I drove from Portland to San Francisco last week and picked up some drifters along the way. I'm generally trying to assume that people are good and that they're not, for example, planning on slipping my money clip into one of their pockets when I drop them off at their destination. Certainly, I improved my odds at having a more refined drifter by ordering direct from the drifter emporium at Craigslist's Rideshare section, and the I-5 corridor between Portland and San Francisco is probably populated with more progressive people than most other routes you could take in this country. (I don't even want to name examples of the latter, or even imply that those places might rhyme with Shmalabama.) But I was still relieved that I didn't have to call 911 at any point to rescue my new companions from some weird auto-asphyxiation truck-stop bathroom escapade.

Instead our conversation on the ride down revolved around the potential federal government shutdown that day, of which NPR had its typical slate of respectful, informative stories followed by (I swear to God) announcements for a Cuisanart swap. I asked my drifter friends if a government shutdown would mean I wouldn't have to send in my check to the IRS on April 15th and they informed me that the Federal Reserve is a private bank separate from the government and a big scam really and that there was no way I was getting out of paying my taxes. (God damn intellectual drifters.)

I indeed took them to their destinations without incident and with my money clip still in my pocket. I spent that weekend in San Francisco touring art museums with my friend Craig. I saw a scale model of a cathedral built out of bullets and gun casings by Al Farrow, with an actual spine running the length of the interior. I saw an anarchist action figure meticulously produced and packaged by Packard Jennings, which he placed in a Wal-Mart with a camera to capture all the shocked reactions of potential customers. I saw carved wooden war clubs by Michael Arcega in the style of Maori warlords who would put a symbol of their enemy at the top of their club to remind themselves who they were fighting against; on these modern clubs were representations of oil refineries. And yet, the image that I remember clearest and am still trying to understand is a photograph from the 1920's hanging in Craig's kitchen of bicyclists in the Tour de France, one with his arm around his friend, another helping that same friend light a cigarette. They were smoking while competing in the toughest physical challenge on Earth. And they didn't look like they were ruthlessly competing against each other. They looked like they were friends.

I've spent the last four years pursuing a dream of aggressively touring this entire enormous country with my band. I haven't had help with the booking, yet it's been important for me to set up shows that look like real shows, hoping that at one point they would be real shows and I would be on a real tour. My tour last fall was in many ways our best yet. I spent the whole summer working on it, making sure that we were at the right venue on the right night of the week with the right bands. It can be dispiriting to drive all day to a show and realize that you're playing the same night as the circus or the rodeo. It's amazing how many times the circus is in town. I chose the size of band that I thought best represented my music: drums, upright bass, electric guitar and trumpet. I even hired someone to help tour manage and sell merchandise. I tried to think of everything, to run down every loose train before it plunged into the ravine. We had places to stay almost every night of the tour, only getting one hotel room in the entire six weeks.

The shows were all very good. The crowds were generally captivated. I played at a prison and met Poppa Neutrino. In many ways it was all a success. But I got to San Francisco, the last show of the tour, knowing that I was going to lose a lot of money on the tour. How much exactly is hard to say, because as band leader I'm already basically subsidizing everything with my own bank account. But I lost a significant amount of money, and when you factor in the money that I still would have to pay to the IRS months later whether or not the government shut down, it was a pretty spectacular financial loss. Not to mention that when we loaded out of that last show and got in our van, we realized that my laptop, passport and iPod had been stolen.

The ride back to Portland the next day felt like a repeated kick in the stomach. I kept thinking how I couldn't afford to live where I had been living, didn't have a job, didn't have a girlfriend (note the priorities). The music that I made seemed to have some value, but that value was out of proportion with the ambition of what I was doing with it. I spent the rest of the winter laying in my room feeling defeated.

One day in December my ex-wife called and said I should come over and see her house and her dog Lennon. He used to be our dog for several years, and since she had more of a day job he was my dog, and I estimate I took him on over two thousand walks in that time. When I got to the house to see him this time he was so senile that he barely recognized me. As we took him out for a walk she informed me that she was going to put him down the next day and that would be it for old Lennon the Dog.

I cried all the next day. I hadn't even seen Lenny in three years. I knew he had lived a great life. He had been all over the continent, not that dogs care about traveling. He had carried great big logs in his mouth on the ocean. He had vainly tried to chase down deer in the valleys of California. He galloped the endless plains of Saskatchewan. And now it was over. I'm not usually so sentimental about animals. When I tried to isolate what made me so sad, I thought of all the times I stopped Lennon from eating something he shouldn't, or tried to teach him to do something. At the end of his life all I wished was that I had given him more treats, that I had given him (literally, I guess) a longer leash. Or another scratch on the belly. I thought about how hard people can be on each other until we realize that we're not here forever, and then we feel sorry about everything bad we did. We know from the start that we're not around here forever, but we still do it.

My wardrobe over the winter changed to black. Every time I chose a shirt or shoes or it was always the black one I wanted. I was in mourning, not just for the dog, but for the life I had thought would make me happy which I now realized wasn't going to happen the way I hoped it would. Some sort of indie-rock dream of headlining theaters and having thousands of people embrace your every word. I realized that the pursuit of that dream was giving me manic moments of excitement, wonderful moments that have changed my life, but those moments are not the same as happiness. Happiness is a sustained feeling where you are in control of who you are, and you're not raking everyone over the coals for your own deficiencies, or expecting the world to sort out your insecurities.

That form of theater-headlining success doesn't come true for very many. But you see examples of it that look attainable and you wonder why you can't have the same success. The Decemberists are probably the best Portland example, as they play theaters around the country, and recently their new album debuted at number one on the Billboard charts. Despite knowing that these things come about because of hard work and talent, musicians are always looking at each other and thinking, "I could do THAT." Audiences, however, don't care if you could also do that, because the band they like is already doing that. Your personal ambitions are not what feeds people, it's the art that you produce. And you have little control over which parts of it are effective and who receives them and in what ways. The entire music business is built around the illusion that you can dictate what people will listen to and when, but that's a lie. I wasn't even around for whatever marketing campaign preceded Joni Mitchell's Blue, yet that album has affected my life far more than anything that came out in the last year supported by marketing dollars. Confusing an advertisement for art is the biggest challenge we have as audience members today. It gets incredibly confusing when music is a commercial for itself, repeatedly asking you to listen to it even when you've bought it and are listening to it.

Sometimes it makes sense to have an external event that you can grieve about when you were really looking for a way to grieve about something internally. Not to turn the death of a dog into something about me, but that's generally how stories are created. The random events all mean something different to different people. Most people would find the crux of the story in the cathedral made out of bullets or the war clubs with oil refineries on the handles. You have to find your narrative arcs where you can and not question it. So Lennon the Dog died and it was the end of the life I wanted to live.

But it's not a sad story, because I've been happier these past few months than I've ever been. The failures made me actually more committed to music than ever, just with a desire to lower the overhead and change my approach to it. I keep thinking about that Tour de France poster. Sports used to be about a way to enjoy yourself and connect to others, and it has turned into a venue to become obsessive about dominating everyone. Winning the race at the expense of your identity is probably not worth it. Maybe the race isn't so much about a competition or the absolute limits of human endurance as it is about a ride through the countryside, enjoying being alive.