Cabin fever

When you are in one place for a very long time, you can get Cabin Fever. I got it once after being in one place for a very long time. All my life I had been in the same place. Seventeen years in the same place did something to me. I looked around; What can I do here? What can I become? No obvious solutions came up. I was on an island with no bridge or tunnel to the mainland. We did not have a car so we didn´t get around either. I was trapped. Was that how it was supposed to be? Would I have to be here for the rest of my life? On this island. What should I do for a living? What was the point of it all? I had to go. So how do you get from an island without a bridge to the rest of the world. The solution presented itself; on a boat. I was going to be a sailor. I wanted to travel the world with my bass guitar and perform at small clubs and pubs in Antwerp, Hamburg and Rotterdam. Not as a front man, but only as a backer for a band that at the last minute had to find a reasonably skilled bassist because the regular had disappeared. Bassists are so anonymous that no one knows where they go. That was the plan. A good dream that seemed like a good plan. Out on the seven seas without ever looking back. Maybe someone from the island I grew up at thought they caught a glimpse of me at the very back of a Johnny Winter gig from Rostock or Freiburg im Breisgau that the national broadcaster aired in the middle of the night. But apart from that – a completely invisible existence on the seven seas.

Life never turned out quite like that. But some thoughts and ideas from back then still remain. I still have a fear of getting stuck. I still have a fear of owning something so established that I can´t snatch it up with the root and take it with me out into the world. Thirty-five years later, I still have a fear that I can´t just say; fuck it! – and go. I own an old boat and a vintage bass guitar. So if someone has lost their bassist and needs one for a gig – I can be found sailing in the sunset breeze down south. Growing up on an island made me more of a sailor than a farmer – even without significant professional sailing time.