Life on tour

Being on tour is a very strange thing to do. You wake up early in the morning, you take all your things, packed, into a van and you head for a city you didn't even know it existed. You arrive there, you find your tourbus - your home for the next one or two weeks - and then you find people watching at you, listening to you, laughing with you. People you don't know but that you share some amazing moments with. And then you pack again all of your instruments and go to sleep in your niche while the tourbus takes you to the next unknown city where you find again great people interested in what you're doing on stage.
There are some very tough moments, when you have to unpack your instruments and build the stage togheter with the guys of the other bands you're tavelling with and with the crew, there are some very incredible moments, when you finish playing the first song and people start applauding at you, for example, but there are some very quite and silent moments, especially at night, when you find yourself finally alone and you can reflect and let your thoughts fly free. Then you think thoughts about people of a distant city being not so different from the ones of your city as you thought before this trip started. Then you think thoughts about the world being simply a rainbow of colors: if you take a plane, fly toward a distant sky and then land, you find a totally different culture, a completely different language, different manners and moods...but if you take a tourbus and while the driver takes you to the next city you take your time and watch the landscapes and the villages and the cities and even traffic signals or neon signs or better if you take your time to listen to the idioms of the people you're visiting...then you realize that there is no difference from you and other people, no matter how many kilometers separate you from them.

Imagination will often carry us
to worlds that never were.
But without it we go nowhere.
Carl Sagan

There is no "Us" or "Them". There is a simple colour gradation that goes from you to the people you have in front of you. A word gradually transforms and turns into another word, another sound with the same meaning.
Borders and customs are human artefacts. They don't exist in nature, they don't even exist in the real world. It's just pure madness to categorize, give different names and characters to countries. The World is the World, a uniqueness of culture, languages and traditions that only belongs to the human being in its entirety.
This is the greatest teaching that being on tour has left me.

Thank you TDV, JTR Sickert, Francesco, Katja, Christian, Mario and you all, folks! Hope to see you again, soon.

p.s. I would like to state that this note is dedicated to everyone on the tourbus. To Snovonne too, even if I did not have enough time to know them. And to every person who came at the shows. And to the Universe itself :)

Perseo