Can It Get Worse?

As sat on the bus drinking my coffee, in freezing cold Canada, I was desperately looked around for a box of tissues.  It seems all the traveling, time changes, and new schedules has resulted in a head cold.  Having a cold on a tour is the absolute worst.  There is no sleeping in because you still need to run the runners and get supplies for the bus and the tour.  There is no going to bed early because you still need to run meet and greet and then load out your stuff.  I’ll be lucky if my head hits the pillow by 1:00 am.  

But here I am on the bus nursing a second cup of coffee, reading the news from America, searching for a box of tissues and wondering, “Is this life now?”  I don’t mean touring or head colds, I mean today’s news of 10 pipe bombs found in various mailboxes around New York. It’s easy to live your life with your provable head in the sand when you’re on the road, TVs aren’t really accessible and you wouldn’t have the time to watch them even if they were.  But yesterday my phone was buzzing like a bee had somehow gotten stuck inside and was frantically trying to escape, thus, there was no escaping the news.  

No matter what side of the deeply divided aisle you sit on, surely the one thing we can agree on is that things have gotten dangerously out of hand. If we can’t even agree on that, I worry, more than usual, about the state of our country.  I don’t really have any words of wisdom in this post, well except that one should always travel with a box of tissues containing lotion. What I do know is that I can no longer say, “things can’t get any worse” or “that would NEVER happen”. Because they have and they did. 

So today as I sit on my tour bus cacoon in Canada, with everyone still sound asleep, drinking my coffee, I tell myself there are a few silver linings.  They don’t have to be big, like the meme at the top of this post that I stole from someone on Facebook or the fact that my baby chicken has organized a field trip for her High School seniors to go and vote today.  Those little silver linings are out there, even if they feel like they are getting smaller and smaller. 

So this morning I am going to force myself, once again, to say “surely, it can not get any worse” and maybe, just maybe, if I say it with my eyes closed, three times, while clicking my heels, it will come true. Right, Toto?

Now, where are those tissues?