And we’re back. I can’t remember the last time I was in South Philly. Seriously, I still haven’t gone back. I’m still in West Philly and we’ve been back for two days.

This afternoon I cleaned the shower doors in the women’s room and the insides of the showers in the men’s room. Over the course of the afternoon I listened to the same Angels of Light record four times. Halfway between Minneapolis and Madison, on the return trip, Mike said “Way to pick the worst possible record for how I’m feeling right now.” And how!

So the linear super boring non-story story of the tour, for my records and for yours, is as follows. I am straight up returning to secret code blogging as soon as this shit is posted once and for all for everyone who cares to google up.

We drove 2,650 miles, marked from a rest stop around Valley Forge back to Girard and Belmont. The only car accident we saw was a cop crashed into an SUV just as we crossed back into the ‘delph.

We played in Pittsburgh at Garfield Artworks with a guy (among some other stuff) who opened his set by covering that Semisonic song Closing Time, and everyone there cringed or threw up apart from his dad. It was the most poorly run show I’ve ever been to. We played last when we should have played first, whatever. We played for five minutes to two people and we played on a stage and through a PA. One of the people was in a band from earlier and the other was Jeremy, who put us up, bought us beer and was a completely amazing dude.

We played at Kenyon College in Gambier Ohio. A hiphop guy Leo who went to the college played before us. I drank maybe eight beers before and was pursuing Purity and Accuracy (“if you don’t know, now ya know”) so I was super into it. He had what might be called a tight flow and he rapped over the beat from Tried By Twelve at one point. We didn’t understand why we were at Kenyon until we found out that Chris is from Aryan/Asian, who played at the show in Philly where Mike met Mirra, who set up the show. (He gave me his CD-R “The Official Mississippi Gamelan Quartet,” or maybe Quintet, I don’t have it in front of me. Home recording lovers who have done mushrooms, watch for this shit! PS Mike if you’re reading this give me back my VCO jams right now.) As for ouuuurrr jams at Kenyon, we defined the “new” set that we’d play for the rest of the tour, featuring the reservoir dream, the not sorry song and the ugly fucked up mic feedback I seem to be playing more these days than I play bass. Also we went to the best bonfire I have ever been to and, as I mentioned(? I’m not reading back to see if I mentioned it or not), I capital-I Interrupted two people when I went on a dreamwalk through distant dark brush at 3AM.

In Chicago we played at a Version Festival event with twelve bands. We played an aggravating set to a fairly ambivalent crowd. Mike and I ate Subway in frustration just before and the chicken I ate made my stomach turn. We couldn’t get very good sound because Mike had blown his amp in Kenyon and he had to borrow a new one.

In Madison we didn’t play a show because Jamie “wasn’t ready for us.” He did buy us tacos, though, and I continue to miss his Philadelphia presence as much as I did when he left.

In Minneapolis we played alone at a birthday party for about twenty people on the second floor of a sprawling house. There were ghosts from my past and future everywhere and the night was generally upsetting though our set wasn’t too bad. Horrible uncontrollable “bad” feedback from the guitar but we just went with it. We gave buddy boy from Gold Kodiak (who I can’t stop calling Malcolm even though it’s not Malcolm) one of the prints of Nate. Afterward there was a tame bonfire in a backyard.

In Madison again we still didn’t play a show because Ted and Don waffled on us. Don had said three days earlier, and I quote, “I didn’t buy a PA last year for us to not do shows.” Fucking lame, dudes!

In Indiana somewhere Mike and I remembered to put in The Blueprint. It made our spirits rise and broke us out of a certain cloudiness that set in after we left Chicago. Mike saw a dozen orioles on the way to Columbus and said he thought it was a good sign, because he saw one on the way to Kenyon. It turned out to be the best show of the tour, and probably a tie for the best time. Aaron of Sword Heaven did us the favor of putting us on the bill. I ate so much delicious chicken and soup that I felt like I was at my mom’s house. Our set was as good as it gets. We drank whiskey and Mike slept on the roof. Everyone was super friendly, the show was extremely well organized and they even gave us some gas money.

And now you know 4% of what I’ve been doing for the last nine days.

Who?: Tasneem, Rafael Mudboy, This Is My Condition, Frankie Martin, free buffets that cost $5 (and/or “there is no such thing as a free lunch”), Max + Mica, Jamie, Ted + Don even though they fuckin’ straight up failed, Caroline for telling good lies and giving us presents, Carissa + Chris, The Feminist Stronghold, Lambsbread + Major Stars + Bonedust + Sword Heaven, Val + Doug

I am having a hard time being clear-headed enough for long enough to write anything or tell anyone anything in any kind of detail. There has been way too much input. When I get out of the car in a new place (we are in Minneapolis right now) it takes me an hour to change gears and go through the hyper-awareness familiarization routine once again. I can’t drive once we get close to a place. In Madison (Chicago?) my eyelid started twitching.

We’re at the apex of the tour arc. I think we drove 1400 miles. Tomorrow is the start of the return trip. When I get back, I will cook myself the most luxurious dinner, drink a gallon of water, take two back to back showers and sleep for thirty six hours with breaks in which I go to my job.

I am a housekeeper. On a normal day I clean four showers, eleven toilets and twelve sinks. I mop four different floors, take out around fifteen trashcans and wipe off four mirrors. Sometimes I vacuum. I usually make at least two beds but once it was something like thirty. I will do anything else anyone asks me to do. When I was in third grade I started doing all of these same things for my dad, for $2 an hour. I think I maxed out with him around $4.50 by the time I was in eighth.

At Version there was an art installation that you could go into, a back to the womb thing. It was a huge air-filled tyvec tent that you got into by crawling through fifteen feet of the most claustrophobic dirty plastic imaginable. Inside there were markers for writing on the walls and a couch. We spent all night in there.

I am mute and I can drink more whiskey and beer than anyone would ever believe. I can’t even begin talking about this shit until we get back.

We are in Chicago right now. Yesterday we were in Gambier Ohio and the day before that we were in Pittsburgh. We have been in two radio shaks, one wall mart, two grocery stores that sold beer, innumerable apartments, one bar, one cafeteria and – most of all – my car. In the midwest things are further away from each other than they are on the east coast. The drive from Madison to Columbus on Thursday or whenever is going to be ugly, but we are well equipped with all of the Sun Ra and Jay-Z that we could possibly need.

I ate the brownies Suz packed me but almost none of the other food we brought. In Pittsburgh after an ugly show we drank Iron City beers and ate the best fake chicken I’ve ever had. At Kenyon, delicious salads grow on trees, so we alternated between gorging ourselves on those and rolling away the beautiful afternoon in the chunth.

This time around there haven’t been any dogs to pet. The only one we saw was a stray in the middle of Ohio. In Indiana there are signs that say “Animal Present when Flashing.” One was flashing but where were the presents? Ahhhhh get it?

Bonsky writes,

its time for secret hotties everyone!!???!!! look for them everywhere, raves, cupboards, bowling allies, the ballet, your grandmas house, in the microwave!!! they could be anywhere or anybody!! find a secret hottie now!!!!

We are going to get free thai food in a couple of hours. Also free drinks. Mike has been working on the remains of yesterday’s 30 pack since about noon. Some people don’t like being on tour and we can’t figure out why.

Hello so far: Jeremy of The Sea, Like Lead + Ed the English major, Chris of Aryan/Asian, Tigersaw gals, Semisonic cover band, Mirra and Nora, tollbooth hottie, Leo, Richard + Tucker + Steffen and all PEEPS, Marianna, Chester, whoever brought those marshmallows to the bonfire. Apologies to the couple I interrupted mid-coitus while I walked in the woods.

If I have time, I will post something a little less cryptic and a little more anecdotal when we get to Minneapolis.

On Thursdays everything seems to be in line. This is the second week in a row I’ve come out onto this roof, had coffee and Pathmark ice cream and worked on a drawing or a word.

At work the other day I thought about trying to write a scifi or a fantasy novel. Two summers ago when I was conceptualizing Working Title I wrote a short article about how genre fiction isn’t taken seriously by intellectuals or academics, and only ever invoked to illustrate some Freudian or Lacanian point in an “accessible” way. Anyway, the thing I was interested in was how genre stereotypes transcend their status as such and become traditions or unalterable lore, how they’re so omnipresent in genre stuff that even by consciously breaking them an author still invokes them in that negation. Working Title was going to be a scifi book but I ended up choking on my own vomit and writing what I wrote instead. For those that don’t know or might wonder, I’ve been drawing on the back of the printouts since.

This is all on my mind lately because Todd asked me at work two weeks ago whether or not I’ve been writing. This got under my skin in the worst possible way and plumes of smoke came from my head as I mopped. Of course I haven’t been writing, writing what? Working Title, Literature, was the most horrendously demoralizing thing I’ve ever convinced myself to get involved with. I haven’t done a damn thing since, and have been detoxing myself by pursuing art junk instead of writing. While the year has been somewhat productive on that front (off the top of my head I can count four large paintings, eight small ones, five small maga-zines, one medium one, the newspaper, the holiday prints, dozens of drawings and piles of junk, my band), even bigger successes (the newspaper) and developments (touring) have felt ephemeral, like small distractions, like colorful graffiti along the bottom edges of a windowless gray building that towers out of sight and off into the distance.

Todd suggested I write for Reader’s Digest. The jury is out on that suggestion. In the mean time, I’ve been working on something for the last few weeks and maybe I will finish it before abandoning it, like everything else I’ve worked on in the last year.

Oh but wait yeah a scifi book. I might do that. Also I have daydreamed repeatedly about epicca, which I parted ways with when I got to college and decided that everything I had ever written in the long years previous was terrible. While that opinion still holds largely true (and extends as writerly self-hatred does up and into the very sentences I am putting into this fucker right now), what seems important beyond completed articles on that old project are some of the better, complete ideas. I frantically email Jeremiah every six months or so (and always think of his birthday even though I never, ever remember to email him on it) saying I’m going to reinvent that thing or get regoing on it or whatever and then I never do. One of these days, though! Jer if you are reading this and I haven’t already sent you one, email me your update.

Also if you don’t know what any of this is about try googling my name and reading all of the stuff I’ve written for D&D websites or worse for my own. Or just wait until I collect my favorite ones later this summer and print them out.

Meanwhile, I’m designing the new letterhead for the Mansion, if I can get off my laziest ass and just go do it. All of my time is going into band junk – I spent about a day last week sending and replying to emails about tour. We’re playing at Kenyon College, Version Festival in Chicago, Jamie’s house in Madison, a friend of Mike’s in Minneapolis, an art gallery in Columbus and a house somewhere in central PA. (Maybe I will blog about tour while we are on the road, whoa!) We’re also playing near St. Joe’s on Saturday. I’ve been dreaming about it all week.

I printed shirts last night but they came out terrible. I am going to have to customize every single one of them in order for them to be decent, which is okay I guess, but I had only wanted to dedicate eight hours to that project, not 24. Mike’s advice was “Shirts!” and he shrugged and laughed. I was in a miserable mood until we watched The Cruise, and then when he showed me that guy Speed’s book, I wondered why I haven’t read anything in so long.

Today it’s raining. I wanted to go out onto the roof last night to drink beer but we went to Dirty Frank’s instead. A couple on a date were sitting behind us and we listened to them the whole night, talking about what they were talking about. The guy had a corona hat on and the girl looked like Concetta. I heard him say “I took some mushrooms and went on a vision quest” nearly two hours after I heard him say “I have only loved two girls in my life, the first one I didn’t have sex with, and the second one the sex was terrible.” Those two statements taken together really typified him. Susy suggested that the girl staying for two hours was what typified her.

At Body Worlds, an enlarged man rode a humongous cartoon apparently functional bike. There were many visible plastinated penises but only one vagina, though the exhibit claimed indifference to all bodily taboos. A sign at the beginning of the exhibit said that no personal information about the lives or deaths of the corpses would be given, though an exception was made for the display of a sectioned obese man, where there was seemingly cause to mention that he died at age fifty of weight related heart problems. For some reason, the only plastinated animals were birds.

My roommate’s dog is asleep on the carpet outside of my room. Oh no wait he just left. He was waiting to be taken for a walk.

I drew six small pages for Ospreys #5 in the last couple of days. I want it to be double or triple size but I will see how far along I am by the time our show near St. Joe’s comes around. Similarly, I’m almost done making shirt stuff, but we’ll have to see what the printing situation is come Monday.

A booking agent sent me this email:

hey tom- before i can make any decision, i need to hear your music…do you have a myspace account? if not, take my advice and make one quick – it is THE way that venues do business with bands…let me know where i can hear you…

We leave for tour in less than three weeks.