Another down day today, this one spent lounging on my brother-in-law’s brother Carl’s couch in Quincy, Illinois, catching up on e-mail, spending forty five minutes on the phone with MSN customer service trying to get my damn e-mail account sorted out. I’m porking out already from the crap I’ve been eating, spending more money than I’d planned on, the van’s running like garbage, my motivation for booking shows is dwindling… so everything according to plan.
Yesterday was a bust show wise, but a decent day. I rolled out of St. Louis as soon as I woke up. The street I parked on stayed pretty busy all night, but somehow I didn’t have too hard of a time sleeping in. I gotta get the rear curtain hooked up, but other than that, the bunk fucking rocks. I made it in to Quincy around one, took the historic Highway 61 in. It’s a nice drive, but it really made me realize that I’m not living in the world that I imagine myself to be. Like Anna said, everyone is just concerned about shopping and eating and downloading and getting gas and going to Blockbuster. These days feel distinctly unhistoric.
But when I pulled in, Carl was standing out front waving me down. It literally took us about five minutes to make friends. We hit Wendy’s for food, and Carl talked about Bill (my brother-in-law) the entire time. The conversation may have stayed on the topic of Bill partially because he’s one of the only things that Carl and I have in common, but it’s also clear that Carl really loves and looks up to Bill, without really having any hope of catching up to him. It’s an odd blessing/curse to have someone to look up to and inspire you, and also someone whose accomplishments will always diminish yours. We killed A LOT of time in front of the TV, neither of us having the energy to turn it off and go out and do anything. Til happy hour that is. We drink Bud Light at a bar called Flatliners (kind of a grim name for the purveyors of poison) with a couple of fat Midwestern girls in the house, Eminem on the jukebox. These lives will not be lacking anything without the Strokes or the YYYs or The French Kicks, to say nothing of me.
After a couple of pitchers, we stuffed ourselves at the local pizza/Mexican place, which was pretty great, then stumbled off to bed. It’s funny, when you’re young, it’s all about getting fucked up, the highest peak of pleasure and fuck the consequences, but as you get longer in tooth, it’s only about comfort and avoidance of pain. Curse my lazy soul.
Posted by Mishka at October 6, 2003 12:11 AM