Off we go in to the wild blue yonder. Left NY yesterday on the first solo leg of my journey. The tour with the Giraffes was fun and fucked up and everything I could have hoped for (and a couple of things I didn’t hope for) but at least then we had a little structure. Each night, we knew where we had to be for the show. In the next two weeks, I have two confirmed shows, and one confirmed appearance at an open mic to play two songs. The rest is up in the air.
It took me for fucking ever to get out of NY yesterday. It was tough leaving Allie. We made plans for her to come out and meet me in Colorado in about a month so it won’t be too long without us seeing each other, but considering that until this year, we’d never been apart for more than a week… She was a trooper when I was up in Canada for a month, I mean it was tough being apart but there was no scene when I was leaving. And there wasn’t any scene yesterday, which makes me think how tough she is, and also how tough I ain’t. I think I was closer to crying than she was.
I got a late start and though I drove as long as I could yesterday, I didn’t make it near as far as I wanted to. I finally cashed it in at a rest stop in Southern Virginia after about eight hours. It was dark out, and I have a hard time staying focused driving in the dark, and it was surprisingly cold. I parked the van at the far end of the rest stop parking lot, hooked up the curtains and crawled in. The curtains work great, blocking out the orange glow of the streetlights, and the flashing lights of the big rigs rolling by. It’s still pretty loud in the bunk, yo! u can hear car doors open and close, and the moaning ooze of trucks easing past, but I managed to fall asleep pretty quickly. I can tell already that these entries are going to have less of the burn that the giraffes diary did, and more of the wide open spaces and the long slow ache.
Sitting outside the Bluebird Café in Nashville, waiting for it to open. Made it here without too much trouble and thought that I’d gotten wrong directions, as I’m outside Nashville proper, and the address I had located the club in the middle of a stripmall. But of course of course, the club is in the strip mall. Confusing omens today, NASCAR and new country on FM, hilarious kids’ Christian music on AM, a phone call from Danny, who misses me, a saddle behind a dumpster when I go behind the locked club to see if there’s a musician’s entrance.
I call the club owner and she sounds surprised that I’ve made it. She reminds me that it’s only for two songs, and warns me that they’re a family establishment and that I can’t use any profanity. Which pretty much strips all my songs of their punchlines. I curse myself for clinging so tightly to my treasured ‘outsider’ status that I’ve decided to write country songs filthier than punk songs with lowbrow sexual innuendo to turn off the intellectuals and dirty words to turn off the parents, and big words/ideas/references that only parents/ intellectuals will get. Clearly, I’m a fucking idiot.
With forty-five minutes to kill, I check my e-mail at kinko’s, hoping that I’ll have a bunch of responses to the flurry of e-mails that I’ve sent out in the last ten days and at least some good news. The only response I get from all the e-mails I’ve sent about booking the next stretch of the tour is one from Jason from The Means. Even reading his transmission in the best possible way, it’s clear that there’s still beef between us about how the tour went down, the missed show in Des Moines and how I tried to coerce them into doing it by calling to memory all the things I’d done for them in NY (which I did because I like the band, but still…), my anti-social behavior during the Giraffes’ tour, etc. The long and short of it is that Jason is taking November off from everything, won’t be playing a show with me in Chicago and, from the sounds of it, won’t be helping me find a show either. The other significant e-mail is from my old pal Aaron, who has decided not to publish his tour diary as he’s found some lingering resentment after getting punched by yours truly. (Perhaps I should add here that my ill-functioning brain has coughed up another memory from that bizarre night—of me punching Aaron not once, but twice. Diligent Ethan Marunas pointed out to me in a phone conversation the other day, too, that I told Damien to take off his glasses because I was going to punch him. This, too, is true. It’s also true! that Damien was telling me to punch him in the face (the wisdom of which I delicately question) and I told him to take off his glasses because I was pissed at what I thought was a bluff. For the record, I didn’t punch him. Dear God, will I ever be able to leave this behind?) I appear to be running out of friends, and whose fault could that be?
Posted by Mishka at September 30, 2003 12:04 AM