#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.

I fell asleep at 2am on Saturday night after a fun but exhausting show and a final weary game of Godstorm with Mike and Amber. I woke up today at 10:30am but didn’t scrape up from beneath the ground until well after one. I watched the cold afternoon burn the walls in the increasingly classic home fashion: long hours drawing uncomfortable CX on the kitchen stool, black coffee, granola with milk and crushed trader joe oreos in there, Garrison Keyler like an old bell clanging in my 4th grade stomach. One night my parents came into my room while I was reading and my dad said, “Here,” and it was a clock radio. He plugged it in and tuned it to WVIA, and I listened to All That Jazz and then Echoes where I heard Nana Simopoulos “White Bird” and Mark Isham “The Woman in Gray.” Hearing even ten seconds of these goofy songs still makes me crumble into the adolescent night. While my parents and grandparents have grown younger and younger Garrison Keylor remains ancient and permanently distant.

My dad brought me the old couch on Saturday. It appears in our old family tapes and I haven’t seen it in about nine years. Fittingly, we ripped the top a little bringing it into the house, but it’s here and it’s fine. Bonsky and I rearranged the downstairs this afternoon to accommodate it, opting out of what I call “Random house classical” (tv bottom of steps, couch opposite) for a new approach, with couch where the communal computer desk was, TV where the barbi stacks were and dining room table + chairs where the old coffee table was, and bikes where the TV and beer refrigerator were. We found a punk patch dating from the Mike Straight era stapled to the wall behind the tape shelf that read “No War Between Nations / No Peace Between Classes,” featuring a dove carrying a molotov cocktail. I sprayed the walls with bleach water and wiped them with a sponge. I live here. When I say I am going home this is where I mean. My dad said to my mom, “You can never visit, you can never see it. He lives in total filth.” I look out over the back on Sunday afternoons here – behind me, out the window behind the stool – and I feel the same warmth from dead yards and bare trees that I feel at my grandparents’ house. As if my house is our old campsite in the gone woods that filled their backyard as recently as a year ago. As if when they were plowed under those tangled trees and the strange sand pits around them went underground and swam to me beneath the mud and the leaden soil, to sprout their vines beyond my window, to wind up over the fences and into the neighbors’ yards. My grampa snores with the TV and the fire turned on and my little cousins screaming and laughing. He has a dream that says, The naked indian moved to Thomas’s back yard.

My dad also brought me a lamp that he had in his and my mom’s room while I was growing up. He famously had a nightmare one night, got out of bed and, to my mother’s horror, punched it off of his night table while whimpering with wide sleeping eyes. I would convince myself every night when going to sleep that I would surely hear a burglar or kidnapper entering the house, and could wake in time to get my dad if I needed to. I slept through this and many other night episodes, but woke up once: one night with wide eyes I watched a single thin black hand part the curtains of my room from the outside enough for a head out in the dark on the roof to look in. I was paralyzed with fear and pulled the covers up above my head. In the morning I couldn’t tell if it had actually happened.

For dinner tonight I had black and white beans in olive oil with four mushrooms, an onion, four garlic cloves and a pepper all chopped in and all fried up into a delicious gray bean slop. Cook it up with cumin chili powder black pepper. Add rice and cheese when it’s done. I crushed some crackers on there and then added some hot sauce, also two pieces of toast. I cooked chicken again earlier this week with the same recipe as before but did a better job, mostly re: cooking longer on lower heat and adding stock gradually rather than all at once like a god damn idiot.

On Tuesday I start going to Amber’s school to read to two of her kids. On Friday or so I’m going to Boston. Tomorrow me, Mike and Sienna are completing the unbeatable proposal we’re working on.

Perhaps you have been reading this blog for the last seven weeks and wondering, “I wonder what he is going to do this Sunday?” Well hey, it looks like I’m writing about it right now. Megalos and home tales for Sunday January 27th for the magic year of our perfect vision and unopened eyes 2008. Less boring than the last two weeks. Pre-fold holler to my boy Jesse “The Kud” who was man enough to admit that he once read this blog.

Sunday styles were consistent. I drank black coffee and listened to A Prairie Home Companion. I drank tang. I cooked myself rapturous spiral cut pasta like so: garlic + chopped spinach + black beans in olive oil with black pepper, cumin and cayenne; throw the cooked pasta in there, crack two eggs on it, break a chunk of feta off, stir until consistent and the egg is cooked.

Earlier tonight my pizza recipe = throw a little pasta sauce on the dough but not a lot, chop an onion super fine and saute with garlic and chopped spinach and mushrooms in olive oil and black pepper, cook way down, spread out on the dough, grate some cheddar and parmesan on there, chop some olives and sun dried tomatoes to top it. Drink a beer and work some CX and listen to the bee mask tape while that monster comes together.

Both of these resulted in near drug frenzy levels of food coma. I am stoked to have finally emerged from burrito/beans and rice/pot of beans purgatory after what must have been six months of not actually cooking. It is good to be well fed and to lay on my floor watching youtube without the listlessness of a can of tuna for dinner and water for dessert. It is good to come home from the grocery store with more options than an egg sandwich.

I spent the rest of Sunday at Mike’s, where I drank two Yuengling Black and Tans. The day before, not that it matters re: the scope of this blog, but anyway I make the rules, I had the first glass of white wine I’ve enjoyed in about a year. Lenka used to give me white wine in the Christian house and we would watch American idol while I cooked chicken or fettucini alfredo or instant Indian food and Mike B’s beautiful dog would lie there with his big ears up. Mike Hall and I played two games of godstorm in which I was the greeks. We played music. We watched The Ten. I listened to Tom Waits on American Routes.

This week I’m assembling my portfolio and great statement of purpose for Sienna. We’re playing a fest on Saturday and my dad might bring me my couch. My brother is coming tomorrow. I’m going to Whimsy’s house on Wednesday. I’m on page 200 and some of CX Cult, a start I’m more than happy with, and hope to be twice as far by next week. I am going back to camp.

Here’s lookin at you kid

Private idiots #3-7

Skating

Wave caps ect