smith’s take that surrendering to the “real world” is the quickest path to mediocrity, which you can see in a great video compiling his philosophies). But the more I think about it, the more I realize that you can’t draw a line where the edges are blurred; if logic is black and white but dreams are colorful, trying to find the middle ground seems relatively futile.

The fact is, most human beings who are doing their best to live their lives to the fullest still believe, deep down inside, in at least some of the magic of destiny. Which means that some of the hardest moments in life are those that make us realize we have to give up on that notion—not the concept as a whole, but one particular romanticized ideal that we’ve been lovingly coddling in our heart. I can’t think of anything more difficult than those times.

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This is a tribute to all my deerest friends.

You can’t just, like, use me and then throw me away, and then use me again and throw me away again, man.

As I was sitting in the Shaimus tour van in the middle of an all-day drive, I was tired both physically and mentally. I felt like a human blob–motionless all day and wondering if I was watching a small part of my young life slip away, a casualty of the road. Touring, I should mention, is often a time of extremes: the highs are incredible, and the lows can be pretty rough. I love being on the road and the tour was going quite well, but having all that time to think sometimes leads to a little nagging sensation that you may be wasting precious minutes.

This feeling is dead wrong, by the way. The fact is that almost nobody has a life that’s action-packed all the time, so it’s ludicrous to expect mine to be that way. Also, bands make great progress by touring–it’s essential to the process of building and expanding a fan base. Even when I’m sitting around doing nothing in a van, I’m still moving somewhere… it’s better than sitting around and doing nothing at home. And down the road (no pun intended), that’s the key distinction to your success. I’ll explain with a little football analogy:

The HBO series Hard Knocks takes a look at the preseason training camp of a different NFL team each year (this year it’s the Jets, I’m still waiting for my Eagles). I always find it fascinating to get a glimpse into the lives of people who are among the best at what they do, and since I’ve never played football outside a backyard, the show is particularly interesting to me; I don’t know much about what goes into putting together a pro football team. Athletes at the professional level are incredibly competitive and dedicated. And much like creative pursuits, it’s incredibly difficult to make it to the pro level… The odds are slim for “making it” in sports.

It’s tough to watch players get cut from the team. Most seem thankful for the opportunity and rightfully disappointed in the decision (they’re probably mostly disappointed in themselves). They often ask, “So what now?” Although the standard answer involves processing paperwork and returning play books, I can’t help but get a sense that they’re asking it less as an inquiry to the coach about the immediate future and more as a rhetorical reflection to themselves.

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What do you call a philosophical monk?

I like my George Foreman grill because shoving silverware in it won’t kill me.  This toaster drawing is pretty terrible.