#1 In a dim room in Nashville TN

Things that have happened so far.

1) My feet were freezing cold by the fire in Philadelphia. I carried a case of beer down the tracks. Davey and Dori came. Matt Betz came and had his dog Blue running in and out of the firelight.

2) We played Risk to prepare for our first show. In the kitchen Muffy & I worked on our set by drawing a diagram of it. On the refrigerator was an old to do list I’d made with nothing on it other than #1. Make a Shopping List. Jeff Melkerson won the risk game

3) Felt terrible and insane in West Philly as I drove past 47th and Baltimore. We played a set in a basement. I saw many familiar faces. We got paid 46 dollars.

4) Baltimore noise set with the dudes, all painted up, slept with paint on my legs, washed it off in the tile bathroom Max made, Max talking about being young and jealous of success and then getting older and just not caring anymore and just doing what you want.

5) The baby, Coal, in Asheville NC, three years old with his little tigger hat on, carrying a huge bag of recycling down the dirt path, growing up in this crazy grapes of wrath free zone that his dad is squatting, and building these sprawling and wild slipstraw clay houses. His little bedroom has a tiny drum kit and is the only truly warm room in the complex, which is up a dirt road, in the woods behind a trailer park, near a power line cutaway in the hills, on the true edge of town. In the other room is a tiny piano and a desk with a block from which nails protrude. “Now that he can drive nails,” his dad says, “I can’t tell him he can’t play with them.” He will be very formidable when he turns 18, I say. Or, says Muffy, he’ll be totally incapable of communicating with anyone or living in the world.

6) White haired old men in the anarchist bookstore. The gay bongo dude sweating so hard and singing the worst, stupidest lyrics to an empty room. “On the A… train. (UHH) Thinking of you. … Afraid on the… plane. (UHH) Thinking of you.”

7) The switchbacks in Tennessee leading to the dead mountaintop covered in snow. “GPS is wrong. No way to TENN.”

8) Was totally naked at the show in the weird bar last night because whatever.

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#2 LA smog

In LA at night the palm trees snag the smog in their hard fronds, and the smog in turn tangles the light from the night street. The palms glow in this eerie way, filled with luminous, misty bundles, like glowing egg sacks maybe. The palm smog light like a pregnant sticky membrane. These light nests even appear to be physically heavy sometimes, as if from their constituent light and mist there might suddenly spill bile or amniotic fluid, and then some  hard thing that will land living and rush off into the night streets.

You can’t see LA from above. We drove up into the hills and past the hollywood sign and down below the city is invisible, smeared, as if drawn in colored charcoal and then wiped away. The tallest buildings downtown appear to stand on the smog. From above the strange cloud’s blanket weight and obvious toxicity are upsetting, and I wonder how there can be a city under there.

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#3 In Oakland

Last night we pulled in. The crackhead dude at the party got super upset at the end of the night when the super drunk bearded guy started baiting his “no homo” thing by insisting on a hug. “I shoots fags where I come from,” he says as he leaves. There’s a Swamp Donkey piece on the door next door.

The space is a fucking disaster of a mess but so perfect. There’s mud everywhere, the dog has three legs, I’m worried the entire night about my shit getting stolen, dog shit gets on my sleeping bag. But it’s also beautifully lit in the morning, and the trash even on an overcast and humid day – the fog is in the mountains just outside of the city, the low clouds, and it looks beautiful, tearfully beautiful to be lying in a sleeping bag, a fucking new total disaster, every single day – is a still and fine picture, as if the cigarette butts, empty bottles, ripped couch cushions, and scattered electronics were composed for the space; the shitty peeling posters and modified objects stapled up to the walls in the familiar anarchy house hard work with mixed results way are soft reminders that this is all a decision, that this is all a way to live, and even though it all looks like total hell, it’s a hell of totally impudent joy, and it feels so good and I feel so lucky and blessed to be here, hungover.

In the kitchen there’s a door that opens wider on the top half. The lintels rise, and then turn out another foot, and then rise to the ceiling. Watching the morning light in the mountains through this portal while the dog tears up the garbage behind me.

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#4 Good sets I saw

- Mark Lord in Columbus. Definitive.

- TJ Drinkwater in Iowa City.

- Moment Trigger in LA

- Human Hands in LA

- Aether Jag in Nashville

- Slime Queen in Oakland

- Sword Heaven in Columbus

- Lazy Magnet in Providence. Masterful.

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#5 Food of Band Tour

In re: walking knee deep into the pacific on Venice Beach with my pants on and the water being nice and then drying off and talking on the phone barefoot walking down the way, man, nothing beats artificial summer. Despite everything good/bad/ugly that’s happened on this trip of mine, it’s totally undeniable that leaving town in the middle of the new england winter crusher to put on shorts for five seconds and eat a slice of pizza and cruise around as if it weren’t January is completely regenerative and worth every weird eleven hour car drive and night sleeping in weird piles of mud and cat hair along the “american noise music trail.”

It’s totally stupid and basic, but I realized on this trip that the group experience of winter in Providence isn’t my only recourse to dealing with the cold and dark, and that if I want to, I can just go to California or Miami or something next time around, and that’s good to know.

No secret restaurants anywhere along the trail, but food/drink moments have been abundant.

Best (no order) =

1) PIG’S EYE BEER in Iowa City = $5 12 pack, tastes like Bodington’s

2) Delicious hemp beer in Topanga Canyon outside of LA at Froggy’s Topanga Fish Market = kind of expensive, but drank it with two excellent mahi mahi tacos and sat by a huge fire eating/drinking, and a guy started asking me what I do in life, and then talking to him it turns out he did “additional music” for Malik “Days of Heaven” and “Thin Blue Line” and sound effects for the first star trek movie?! I was sort of thinking like “Dude buy me a beer” but obviously he was pretty much only interested in me as a foothold for talking to haley and sasha.

3) All burritos in LA, oh my god.

4) House-smoked brisket sandwich at ANCIENT WAYS CAFE in way rural new mexico

5) Lamb shawarma sandwich at ALI BABA’S GRILL in knoxville = Got a speeding ticket at this exit, and feeling totally dejected pulled off to try to find food. Millions of miles of taco bell/kfc/home depot/target/walmart/car dealership anywhere USA braindeath, but then I noticed this joint Ali Baba’s right on the strip with the rest of it. Totally weird middle eastern dude hangout zone, complete with a guy who tried to upsell me many times to “the special” ($12), claiming to have the best hummus in the world, etc., etc. But I mean, the sandwich was totally good!

6) Ethiopian vegetarian and meat combo platters shared with my ancient best friend in Berkeley Tasneem and her new husband who I’d never hung out with before, and it turns out he’s pretty cool (then we went to a climbing wall gym, and after that played settlers of catan)

7) In LA at the liquor store = “Hey man what can I get for not a lot of money.” “Natural Ice.” “But that isn’t disgusting.” “You like wine?” “Yes.” “Charles Shaw mang. And you know, put a little liquor in it, that makes it nice, IT’LL GET YOU DRONNNNK”

8) Blue cheese / mixed greens / hummus on baguette sandwich in the car in Wyoming, would eat this every day

9) Beautiful spread of cheeses and olives at a super fancy party in Santa Fe that we somehow ended up going to. Drank bombay sapphire martinis and maker’s on the rocks. Everyone was dressed to the nines except for me and two skateboard dudes. A guy with white pants on kept smiling at me and taking my picture, and I never talked to him or questioned it.

10) Drinking a huge pitcher of the bar’s homebrew with Jeremy Harris in Nashville

Worst (no order) =

1) Two slices of sausage slime pizza and a Naked Juice from the Casey’s General Store rest stop on I-80 outside of chicago.

2) Oakland groceries getting kind of gnarly by the upper mid west; the mixed greens getting slimy, the yogurt thickening up, the bananas turning black and frozen.

3) Papa John’s Pizza with an egg fried on it in Oakland for breakfast, total mistake

4) All coffee at Flying J rest stops

5) Grocery store free sample pig out at 10pm outside of Oklahoma City, booo.

6) $5 for a scrambled egg and toast with butter in Santa Fe, should’ve just ordered breakfast. Skateboard dude from the party was at the restaurant. I talked to the waitress’s boyfriend at the party about circuit bending. At one point he said “Oh your band sounds like noise music, I have a noise band!”

7) Totally rank dumpstered sushi from The Bank in Baltimore = eating it thinking “well maybe I’ll get food poisoning from this” and then throwing it out without finishing it.

8) Drinking Ancient Age bourbon in Iowa City. Not that I would ever not drink it again given the opportunity (obv.), but fuck that shit.

9) Getting paid in methadone in Nashville (girl asked for it back, we gave it back); getting paid in weed brownie in Oakland

10) We fucking went to Taco John’s for some reason one day.

11) Wanting to cook so bad all month but not being able to

12) 51 Grill in Asheville NC, east coast hippie capital. Don’t put “greek salad with mixed greens” on your dumb menu if you mean “pile of iceberg lettuce with fake feta”

And I mean very little of this touches on actual adventures/occurrences, or the list of the best dogs of tour, or anything.

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#6 Boosh list excerpt Jan 21

Guys so much insane shit has happened since I last checked in, I’m sorry, my internet scene on this trip has been so terrible, now I have to drive to Chicago so I can’t check in, buuuuut here’s a possible parable/karmic anecdote for your faces:

So I quit smoking marijuana a while ago and that has been great so far, and I’ve been refusing it at every turn since, but I mean, I know my brain, and I know that occasional horrible slime experiences will happen despite the fact that I’m pretty much not at all behaving like it’s 2006 anymore.

In Oakland somebody paid us with a weed brownie that had an alien sticker on it, about the size of a free sample piece of bread at east side marketplace, not exactly looking like a stunner, but a handsome dude with long hair and eyeliner on was like “split that with someone man it will FUCK YOU UP!”. I decided I wanted to keep this pot brownie because A) I could trade it to someone for beer or B) being on band tour and feeling insane and exhausted all of the time alters my decision-making.

In Iowa City last night after drinking six PIG EYE beers (so good, $5/12 pack, tastes like bodington’s!) I decided, because I was drunk and in this crazy touring mind-state, to eat the pot brownie, which I’d been fingering in my pocket in the car for the 2500 miles of horrible salt/snow/gray sky since we left CA, and it was kind of warm and crumbly when I took the shitty drug cellophane off of it, and I ate it.

The dudes we’re staying with (#1 lifestyle band in america TJ DRINKWATER = Jeff / Si / Tater = excellent hosts, excellent dudes, total maniacs) were on mushrooms and at like 2am after throwing the pool balls all over the bar and smashing the cues and getting into weird fights, they were like, “Come on let’s go break into the new squat.” And normally in Providence or certainly in Philadelphia at 2am kind of drunk I would 100% definitely participate in entering a weird building, but because I was extremely, sickly stoned from having this total aberration of a decision to eat a brownie with an alien sticker on it, I was like “Buhhhhhhhh” and couldn’t get up from the couch when they left. The dudes got arrested by five cops (who they repeatedly hilariously kept calling “big daddies”) with guns with laser sights on them, spent the night in jail, and have $500 trespassing fines. But because I chose to do drugs, I just had a kind of bad night’s sleep and got sort of dehydrated.

The important post script is that this morning they skyped in their friend from England to play a set for us while we ate breakfast, and their attitudes/spirits weren’t broken at all by their night. (“Totally TJ.”)

Okay I’m going to a mud wrestling party or something with Aaron later, more soon, back in a fucking week, overheard just now, 5:56pm, Janaury 21st, 2,010: “We’ll smoke the hash and we’ll do it. No we gotta do something chill. Let’s get hashed out and do it. And then we’ll walk to starbucks.”

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#7 Boosh List excerpt February 6th

Well okay, I’ll weigh in on this email thread, which is surely already the definitive document of the 2010 “thank god we have each other, because the world is so weird” zeitgeist.

A little atmospheric context = I’m listening to reggae, it’s 45 degrees in my house, there are sheets covering the windows, I just ate the best oatmeal, I woke up at 2pm, the kitchen and the living room are clean and still, we’re out of toilet paper.

I know I’m the odd man out as the guy on boosh list who isn’t “excessively prone to feelings” but I think maybe it’s worth adding a couple recent winter occurrences that made me feel okay about everything =

1) Walker scampers up to the car in Pittsburgh and then makes a killer breakfast after we walk through the rainy winter night cemetery, climbing over the wet stone wall, considering holes in the ground where rabbits might fall into tombs and never escape (“it’s a long drop”), and the changing silhouettes of angels and saints and statuary as you move past them; how they turn to follow you, like standing, wriggling shadows, at night suggesting images much removed from what their sculptors intended, and where I see what I think at first behind my rainy glasses are flashlights, but what are actually white tail deer, bounding silently away.

2) Sitting at Katy’s table the night I got back on the opposite side I usually do, drinking beer from a glass, just looking around the warm room, looking out over the street. There was a thing when I used to travel pretty much always where when I’d get home to wherever I lived and I’d feel like “Ugh the kitchen and living room in Richmond are better than this.” Upon returning to Providence, even from a t-shirt in breezy LA and strange Santa Fe, I didn’t feel this at all. Incredibly I’ve been here for a year now, and this is now where I live, Providence is now where I’m home. And since I don’t think it’s super evident from the above, my saying the kitchens of Richmond were better than the kitchens of Philadelphia was an evaluation of personnel just as much of space. I would rather be back and bundled warm and looking at the familiar low ceilings with my people here, eating pizza with Jonathan at Summer St, my head steaming in the morning as I come out of my sleeping bag in freezing Lockwood and have the first thing that happens in the morning (morning: 1pm) be that Walker asks me some question about where something is or how we’re going to do something on Friday, hiking around the butterfly farm, listening to podcasts in the eternal February 1st foodstamps checkout line at Price Rite eagle square. The weird corners and secret warm rooms of Providence have the filthy mud floors of Oakland beat. They have the true life-hating murder spirit of Nashville, the jolly, ugly aggression of Free Philadelphia, the sunny, easy shrugging bullshit of LA, the crystal drop-out free zones of Santa Fe, and everything else on I-40 and I-80 all beat. I’d rather be shrugging and freezing and UGHing in Providence because it’s Providence and because this is where we all are, as demonstrated at Katy’s table in a glass of beer, January 31st, 2010.

3) Making eye contact with Andrew in the night as he came in and I was about to go to bed, and we both smiled and I crossed from behind the big table, and got the good huggy shit. Susan referred to Andrew as being the only guy in “our posse” with a beard yesterday. I don’t call it a posse, I call it a team!

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#8 Excerpt to Ben Feb 18th

In my world I’m still doing this vegan secret restaurant with my roommate. In re: things being logical, sustainable, scalable, & self-perpetuating, it’s all of these, and has made it possible to not have a day job, if not quite possible for us to turn on the heat.

In re: projects, I just did a full US tour and only played eight shows with a new band, I finished my 14th mini drawing book and have a “best of 2009″ book ready to go that I’m trying to figure out how to print for less than $100), I’m working on a video, I’m manifesting my reality day by day, pushing with arms outstretched against the rough bedroom walls of reality, like in time bandits, and they continue to give, revealing long dark hallways full of blowing trash, and I’m hoping these too will eventually with persistence and finesse drop away, opening a portal that leads somewhere good and weird and different.

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#9 Bioburden

On Feb 17, 2010, at 5:49 PM, Susy Jones wrote:

> Bioburden

>

> Send a sample to the Berkeley Labs because

> I have a heart murmur now, not to mention

> My lungs are filled with dark romantic dander

> From the double-pawed posse of calico cats

> Who warded off sea monsters on trips to New Bedford,

> In between sleeping and catching fish for snack.

> Had a hunch Melville was a Leo, too,

> And so he is according to the wiki.

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#10 Excerpt to Matt Feb 25th

Yeah okay I’ll send one more email today before I go to bed!

What’s in Rochester that you want to go there? This sick band PENGO was from there, might still be.

http://www.mimaroglumusicsales.com/artists/pengo.html

Jeremy Bailey went to grad school there too. Sort of useless except for bro hardcore though I always thought?

Joblessness = Insane life of leisure / life of worrying about everything falling apart in two months. I haven’t had a job in the normal sense for four months which is the longest I’ve ever been unemployed. But while it’s tough sometimes I feel like the stress of living at the far left of things and manifesting/sustaining my own reality instead of working in a super safe and riskless but kill-myself $10/h time render environment is a different and better kind of stress, and I’m actually pretty into having not left my house except when I want to for the past so long, and my “work” being listening to records, eating what I want, and cooking in my own kitchen. I think your actual objection is maybe Idleness is for the birds, or Being broke is for the birds (both true).

Melvins = First time I drank Patron was with Jello and the Melvins! I love LYSOL (download here = http://www.mediafire.com/?rpnxmn4k5sy) but that said, I’m not sure exactly if it’s a dichotomy or not, even though in my mind it is, but I’m more of an Earth dude than a Melvins dude. Put a beer in my 2006 hand and play LYSOL wherever whenever though.

OFFICE HOURS = I’m so bad at doing this but I know what you’re saying. Escaping the house/closed loop and getting into the world and being around other humans is mega important. Main thing I’m missing about “working” is not being in the public, good and bad parts of that equally.

Also = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD4EGN2MQjk

Tom Bubul

240 Lockwood St

Providence RI 02907

I’m going to send you more tomorrow. I feel like writing this now and sending it gets me started and it being out there will compel me to finish.

Ultimate slow/fast week. I’ll post my good Obama being president joke later. As of right now, it sure looks like I’m moving to New York. If you have a job lead for me, get in touch.

Let the eternal record of my blog reflect that there was a time when Sierra and Zelda and I went to the Lincoln Inn in Essex Vermont, where Sierra showed me how to box step while grizzled country/rockabilly dudes played hard and whiskey sweaty, and middle aged guys with tucked in shirts and blonde girlfriends much taller whisked briskly around the floor. I ate a burger and we talked about 2nd Life and whether Barack Obama puts his hand on his heart when he pledges allegience for the entire night. Zelda said, “George, this is Melinda.” “I’m Tom,” I said. “I’m Rachel,” she said. Later, I walked around the mountain in Johnson, the sun set black-eye blue on the mountains, and we trekked past lit trailers, through the mud of vinegar and shit-smelling cow pastures, and back down across the dilapidated bridge. At a bonfire I took off my sweaters and sat in my tshirt with dry lips and the rims of my glasses getting hot. The smoke blew up and high away from stacked palettes to fierce orange black, and beyond the streetlights on School Ave was the silver sky. On Saturday morning Leah and I left and we stopped at Father’s Restaurant, where I ate delicious fried fish and mixed berry pie in Norman Rockwell desolate green interior/gray deathmask belltoll drizzle outside, old couple sitting in another booth and not talking, and I chewed with the full, terrible awareness that I am not going to drive back up I-89 for a long time.

Now I’m in Brooklyn, where it looks like I’ll live. I watched Hackers with Cory, went for drinks with Katie and Alex, ate burgers and played dominos with Julio and his totally good men’s group, partied with Allen, Kathryn and that extended team, went to Dinner Group where I talked to Justin bald and bearded about the trains and had a staring contest with Alfe and team, and pursued employment and made burritos and yucked it up with Leah almost full time since we got here. I’ve moved my car at least four or five times. In all, it’s been such a fun and fast-moving time that I got over feeling disappointed and insane by the time I had even officially heard the status of my work in Vermont.

They’re hard steps out of the gray area and they ring out loud across many months. BOOM here’s the job I wind up with, BOOM here’s the house I live in, BOOM, it’s 2009, where am I, who am I, what am I doing, BOOM, life sucks, but amazingly, resiliently, it still somehow rules way more.

1) the number of times I have watched the Seventh Seal while doing work over the last eight years
2) Geno + Alice tearing each other apart all over the house forever
3) Kynar House of the Future built from the ground up
4) instances throughout history where a person cooks one giant pancake while NPR sputters and chirps away in another room (not bothered about doing a good job of making four decent and shapely pancakes, but by oneself and hungry)
5) litterboxes I have known and feared
6) cats I have been allergic to
7) neighbors I have heard through walls
8) neighbors I have seen through windows
9) cars that slowed down on Susquehanna Ave in front of my house and scared me nightly 11pm circa 1991
10) last night my brother texted me at 2:38am the following:

Ever get drunk and feel awful like u have the weight of the world on your shoulders and you cant articulate the love u have for those who are closest to you

11) fingers scored from strings
12) work all day on the couch and move upstairs to work all night on the other couch

finished inking markers poster five days after the fact, fake tour last weekend ruled, playing on Monday at big pink, working non-stop + working non-stop, haven’t been home in a week, listened to two of the Tower Recordings records today and totally felt it, lots of cleaning to do tomorrow

\/\ \/ \/\ \//
L.I.F.E.
“Just trying to get through the day without any incidents, and hobbies are for passing the time.”

Tirath Singh Nirmala – Bluster Cragg and Awe – “Faleaflowstream.” Thanks bro I needed that.

Bom bom, Have a nice dream

Ex-Cocaine – Keep America Mellow: None of my friends like this record and they all make fun of it when I play it. Ben Caves in Lexington managed to bro down with these dudes in Missoula and was there in the basement when they did their thing, somewhere across the smoke, and wow, someone agrees with me that this is the best hippie band. Listened to this on repeat all summer while I knocked down trees with a sawzall, sweating into dissolving t-shirts, pants giving way until I cut them off, pockets all ripped out and full of holes, mosquitos in Mike’s house hovering on my legs, piling bricks into a perfect chimneys to aerate the ground, to release ancient underground fires. Brightest saddest summerfade on flat tire bikes and concussed brains on Chestnut Street bridge, dumb riffs and drug smoke and singing the July tunes drunk on August nights. Saddest brightest most straightforward and unexpected psych beast, just like verything in my everything.

The boys took me to Poughkeepsie on Saturday, rode with them in the back seat passenger side. Michael fell asleep to the Converge record. I am starting a Mindflayer-style band called Drugdealer with the next awesome drummer who doesn’t give a shit that approaches me about it with any level of seriousness, if Jake doesn’t get on it first. I knocked some people over on an ice sheet and everything happened and happened and happened again.

Wrapping up my computer job, feels good to be near completion. Doing another one and another one. Never been so busy, too busy to set up action and wildness.

And it’s already all such old old news. Might go on tour with them for a while in May, might sing in the woods with Pink Des dudes tomorrow, what else is new / what can ever be new.

Tatter Blurts:

Sleeps ferocious while hand caresses the satin time-slip. and cares for these times. and are the mess

American mouth wonders aloud, What next, where do we go next, what do we do now.

Year started with tinnitus and waves of Jersey sweat from shoving crushing shoulders and backs. The saddest $30 lesson: not 20 anymore. Couldn’t get drinks, couldn’t dance, they didn’t play Helter Skelter. There was a Nazareth video playing, which may have been a good sign.

Everything Is Always Getting Better Always. Where my year of the pig bros at?

Woke up from a dream with saliva running from my 3AM mouth. Earliest I’ve been to sleep in weeks and up from dreams before I’m usually done to begin with. I was in a bathroom of a giant hotel that was hosting Jesus Lizard and Butthole Surfers in the back by the pool. I took a break to get outside and had to wear a white sticker on my hand; I had lost the pink bracelet and my shirt. Walking out down the tiled mosaic floor behind an older man, totally drunk and wearing a ragged suit, walking very slowly. I went upstairs instead of outside. I thought the line upstairs would be shorter and it was empty. The doors were made of polished wood and the floors were clean, the toilets ivory and gold. I had diarrhea and a man looked over the top and I dove out on him, he said what’s wrong with checking to see if you needed extra toilet paper? I told him I had caught him checking to see if I had extra toilet paper earlier in a different bathroom too, and that he was following me. He said well what if I shoot you.

Earlier I had tried to throw tennis balls to my brother and my uncle waist deep in the river. I could only throw them a few feet and the tide kept carrying them back. Earlier I asked my brother if my grampa was in the mob and he said he couldn’t say I and cried. Earlier I walked on a wall past oldest trees at the furthest reaches and up through a cone mouth of wooden stakes that only opened one way, pulled myself up and was on the top of the hotel, out in the city night above everything, and a woman below said “This is all you get.”

OSPREYS tomorrow in Wilmington delaware at that jawn MOJO13. Playing with bad-weed and harshed mellows noise bro Wether, Pink Deserts doing that ugly swirl and Northern Valentine playing the “rock?” sounds.

Wilmington is only 10 minutes from south philly. You can stop to check out Jesus With the Eyes and still make it in 20. Show is at 9:30.

We jammed for an hour today – Bonsky told us to turn it down. New shit with the cello and new tricks is way nice. Incredibly psyched for tour, tell your far flung bros to check it out.

january 18 columbus cafe bourbon st
january 19-20 gambier oh kenyon college
january 21 ??? lexington area ??? anywhere between columbus and nashville – get in touch if you can help this happen
january 22 nashville chris cherry blossoms’ joint
january 23 ??? atl / athens region ??? same thing holler
january 24 columbia sc the whig with KGB graffiti bros + stoked to see k sheild after not returning his email
january 25 durham nc broad st cafe with temple of bon matin
january 26 charlottesville the tea bizarre with matthew playing drums, going to project shogun assassin and play three notes for the whole thing then fall on a sword.

All weirdness and heavy-headed… serious deja-vu in the club last night. We played a tough set, ragged by technical problems throughout, continuing curse of the p.a. = can’t get the right levels, can’t hear anything, bad feedback, emboldened by borrowed amps = falling on my face. Played an old-style guitar thing that didn’t work too well, couldn’t hear mike at all; second one was mic tricks, not bad, would’ve benefitted from the jug’s presence. Third one was key, cello on his side and I played the new march with crushed bass… in all it was nice to play and good to get difficulties sorted before heading out. Naturally we knew the dudes – recognized Wether from somewhere, knew Pink Deserts bros from the church. Jason and the Argonauts was playing on loop at the bar, saw the skeleton warriors rising up three times.

Couldn’t get out of bed this morning, woke up completely terror-domed. No food in the house but not too hungry… genghis dudes practicing new riffs downstairs all morning, probably laid in bed and listened for an hour before I finally got it together to climb down to the dirty floor. Toenails and paper room grit stuck to the bottoms of sweaty feet, a room feeding back. Dreamed I could just sleep through it all and not ever have to get out of bed, perfect stasis up there in the loft, nobody would come to check or bother, I’d never get hungry, just keep slipping in and out of sleep while the genghis dudes riff and the light comes and goes, distant smell of Clay breakfasts and drug cavern classic rock sound, carpet growing longer and thicker, buckling under my loft like a crushed caterpillar, a leech on an arm under squeezing fingers. Found Nutty Steph’s christmas pres while I was cleaning, was my late breakfast from far hills, and I was in that tower and the sun was setting again and again:

Spent the afternoon re-sorting it all, clean paper here, half-dones here, dones here. 2007 marches on and I am packing that ship. Tonight going to trade noise musics with Pink Ds, hopefully check out Jared’s band after missing it too many times. Recorded an hour yesterday, sent four emails, played and still went to bed thinking, What do I have to show for my day? Unbelievable.

It is 4AM and Christmas is underway. Midnight mass and the usual great aunts who I see only once a year.

My grandmother got my mom a hot dog roasting machine like you would see at a convenient mart.

Playing too many video games, feeling seasonally affected, blah blah. I always think I’ll get work done when I come up here but I get too put off of everything and end up awake at odd hours, red-eyeing same walls and ceilings, on the super sixteen regress through harsh Internet sunrise backed by techno drums of death. This time around I’m sleeping in the attic and that’s a welcome change but I’m still not getting anything serious done. Drew multiple pages for OSPREYS zines (big -> small joints, not eighth-sized, so actually a semi-accomplishment) but it’s all obsessive shit, tons of small lines vibrating.

I am hoping once Christmas is done I’ll settle. Saw in the mass book tonight that they call the weeks outside of Lent and Advent “Ordinary Time.” I had forgotten about that, “Ordinary Time.” See future thing about that too tired.

Tour planning is happening too. Can’t wait for Ordinary Time and driving back out. Shaping up to be a fine ride and a killer set of shows. More tomorrow live from opening my presents – got tons of work to do tomorrow afternoon after I wake up from what’s shaping up to be a long nap, will undoubtedly have more to say with a clear head.