9/30
 
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?
 
9/31/03
Slept last night in the Johnny Cash rest stop outside of Nashville, which I stumbled upon, which can only be a good omen.
 
Consumed with panic and doubt about not having a show tonight when I pulled in to Kung Fu Coffee and landed a show there.  Now, consumed with panic, doubt and worry about the show tonight.
 
10/3/03
 
The nature of life in a car is that you’re at the whim of the road.  You get all of the ups and down, and you’re subject to incredible reversals of fortune.
 
I’m sitting on the couch in my friend Anna’s house outside of Fayetteville, AR.  I’ve been on the road since Sunday the 29th and due to computer problems and a certain indolence on my part, this is the first time I’ve had a chance to sit down and write.  The last few days have been a mixture of anxiety and anticipation.
 
 
As I was writing that last sentence about eight hours ago, I heard a noise coming from my friend Anna’s bedroom.  I hadn’t seen Anna for about a year and a half.  In that time, she became addicted to heroin and has been in and out of detoxes and rehabs, gotten pregnant, gotten engaged, lost the baby, broken off the engagement, had six car accidents, and so on, ad nauseum.  When I heard noises coming from her room today, I went and knocked on her door and asked her if she was alright.  When I got no coherent response, I walked in and saw her cleaning up bright pink vomit.  I asked her what was going on and she said that instead of going to her AA meeting today, she had gone to W! algreens and bought a bottle of cough syrup and drank it.  I found the bottle, and it was an eight ounce bottle of maximum strength, the same shit that sent me into convulsions when I was sixteen.  I couldn’t tell how much of it she’d thrown up, but I knew I was in for an unpleasant day.  I was right.  She was barely coherent and getting worse, staggering around, tearful, gripped with sudden tears.  She’s a small person, always naturally thin, but now almost bony from being strung out.  For the first time, I felt like I understood all the drug analogies, i.e. ‘monkey on his back,’ etc.  It was like she was fucking possessed, like there was a huge, powerful supernatural bei! ng writhing inside her tiny frame.  I was continually concerned for her welfare as she kept walking into walls and almost falling into windows, onto end tables covered with pictures, etc., but more than once I was just creeped out by how depraved she had gotten and I just wanted to run the fuck out of there.
            It’s incredibly hard to watch a friend strung out because you’re riddled with all these conflicting feelings.  I wanted to draw her to me and just hold her and let her cry and tell her it was going to be alright, and I was deeply disappointed in her not just for letting herself get so fucked up, but for fucking romanticizing it, and I was scared of her, I guess because I saw a little of myself in her, and I just wanted to get as high as she was and sit with her and talk about space ships and capsules and escape hatches, too. 

Of course, along with all the babble, she did say a couple of brilliant things.  In a long riff about how people are actively disinterested in the meaningful things in life, she said “people don’t want art to change their lives!  They want to talk on the phone!  They want to download!  They want to go to Blockbuster!”  Which, for the record, is true, but it’s no excuse for becoming a junkie. Listening to Sigur Ros (all fucking day, might I mention, which I don’t think is conducive to getting someone off the goddamn drugs, even after I gave her a copy of my new record, Christ) she pricked up her ears for a second, then looked at me and said “People have got to stop making music that sounds like cell phones.”  Amen to that, sister. 

After a long fucking day with her, both she and her parents opted to not let her go to the bar to watch me play.  I feel like I’m always writing “today was a new low” but let me say it: today was a new low.  I feel as bad as I’ve ever felt, and for once it’s not just out of pity and concern for myself.
 
10/6/03
 
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 sho! pping 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.
 
10/7/03
 
Spent last night spanking myself half to death watching Skinemax on the floor of Carl’s apartment.  Turned the sound down at one point because I suddenly got concerned and didn’t want him to hear me, and heard the exact same lame soft-porn rock and faked moans coming from his room.  Ah, human closeness, alienated together.

Van’s running great again, the control panel cleared of warning lights.  It feels like a fresh start, which is good in terms of the van and bad in terms of me, in that the resilience/momentum I got from muscling my way through all the sucky shows/open mics feels gone.  I’m nervous about the open mic tonight.  Urbana looks like a decent place to play despite the slightly menacing name.  The Mon/Tues/Wed nights actually have been easier for me, as I can jump on an open mic; Fridays and Saturdays it’s clear that I don’t belong; the hopelessness of my venture becomes transparent.

Heard the new Strokes single on the radio tonight as I was pulling in to Urbana.  I’m underwhelmed, but it does seem a little more hard-bitten than the last stuff.  I wish I could write more knowingly about hotels.

There’s a cute girl in a wheelchair here.  She’s wearing a cotton top w/ little flares around the shoulders and could it be a bow in her hair?  The wheels of her wheelchair have big gaudy stars and stripes inserts, but it can’t be a joke, not here, not in Urbana, IL.  I don’t want to stare; it carries different weight when the object of your attentions is in a wheelchair.  I’d love to go home with her. Why must it always be the sordidly hot or the aberrant depressing?  Dear Sweet Allison, your eyes grow bigger as I recede into the distance.

I’m consumed with the same string of anxious thoughts as I drive.  I’m not writing/ I’m not writing songs/ I’m running out of money/ I can’t see a time in the future when this’ll get easier/ I should have made more out of my time in NY/ I don’t have any friends that I’ve had for a long time, etc., etc.  I could go on, and I will, tomorrow in the van, driving to Nashville.
 
            ***
Curious show tonight.  An open mic at a huge venue, like 400+.  I got into town early, blew my chance to play at an open mic at the coffee shop next door where I may have actually made some fans and sold some CDs, then played on this mammoth stage to a mostly empty room.  The few people who were there shot pool as I played, and there was always a long pause after I finished a song where people realized “Oh, he’s finished a song, we should generate some polite applause.”  But somehow, I turned it out, had a great time playing and sang my guts out, totally hoarse after five or six songs. Then I sold no CDs, got no names on the guest list, couldn’t even bring myself to give a CD to the guy who ran the night.  As I was loading out, the next band was rocking out, a huge ska band w/ sloppy horns, lame keys sound and distorted guitar with some nineteen year old dude rapping his way through that Cake song that was on MTV, what, six years ago?
 
10/8/03
 
Sitting in the “Hall of Fame,” a.k.a. “Hall of Shame” a.k.a. “Loser’s Lounge” located inside the Best Western in Nashville.  We can only go up from here.  (Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the first time I’ve said that).
 
10/20/03
Hoo ha!  Redemptive show last night in Denver, nothing better than walking into a getting-it-over-with show and playing a fucking encore.  Paid $40 and sold five CDs.  The best part was after a really cool set by the PW3, their bass player (John Lennon sunglasses, long gray hair, long gray beard and droopy mustache, New York Fucking City T-shirt, sitting on a stool thumbing a pink P-bass w/ a paisley leather pickguard) said he had to tell me a story.  “I went to see Frank Zappa in ’74 [I knew then that I had been waiting to hear this story from this guy all night] and he came out while the house lights were still on and said ‘Alright, everybody’s got to sit down and shut the fuck up and listen to this guy.’  This guy came out and mumbled some jokes and played some songs on the piano. That guy was Tom Waits.  I’m going to be telling my grandkids about you.”
 
10/22/03
The Lion’s Lair, Denver.  A female mannequin head hangs over the bar with a Mohawk of syringes, its eyeballs drooling out of their sockets.  The bartender talking about her daughter’s ringworm. Gee, it’s great to be back home.
 

Elliot Smith killed himself yesterday.  I’m outlasting all my idols on this tour.  Without wanting to.
 

I’m still fucked up from my visit today with ‘The Oracle,’ as she shall henceforth be known.  [On my mom’s recommendation, I went to go and see a psychic who made some pretty accurate predictions for her seven years ago.  This same woman predicted that I was going to be very wealthy when I was 27.  Well, I’m 26, so I’m assuming it’s not going to be a slow build to my eventual fortune.]  It’s baffling, every word out of her mouth blew my mind and I’m still exhausted from hanging on her every word for half an hour.  It’s super encouraging to hear from her that this year ! is going to go well for my music, but she said several times, in clear language, that I can fuck it up by “letting my energy go down” a.k.a liquor.  It seems like that’s what I’ve been trying to do forever, just to exert my own will over what she said when I was nineteen.  Pretty fucking stupid.  Worst thing is, I said “Alcohol?” and she said “Yes… but that’s not it.”
 
10/23/03
Last night blew.  Maybe the emptiest I’ve ever seen the Lion’s Lair.  More than a little humiliating—this is my triumphant homecoming, my van drawn into town by a team of six gleaming white horses?  Calamity Jean was surprisingly good, compelling songs, great voice, strong guitar playing.  And she also plays accordion, sax, piano and saw!  A touching and slightly melancholy character, broad Midwestern face, thick Midwestern body, big, pretty eyes. 
 
(Okay, I meant to write about last night, but as I am writing, I’m witnessing a spectacle too compelling to ignore.  Sitting in Penny Lane, a coffeehouse on Pearl Street (read as: hippie heaven) in Boulder, CO.  A couple of hippie dudes jamming onstage, one w/ a beard, clogs, and a classical guitar, the other, a bass player, only wearing one of his flip-flops.  A dreaded (in both senses of the word) hippie girl walks out of the bathroom and starts doing her funky hippie shuffle, self-consciously un-selfconscious.  Is that a dress and jeans she’s wearing?  Indeed it do.  A plague on this town.)
 
I follow the funk onstage, play three songs, a rather lackluster performance if I do say so myself.  My voice appears to be fading.  As soon as I sit down, the three college girls behind me who all approach cuteness without really attaining it lean over and say “hey, can we buy a CD?”  Great, fabulous, one CD sold.  But they’re holding out fifteen bucks, they each want one.  I fucking rule. 
 
10/24/03
Okay, I am now sick of my mother.
 
10/25/03
Boulder is both not as bad as it used to be and way worse than it seems.  The frat boys and untouchable sorority girls in tight yellow CU T-shirts don’t phase me as much as they used to, as I’m no longer a second class citizen in the scene that they rule.  I’m now officially well into my in-betweenness: I’m not a college kid, and I’m not some swinging rock club promoter, and I’m not a grown-up with a goddam career, I’m just a hanger-on.  Which is bad sometimes, like the time I was parked behind a building in-between a little park and a field somewhere in Illinois (I think it was Illinois, it could have been Missouri) and I woke up, moved my shield of pillows and peered outside because I detected someone close to me and it was a little old lady—a nice ! little old lady with a bright red coat and white hair glowing under the rising sun—just out walking her dog.  She’d already been checking out the van I guess, and her eyes widened when she saw me moving inside of it.  She walked away quickly, peering back at me nervously over her shoulder. 

Sometimes it’s good, like the time in Urbana, Illinois when I couldn’t find the place where I was supposed to play and I pulled up next to a meek Asian-American college girl who was just getting out of her car to ask her for directions and I swear I could feel her hands tightening on the little canister of pepper spray her father gave her to put on her key chain.  Yeah, beware, little darling, I’m a stranger in your town.
 

But being a stranger in Boulder is worse because I know this place, and I know it well.  I even kind of ruled it for a while, albeit disdainfully.  Which is to say I had a reputation here, and people were a little uncomfortable around me, but respectfully uncomfortable, not just creeped out like they are elsewhere.  [God, I’m so sick of my writing, somewhere along the line I learned how to talk down to people in my writing and now that goddamn middle-class condescending middlebrow has covered my real writing like kudzu.  At the very least, this journal has taught me that I have a limitless capability for whining.  Boo fucking hoo.]   I want to talk to somebody, but not just anybody, I want somebody to want to talk to me.  I don’t want to have to go out and look for it.  It sucks coming back here and having everything be the fucking same as it was when I was seventeen, living with my mom and my sister in a cold bare apartment, none of us with any friends or any money, my mother’s continued high spirits only wearing us further down, all of us desperately lonely and wanting friends with the same intensity with which we resent all of humanity.  I gotta get the fuck out of here and back to Allie’s loving arms.
 
There’s a kink in my back that I’ve had since, oh, about Alabama and it’s not going away.
 
Stunning scene on the Pearl Street mall today.  After my huge success at Penny Lane the other night (selling three CDs to cute college girls!!!) I decided I had to try my luck at busking because, who knows, I may be great at it.  After running a couple of funny covers, I packed all my shit up and headed out.  Well, I chickened out, of course, but I justified it by telling myself that my voice was dying (it may be) and that it wasn’t worth doing for twenty minutes.  But, man, when I was walking back down from scoping the scene out, I heard this fantastic music, like Calypso but played on vibes instead of steel drums.  As I approached, the first thing I could see was just this little blond girl’s pony tail bobbing up and down as she was whacking away on something—I mean big, wood-chopping strokes—with sticks with bright yellow tennis balls on the ends.  As I got closer, I could see that it was a whole family (maybe some crackpot right wing Christian church group, but Christ, just imagine it as a damn family, okay) dressed in assorted tie-dyed bright blue outfits with the guys wearing those little hats that dudes always wear with dashikis, and all of ‘em playing sets of vibes of different sizes, maybe four of five different rigs in all, the smallest being normal sized and the biggest one maybe four feet tall and eight feet long with individual boards cut out of what must have been two by sixes.  None of the players appeared to be over sixteen, and many of‘em were well under, maybe as young as nine or ten.  As I got closer, I noticed a kid in front playing a hand drum as well, and a young girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen, standing slightly in front of the whole troupe in bare feet (though I was cold in my jean jacket) shaking huge maracas made out of coconuts and unselfconsciously swaying her hips and taking in the crowd.  She was fucking beautiful, and she had us all.  But not beautiful in a generic, safe way, not optimized beautiful, but a fragile beauty. Like at that moment, she was the best fucking thing I’d ever seen, but even then, staring at her because I couldn’t help myself, I knew that in only a few short years, she would become dissatisfied, she would feel that her hips were heavy on her and out of proportion to the rest of her body and that far sooner than that her life would be complicated w/ all the appallingly banal convolutions of teenage life, that her face, though it was clear, was probably bound for the ravages of serious acne and that maybe even that night her boyfriend could pull some bullshit “you would if you loved me” and that cloud would settle over her face, never to leave.  But for today, she was perfect.
            God, I’m a hack.
 
11/11/03

Feeling badly about not writing for a long time.  There hasn’t been much to report, and there has.  I’ve been foundering here with my family, just like old times.  We’ve all been barely restraining ourselves from killing each other, getting into petty arguments.  My mom pisses me off all the time because she’s continually upbeat, even polite to the continual barrage of telemarketers. She’s been working marketing for the vacation industry for so long that everything she encounters is filtered through her brain’s current obsession for marketing.  The apartment is full of no, not National Geographic and Outside magazine, which I actually dig reading (part of my visiting-home-regression-ritual), but National Geographic Traveler and Outside Vacation, which is each’s magazine’s respective attempt at cashing in by selling something that looks like a magazine but is really just full of ads and short article that read like ads.  This is the part of American commercial culture that deserves a violent, lingering, painful death.  And my mother is now an enthusiastic proponent of it.

My little sister is just as bad.  She’s 22, working at the Deli in a supermarket called ‘King Sooper’s,’ which has as a mascot, you guessed it, a little cartoon king.  She’s the yin to my mother’s fiery yang, unable to muster enthusiasm for anything.  She doesn’t have her driver’s license and has shown zero interest in learning how to drive.  A pal here gave me a bunch of pot, and she wasn’t even into getting fucked up.  She’s moving to Dallas at the end of this month to move in with a dude she met over the internet.

Of course, I’m the fucking worst of the bunch.  Since I’ve been here, I’ve been reading Stephen King books (trust me, you remember The Talisman as much better than it actually is, I’m sad to say) and pulp real-life war thrillers, jerking myself to near unconsciousness, not showering, sulking around the house.  My mom has cooked every single meal I’ve eaten since I’ve been here (except for the times she’s taken me out to dinner) and I haven’t washed a single dish.  Not (nary?) a one.

It’s kind of funny, my mother bounces around like her life is one big adventure when she’s been through some really horrific shit, like a childhood of poverty-with-a-happy-face, The Divorce, the years of near poverty and loneliness that followed, rapidly approaching sixty, and my sister and I, whose lives still really are just big adventures, literally spend days on the couch, never getting dressed or leaving the house.  We’re like extras for ‘The Ice Storm’ who didn’t make it because we were too depressing.  Man, I am just horrified at the banality of my family (I include myself in this group).  It’s totally bogus, but somehow you think that your love and esteem for these people will save them from internet dating and making lame jokes about " Puppetry of the Penis" in front of your girlfriend or the bizarre comedy of having to set your alarm to get up in the middle of the night and empty the salad bowl, the stock pot and the bucket that have filled with water from the threeleaks in the roof of the one bedroom apartment you’re illegally inhabiting before they overflow, but it can’t.  Nothing can save them.

The saving grace about my trip out here has been the great folks I’ve met.  Greg Ego, a dude who e-mailed me out of the blue because he liked my CD so much, has come to every show I played and even recorded a bunch of ‘em and is going to burn me CDs of the shows and a CD of pictures he’s taken.  I got to meet Shannon, the guy who rescued my CD from a stack the Lion’s Lair was going to throw away and is responsible for a lot of the fans I’ve made here.  The PW3 were super nice, buying a bunch of CDs and hooking me up with another show and even gave me the lion’s share of the eighteen bucks we made for the night.  Sharon, who I used to work at IHOP with, let me sleep at her crib a couple of nights.  Theron fed and watered me and hooked up two shows for me, let me borrow an amp, all kinds of shit.  Thank you thank you thank you, you’re the fucking best.
 
12/20/03
Well, shit, I’ve let the ole tour diary fall by the wayside, and as I’m marooned (moroned?) in Allie’s apartment right now, too sick to go out and hang out with the friends I’ve missed so badly, right now might be a good time to take stock.

The van is holding out so far, though I hesitate to say that for fear of jinxing it.  The passenger’s side door still doesn’t open and has proved unfixable and, worse, I’ve often returned to the van after parking it to see that the ‘door ajar’ light has lit because the nylon strap holding the sliding door shut isn’t quite tight enough.  One of these times I’m going to come back and the fucking battery is just going to be dead.  The power locks work intermittently at best and the passenger side window doesn’t work at all—well, didn’t work at all, now it doesn’t exist as it got kicked in the other night. The thieves didn’t get much, only my power converter and a twelve pack of beer as far as I can tell, and they didn’t take any of my necessities like my credit card, my frickin’ passport, my porn, my naked pictures of Allie, my digital camera, my Richard Pryor boxed set, etc.  The passenger seat is soaked and full of shards of broken glass, which isn’t too big of a deal, the Pod is getting to be more and more of a one-man ride.  It only smells a little odd right now, but I’m sure it’ll ripen up nicely once I hit the warm weather.  But somehow, it’s still running like a champ, and it’s almost a pleasure to drive.  All in all, not too bad considering the sixteen thousand miles I’ve put on it since I got it.

My friends seem to miss me, which is nice.  I got a real warm welcome from Jay Braun and Jack Martin gave me a hug and a kiss, which was really swell.  The same day, I ran into Curtis on the street and was really glad to see him and have him make fun of my soft hands—like he’s such a hard worker, my first experience of Curtis is hearing him bragging to some pals in a liquor store how he fell asleep on the toilet at a construction job.  After we made plans to hang out—which we still haven’t done as I’ve been so goddamn sick—I realized that when I was living in NY, I wouldn’t see him for months at a time and think nothing of it.  I guess I could have seen him if I’d have needed to, though, which makes all the difference.  It’s funny, too, who I’ve kept in touch with and who I haven’t.  The person who’s called me the most (after my gorgeous girlfriend, of course) is my old pal Danny.  It seems the best way to make friends with someone is to try out for their band and not get in, then recruit them to play drums for you and terrorize/irritate them with your drunken exploits.  Shit, if that’s really true, then it’s a wonder I don’t have more friends…  I got to hang out with Eben, too, which was pretty great, our memories of working together have distorted in the same way; like, when I think of the club, I imagine me and Eben and Andrew and Willy and Ben all bartending together with Tony the Neck giving free tattoos and The Giraffes playing while smokin’ hot naked chicks dance on the bar while equally hot chicks come on to us while they order drinks and then tip really well.  Ah, the good old days, may they remain right where they are. 

The show?  Well, it’s like I said to Eben, man, it’s amazing, from three months of playing guitar nearly every night… I still suck.  I mean, I’m better, my slide is more convincing, but I’m still a hack, I forget songs, I get too drunk and repeat verses, I miss notes, I just generally struggle with the whole singin’ and playin’ at the same time thing.  My voice has gotten a lot stronger, and I’ve got the shtick down.  Which actually kind of bothers me.  I got a fantastic review from Tris McCall, which isn’t just good because he says nice things, but because he says some things that aren’t just nice, things that show that he’s really engaging my records.  I think he’s frustrated with the continual ‘I’m so hungover/you’re so beautiful/I hate my guts/insert gritty, depressing imagery here’ bent of my music.  I am, too.  And though I want to say ‘when I stop seeing it, I’ll stop writing about it,’ things haven’t been fucked up for a while.  Or at least they haven’t been as fucked up as they used to be for a long time.  Or at least in the way they’ve been.  Drinking isn’t the number one problem anymore.  Or even chicks, as I’m in love and have been for years and showing no signs of slowing. Figuring out how to be/who to be when I’m not drinking is the number one problem.  Or maybe trying to survive under the twin pressures of my hubristic, megalomaniacal ambition and my paralyzing fear of trying hard at something and failing.  So my options are continuing to revisit my fucked up past, which is essentially a bottomless mine for depressing narratives, albeit remarkably similar narratives (how many ways can I tell the same fucking story?  Hmmm, answering that question would actually make a good record…) or to start writing about my current life, like how I wish any institution that hits you with default charges without telling you would go straight to hell and stay there, or how I understand the US as essentially a plutocracy, which I think is more horrendous than India’s caste system, as at least in India it’s clear that the system is based in hatred and ignorance, with the interest of stratifying humanity, whereas in the US we celebrate the ‘free market’ as morally right.  I think I’ll always want to ‘comfort the wounded and wound the comfortable’ as the saying goes, and I think The Washington Ballet does that, but it also conveniently throws a pity party for little old me.  That song and Island of Misfit Boys are always the best received, and they also pigeon-hole me as the drunken, Romantic loser that Tris doesn’t want to be and, fortunately, I no longer am.  I do think that somewhere along the line I ceased to be ‘promising’ and that I am slowly proceeding down the spectrum to ‘disappointing’ but as I’m not quite there yet, it seems unbecoming to piss and moan about all the ‘potential’ wasted.  There’s got to be a change, som! e growth somewhere, but damn it, Tris, I’m not going to write political songs and I’m not going to write third-person Springsteen-ian narratives of the downtrodden.  For better and for worse, I am my best character.

Things with Allison are good, which is to say that sometimes things are great, and other times less than good.  I had a distinct feeling when I got back this time that she missed me less than I missed her… but then I came back exhausted and lonely and really fucking sick and worn down, so that could play into it.  I immediately thought it must be because she’d hooked up with some dude, which of course is fair by the rules of the game which we both laid out and agreed to, but still, my fucking heart sank.  I don’t really know how to put this, but it fucking kills me how much I love all the little things that she does, from all the fucking coochie coochie coo baby talk that we do to each other that would drive our friends fucking nuts if we did it around them, to what she does in the sack, to what a pure heart she has, I mean, it’s like she exists in this world simply to alleviate the pain of others, and man, just everything about her, that she’s still best friends with the girl who grew up next door to her who has always been her best friend, that she still calls her mom ‘Mommy,’ I mean all that shit, everything I know about her, it’s the fucking best, and that some guy she meets at a bar who’s really into Radiohead could pick her up and fuck her just because she’s lonely and horny and then call some friend the next day, all casual and say “oh yeah, that bitch I was chatting up last night?  Yeah, she took a ride on the purple-helmeted crusader, if you know what I mean” well, that makes me fucking homicidal.  It’s clear that my ‘odyssey in a mini-van’ is wearing on both of us. We’re both still committed and really enjoying each others company, but now we’re both suspicious of each other.  I worry that we’ll get so good at making do while the other is not around that very gradually and then all of a sudden it’ll just be easier for us to not be together at all.  I really don’t think it’s to that point yet, or even close, but if it ever came to that, well, I’d never forgive myself for fucking up the one perfect thing I’ve had in my life.

And how am I doing?  Like I said about the van, not too bad considering the sixteen thousand miles.  I’m kind of fucked up right now because I’m sick (recovering/ not recovering from strep throat, and still slugging it out with a bitch of a sinus infection) and I’m horrendously busy booking shows.  I’m pretty fucking broke, but also not as broke as I could be.  I’ve had some success with getting on decent shows that actually pay a little and getting good write-ups.  The High Strung have been a constant ally who I’ll never fully repay for their support.  I offer my eternal friendship guys, I hope that’s enough.  I’ve also had some setbacks—the January tour with the High Strung has ended up being me just calling all the booking agents at all these clubs to beg my way onto the bill for twenty minutes with no pay, the van getting broken into and needing five hundred bucks worth of work in CO to pass emissions has sucked, getting sick is the worst—but I guess right now, I’m rolling with the punches.  As I understand it, this is attrition warfare, I just need to burn up those highways and wear out some tires and some desolate Monday nights and hopefully by the time the van dies, I’ll have enough support from a label that I can just keep on doing what I’ve been doing.  But, shit, hopefully with my baby by my side.

 

First tour diary (with The Giraffes!)

BIG review in Denver's weekly paper

Interview in the Dayton free weekly

Dishing dirt on The Strokes  

Read my profile in NY Press