I had a completely different idea for my 4th blog post on Sturnella Neglected than what I'm going to be writing this evening. My original intention was to tell you fine folks a story about a bear-sized German who drank Goldschlager straight from a bottle and wandered around all day with golden lips. That in and of itself isn't too entertaining, but things get interesting once you consider the fact that he flew airplanes after drinking the shit. It was at my time in flight school when I knew this crazy bastard. For all I know he was the guy flying our 757 from Atlanta to Ft. Myers, FL. That story and many more are the subjects of a narrative (possibly a novel that will most likely go straight to ebook if anywhere at all) I've been writing about my single semester at an aviation college. Don't worry, there'll likely be more about this to come.
As I was mapping out how this post was going to go, I was waylaid by a concept that affects my consciousness almost daily. I have this desire to write something significant, to create some "homespun immortality" as Chuck Palahniuk puts it in Diary. I'm not sure why that is, honestly. I'm not really afraid of death, at least not conceptually. As far as I can tell death is the final end of the self and the only guarantee any of us are ever given in this life. I suppose that I simply loath the thought of not being remembered after I'm gone. The whole feeling is really quite selfish and arrogant, but it forms this drive to create in me. Yes, I want to express myself, but more than that I want my expression to count for something.
The whole idea of literary immortality makes me think of my grandparents who died a few years ago. They were both great people and lived very long and fulfilling lives, but once my cousins, my brother, and I are gone no one will even really know that they existed. Contrast this with William S. Burroughs (whose birthday is coming up soon, by the way), a man who pickled himself with morphine and heroine and shot his wife in a party game gone awry. Old Bill is hardly the role model my grandparents were, but his memory will live on in some vestige until the sun swallows the earth.
It makes me want to write down everything I knew about my grandparents, my parents, my family and friends, to put it all down in print and then publish it by myself so that those people at least have a shot at eternity. It's a crazy impulse, I know, but one that can hardly be foreign to any writer. We're so painfully aware that we're made only of fragile flesh and that someday everyone who even knew us will be gone. If you haven't imbedded your words into the cultural cannon, then who will remember you?
Like I said, the whole thing is arrogant and irrational as hell. Of course we all want greatness and immortality like that. We all want to be Hemmingway. We all want to be Julius Caesar for that matter. It simply ain't gonna' happen that way for the most part, especially not in this fractious society we live in today. The best course of action would be to live a long and happy life, or a short and intense one if that's what you're into. Basically get yours and treat everyone at least decently. After all, what does the memory of you matter to actual you who's decayed into dust somewhere? Exactly. No matter at all.
Speaking of decency and all that, if you're reading this and you want to leave a comment then go ahead! Make fun of me, I can take it.
I've got to get home and work on this narrative I was talking about, so I'm going to leave now and clock out. G'night!
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Monday, January 26, 2015
Scene
I feel like I'm coming down with an illness. That isn't very surprising considering that most of the typesetting department has been out with the flu. It's even less of a shocker when you consider that my dinner consisted of shitty, vending machine breakfast sandwiches and a bag of Bugles. Hell, I've had that infamous tickle in my throat all weekend and decided to treat it with half a pack of cigarettes and a $40 bar tab. You can't feel the symptoms of a cold when they're buried in the miseries of a stalwart hangover.
That was a fun ride home, by the way. On Saturday my band headed up to St. Louis to play the last night of the local punk rock fest there; Dude's Weekend. It should be noted that Dude's Weekend was actually called Stay Retardeder the year prior, and the year before that it was the aptly named Stay Retarded. I'm just as baffled as you probably are by the questionable misogyny and the poking of fun at those with special needs that these fest names exhibit, but that's territory I'm not going to go into right now. There's a whole other generational/existential angle I'd like to explore instead.
I rode up to St. Louis in Jake's car with TJ. The conversation revolved heavily around TJ's recent breaking of a 2 1/2 year long dry spell (prime entertainment fodder) until we officially found our way out of the greater Kansas City area. It was at that time that we almost died when Jake veered off the road so that he could make a stop at one of Missouri's millions of fireworks stands. Those places look like massive warehouses full of explosive ordinance, but when you enter you find that only the front room is stocked and it's selection is shittier than most tents that pop up in Kansas around the 4th of July. Such is life, I suppose.
Once we got back on the road, Jake craned his head toward the back seat where I was sitting. He asked me if I'd ever heard of orgcore. "Morgue Core?" I asked. "No," he said. "O-R-G, no space, CORE." No. I definitely hadn't. He alluded to something like he and I belonging to that particular subgenre of some scene or another and urged me to look it up.
What I got was the picture from yourscenesucks.com of an "orgcore punker". An orgcore punker- apparently- is someone pushing thirty or already there with an affinity for beards, flannel shirts and late 90's/early 2000's mopey, drunken punk bands. The similarities between description and reality got even more eerie; orgcore punkers sport band themed and sailor tattoos and are all more or less alcoholics. Shit, I thought. And here I was beginning to believe that I'd left all notions of belonging to any scene behind a while ago.
Something pierced my pseudo-panicked confusion before it could really settle in. These "core" and "scene" labels are often times applied from the outside. I don't know anyone who'd walk around and seriously say that they're orgcore. At the show that night I did take stock of all the orgcore punkers I saw, however. That's a phenomenon called labeling. Once you've ascribed a label to someone, it is damned near impossible to undo the damage. This labeling phenomenon is a central part to the dehumanizing effects of racism and homophobia by the way, but that's not the point I'm even remotely trying to make here.
The crux of the matter is that these genre labels are absurd, teenaged bullshit. We all remember how it was to listen to Taking Back Sunday when everyone else in our highschool class was listening to shitty hip-hop and Nickleback songs. It made us feel separate, superior some how. These indie and underground bands and the scenes that grew around them were havens for misfits like myself and most of you. When we heard those songs and went to those shows we felt like we belonged and that we were a whole hell of a lot smarter and erudite than our jock and cheerleader peers. The problem, though, is that we were pigeon-holing ourselves and only filling some vague sort of a uniform. There wasn't anything wrong with the music or the shows, but allowing your style of dress to define your social grouping and status is just ridiculous. It's tribal, really, which doesn't seem so bad until you realize the majority of your fellow "tribe" members are just as petty and awful as the people you were trying to deviate from when you got into this mess in the first place.
It all boils down to this "Generation Me", or "Generation Y" thing. Wouldn't it be more accurate if the monikers were "Generation Meh" and "Generation Why?"? I think so. Thanks to the internet, we're free to shut out the rest of the world and dive headlong into whatever social setting we want to. Do you want to be a swinger? There's a social networking sight for that. Have you always believed that you were an immortal bloodsucking monster of the night? There's a sight for that too (insert clever Facebook joke here). The point is that we don't have to interact with anyone we don't want to and it's ripping American society apart. Instead of being individuals loosely affiliated and able to level with just about anybody, we're becoming a reluctant confluence of thousands upon thousands of tiny, little tribal groups lacking the basic social skill set to relate to anyone outside our immediate clave. Good bye, greatest society on Earth. That's why we should be Generation Meh and Generation Why?. Because we're addicted to techno-crack and we couldn't care any less. Those names are also cute and clever (sort of) and mark the pinnacle of my creative output for the day.
So what's the solution? Well, there isn't one. As far as the whole genre argument goes, you're basically going to be committing the intellectual equivalent of smashing your face into a brick wall if you even attempt to fight it. There's an unstoppable ocean of human ignorance there that forms the very premise of the discussion, so don't even try. My approach has been to overtly ignore the whole thing while secretly remaining convinced of my own superiority to anyone engaged in the "scene" conversation. Clearly that doesn't work because here I am fucking writing about it. And as far as the social disintegration of America goes, I'd simply invite you to pull up a seat, grab a drink, kick of your shoes, and watch the ship sink.
That was a fun ride home, by the way. On Saturday my band headed up to St. Louis to play the last night of the local punk rock fest there; Dude's Weekend. It should be noted that Dude's Weekend was actually called Stay Retardeder the year prior, and the year before that it was the aptly named Stay Retarded. I'm just as baffled as you probably are by the questionable misogyny and the poking of fun at those with special needs that these fest names exhibit, but that's territory I'm not going to go into right now. There's a whole other generational/existential angle I'd like to explore instead.
I rode up to St. Louis in Jake's car with TJ. The conversation revolved heavily around TJ's recent breaking of a 2 1/2 year long dry spell (prime entertainment fodder) until we officially found our way out of the greater Kansas City area. It was at that time that we almost died when Jake veered off the road so that he could make a stop at one of Missouri's millions of fireworks stands. Those places look like massive warehouses full of explosive ordinance, but when you enter you find that only the front room is stocked and it's selection is shittier than most tents that pop up in Kansas around the 4th of July. Such is life, I suppose.
Once we got back on the road, Jake craned his head toward the back seat where I was sitting. He asked me if I'd ever heard of orgcore. "Morgue Core?" I asked. "No," he said. "O-R-G, no space, CORE." No. I definitely hadn't. He alluded to something like he and I belonging to that particular subgenre of some scene or another and urged me to look it up.
What I got was the picture from yourscenesucks.com of an "orgcore punker". An orgcore punker- apparently- is someone pushing thirty or already there with an affinity for beards, flannel shirts and late 90's/early 2000's mopey, drunken punk bands. The similarities between description and reality got even more eerie; orgcore punkers sport band themed and sailor tattoos and are all more or less alcoholics. Shit, I thought. And here I was beginning to believe that I'd left all notions of belonging to any scene behind a while ago.
Something pierced my pseudo-panicked confusion before it could really settle in. These "core" and "scene" labels are often times applied from the outside. I don't know anyone who'd walk around and seriously say that they're orgcore. At the show that night I did take stock of all the orgcore punkers I saw, however. That's a phenomenon called labeling. Once you've ascribed a label to someone, it is damned near impossible to undo the damage. This labeling phenomenon is a central part to the dehumanizing effects of racism and homophobia by the way, but that's not the point I'm even remotely trying to make here.
The crux of the matter is that these genre labels are absurd, teenaged bullshit. We all remember how it was to listen to Taking Back Sunday when everyone else in our highschool class was listening to shitty hip-hop and Nickleback songs. It made us feel separate, superior some how. These indie and underground bands and the scenes that grew around them were havens for misfits like myself and most of you. When we heard those songs and went to those shows we felt like we belonged and that we were a whole hell of a lot smarter and erudite than our jock and cheerleader peers. The problem, though, is that we were pigeon-holing ourselves and only filling some vague sort of a uniform. There wasn't anything wrong with the music or the shows, but allowing your style of dress to define your social grouping and status is just ridiculous. It's tribal, really, which doesn't seem so bad until you realize the majority of your fellow "tribe" members are just as petty and awful as the people you were trying to deviate from when you got into this mess in the first place.
It all boils down to this "Generation Me", or "Generation Y" thing. Wouldn't it be more accurate if the monikers were "Generation Meh" and "Generation Why?"? I think so. Thanks to the internet, we're free to shut out the rest of the world and dive headlong into whatever social setting we want to. Do you want to be a swinger? There's a social networking sight for that. Have you always believed that you were an immortal bloodsucking monster of the night? There's a sight for that too (insert clever Facebook joke here). The point is that we don't have to interact with anyone we don't want to and it's ripping American society apart. Instead of being individuals loosely affiliated and able to level with just about anybody, we're becoming a reluctant confluence of thousands upon thousands of tiny, little tribal groups lacking the basic social skill set to relate to anyone outside our immediate clave. Good bye, greatest society on Earth. That's why we should be Generation Meh and Generation Why?. Because we're addicted to techno-crack and we couldn't care any less. Those names are also cute and clever (sort of) and mark the pinnacle of my creative output for the day.
So what's the solution? Well, there isn't one. As far as the whole genre argument goes, you're basically going to be committing the intellectual equivalent of smashing your face into a brick wall if you even attempt to fight it. There's an unstoppable ocean of human ignorance there that forms the very premise of the discussion, so don't even try. My approach has been to overtly ignore the whole thing while secretly remaining convinced of my own superiority to anyone engaged in the "scene" conversation. Clearly that doesn't work because here I am fucking writing about it. And as far as the social disintegration of America goes, I'd simply invite you to pull up a seat, grab a drink, kick of your shoes, and watch the ship sink.
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Killing Time
Well, shit. It looks like I did something right after all. I may have hit the mark when I christened this blog as a sinking ship. But if I'm being honest (and there's absolutely no way for any of you to know if I am or not) I have written several posts for this blog while I was on tour with my band. The problem is that I simply don't know how to actually run a blog and those posts are now lost in the ether.
I guess there are some consistencies to take comfort in still. In spite of the long lapse between posts I'm remaining true to the formula. I'm writing this while I'm at work. You know the place where you're supposed to make money by following the rules and doing shit other people tell you to? Yeah, work. I'm there, not doing what I'm supposed to. Instead of typesetting (which is boring as all hell) I'm working on my fucking blog to the soothing sounds of the guy in the desk next to me slurping tea, trying to fart as quietly as possible, and stifling laughter over something on his iPod he finds amusing. It's been awhile since I've read Dante's Inferno, but I'm pretty sure that this was one of the featured tortures of the Third Malebolge or something. Seriously. The guy in the desk next to me never talks, just giggles and farts and drinks his hot beverages at an absurd volume. It'd actually be kind of funny if it weren't so creepy, but I digress.
I said that I'd written several posts about my band's tour in June, which is (as far as you'll ever know) true. I honestly don't know how the fuck they didn't make it up here. I remember writing these vivid accounts of all the stupid shit we did and posting pictures we'd taken and now there's nothing. Not a damned thing. So, in the interest of posterity, I will try to recall what all went on for that week or so. If nothing else, it'll give me something to do for awhile while I'm working at the most boring job ever.
We left in June. I recall the process of getting out of town as being an incredibly tedious and infuriating ordeal. First, Kolin's ATM ate his money. He got paid the day we were supposed to leave or something and when he tried to withdraw money he got none. His hands were empty. No cash. The machine, however, thought otherwise. It printed him a nice receipt thanking him for his business and for agreeing to pay the bullshit fee and let him know that his account had been voided of a nice $300. Cool. Next we had to play musical credit cards in order to get an AVIS rental car. My card, a debit card, didn't cut it. Kolin's money was somewhere in the matrix. Korey doesn't even have a card. We tried my mom. She drove all the way out to the other side of town and her card got declined. Sorry mom. Thanks anyway. Finally we got Landon to agree to help us, which was fun. The only stipulation he gave us was that if we fucked the car up in anyway, we should totally destroy it. We agreed to those terms. A carbeque was pretty enticing after the whole shit show, but we finally got underway. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. We had a lovely drive across Western Kansas under yellow, forbidding skies. If you're at all familiar with Kansas you know that yellow skies are not a friendly sight. They mean you're either in for a nasty thunderstorm, or you're going to die in a tornado. We dodged that bullet somehow and made it to Denver in the nick of time.
When I say that we made it in the nick of time, I mean it. It was about 8:30 or 9:00 pm when we arrived, and if you know anything about rock-star time, that's still cutting it close. We had just about enough time to smoke a joint in the parking lot (which we totally did) before loading our gear in and playing. I wish that I could list off all of the awesome bands we played with, but I really can't remember their names. I spent about 50% of the tour in an alcohol induced state of disorientation. The cool part about Denver was that a lot of my old friends from high school showed up. Some of them I hadn't seen since then, so that made it even more special. As you can imagine, with an impromptu class reunion of sorts, I was fed many a shot of tequila and whiskey and I got mightily tanked. The next days drive was none to pleasant for me.
The drive wasn't just torture because of my hangover. We were going to Salt Lake City by way of Wyoming. If you've never been to Wyoming, I'd advise you to keep it that way. People in Wyoming, at least on the interstate where we were traveling, are assholes. After much driving through blasted scrubland and barren wastes, we made it to Utah. Utah, by the way, is a gorgeous state. After driving through some of the most beautiful red rock mountains I've ever seen, we made it to SLC. That's about all you need to know about that stop. It was Salt Lake City, capitol of the Mormon faith, after all. The best part was drinking shitty beers and watching Animal Planet in a hotel room until 4:00 am.
Our next stop was in Reno. That trip takes you through a lot of open grass hills and pseudo desert. We kept ourselves entertained by trying to out fart each other and by reading articles about the many exploits of Creed frontman Scott Stapp out loud. Reno itself resembled something akin to a heavily storm damaged gambling town, which I suppose it is (minus the storm damage). The show was okay. There were about five people in the crowd. I have no idea what happened to the local band. There may not have even been one. Those five people dug it though, which is always an awesome thing. Again I got drunk as hell and passed out on a kind stranger's floor.
The next day we headed toward California. We crossed more desert and then came to a checkpoint marking the entrance into the Golden State. I was driving and since we were rolling up a dooby, I started freaking the fuck out. "What is this?" I thought! I was under the impression that ol' maryjane was legal, or at least decriminalized, in the great state of California! I told Korey to stuff the joint and all of it's makings under the seat and prepared myself for a trip to jail. The panic was completely unwarranted. It was a department of forestry or agriculture checkpoint. All they wanted to know was if we were transporting any firewood or plants. "No, sir," I said, and we rolled on through. Once we were clear, I laughed my ass off. You bet your khaki clad ass we were transporting plants, my friend!
Eastern California was prettier than Nevada, that's for sure, but once we got closer to Humboldt County things got positively heavenly. We drove through winding mountain passes in the midst of ferny forests with crystal clear streams running on either side of the road. It was slow going, but just about the prettiest thing I'd ever seen.
We pulled up to our old friend Kenny's house in Trinidad, CA sometime in the afternoon. Immediately upon meeting the guy we smoked and he took us on a hike out by College Cove. The ocean opened up to us and we drank cheap beer while we walked on the black sand beach. After that lovely stroll, we hiked on out to the cliffs overlooking the Pacific. If the winding drive through the forested mountains was impressive, the view from these black basaltic cliffs was simply awesome. The ocean just raged and pounded against the rocks. Note to self; retire in Trinidad, CA.
That night we played a show in Eureka, CA which wasn't too far from Trinidad. The show itself was pretty uneventful. The local act failed to show again, so we played with some guys from Washington State. The Curse of the Black Tongue. That was there name. Good surfy rock n' roll. The whole damn town smelled like day old, disemboweled fish though, and there were droves of the homeless milling about. It was good to get back to Kenny's seaside bungalow and drink more beers and listen to the Macho Man Randy Savage's hip-hop album. Great times.
The next day was our day off and we spent it running around in mother nature's playground some more with Kenny. We drove out to this place called Fern Canyon which was splendid. We hiked the stream as far back as we were willing to go, which was really far I might add. Once we got back there a good ways, the tourists on their sure footing at least a quarter of a mile behind us, we blazed some more and drained some beers. When we were done there we headed to the Lady Bird Johnson Red Wood Grove. We were warned by sings to look out for bears, but I was too busy looking up at a canopy that stretched hundreds of feet into the sky to keep an eye open on the ground. A bear could've eaten my dumb ass, but I don't think I would've minded a whole hell of a lot. A mist had rolled in that afternoon and shrouded the upper parts of the trees. It was, in short, phenomenal. The nature hike days with Kenny made the whole tour worth it.
We said our goodbyes to Kenny and hit the road, heading south for Oakland. The drive wasn't bad, but we had to abandon the Pacific Coast Highway to make up for lost time. Oakland itself looks about like you'd expect it to, if your expectations are Aleppo, Syria or Falujah, Iraq. The town even seems to have its own refugee camp full of the homeless. The show was still a lot of fun, probably the best of tour to that point, but our good friends in the Atom Age advised us that it would probably be a good idea to stay the night outside of Oakland. We did. I think the town we ended up in was Aurora, CA. We smoked that hotel room out, per standard operating procedure.
Now, I thought Oakland seemed pretty third world, but LA was even crazier. The part of town we played in, the part closest to all of those famous landmarks, directly adjoined what I can only describe as a George Romero themed amusement park. I have never seen such a confluence of the doomed and forsaken in my life. Entire streets seemed to belong to roving bands of junkies and the homeless. At one point I kicked what I thought was a pile of trash bags in the middle of a sidewalk. Imagine my surprise when the trash bags moved around on their own and looked up at me and told me to fuck off. Yeah, LA was insane that way.
The show was cool though. We played at Redwood Tavern. Now, I don't know if you're a big Zoe Deschanel fan, but that's the karaoke bar featured in the movie 500 Days of Summer. Pretty cool, huh? That's right. I played on the same stage that Joseph Gordon-Levitt pretended to drunkenly sing on. The other bands were legit too. The Lysol Gang were good and they were awesome human beings to boot. They took us to an excellent Mexican restaurant where I for-real-drunkenly pissed off the patio out back. It was a good show and good times.
After LA we headed to Tempe, AZ. Or was it Phoenix? I was honestly too terrified by the thought of getting busted for having drugs in Maricopa County and ending up in one of Joe Arpaio's Nazi death camps. Thankfully that didn't happen, but I still watched my back in Arizona. Kris Kobach is from there, after all. That's two strikes, Arizona.
The show was our best though. We played with lots of really good bands and the venue was next door to a shady-ass sex shop. It was almost as entertaining to watch the patrons of that shop enter and exit in shame as it was to watch the bands playing on stage. By the end of the night I was righteous-hand-of-God's-will drunk and woke up on a mattress spooning a dog. I was so hopelessly hungover the following morning that I left my bag with all of my clothes, my toothbrush, a brand new $40 multi-tool, and my disposable camera inside. When will I ever learn?
The last stop of tour was supposed to be in Albuquerque (God, what a stupid name for a town). When we pulled up to the venue, a flustered lady told us that we were late and that all of the local acts had dropped off the show. We stared at her with slacked jaws. In spite of coming at us like a tiger, she ended up giving us $50 and we didn't even have to play. That's called winning the game, folks. We drove across the street to a little café on the corner and had ourselves some burgers and beers. Apparently the place was famous because there were all these pictures of the owner with various celebrities. I can't remember anyone in particular, but I want to say there was a picture of Nick Nolte, one of John Goodman, and one of the greatest martial arts champion ever; Steven Seagal. When we finished our food, we lit out of New Mexico, determined to drive all the way home because fuck it. Why not?
On our way home, around sun up, we happened into my hometown of Pratt, KS. We stopped into the only place open, Don's Serviteria. It was worth it for the coffee and the huevos rancheros. That combination may have kept me glued to a toilet for a good half an hour, but at the time it was pure victory. Four hours later we were home and unpacked. I smelled like dog shit, but I didn't care. I took a nap like I've never taken one before.
Now, that summation of tour wasn't as glorious and hilarious as I wanted it to be, but I'm working solely from memory. I had the tour diary updated daily, replete with hilarious pictures of Scott Stapp and TJ and all of the scenery we passed through, but as I've said (and it's up to you to decide if you believe me) the damned thing is lost to the sands of time somewhere in internet land. Maybe I deleted it when I was clearing out room in the writing folder on my laptop for easily rejectable short stories and a novel I'll probably never finish. Who knows? All I do know is that I'm very sorry for wasting your oh-so-precious time and that you couldn't be dazzled by all the gorgeous pictures I took. Cheers!
I guess there are some consistencies to take comfort in still. In spite of the long lapse between posts I'm remaining true to the formula. I'm writing this while I'm at work. You know the place where you're supposed to make money by following the rules and doing shit other people tell you to? Yeah, work. I'm there, not doing what I'm supposed to. Instead of typesetting (which is boring as all hell) I'm working on my fucking blog to the soothing sounds of the guy in the desk next to me slurping tea, trying to fart as quietly as possible, and stifling laughter over something on his iPod he finds amusing. It's been awhile since I've read Dante's Inferno, but I'm pretty sure that this was one of the featured tortures of the Third Malebolge or something. Seriously. The guy in the desk next to me never talks, just giggles and farts and drinks his hot beverages at an absurd volume. It'd actually be kind of funny if it weren't so creepy, but I digress.
I said that I'd written several posts about my band's tour in June, which is (as far as you'll ever know) true. I honestly don't know how the fuck they didn't make it up here. I remember writing these vivid accounts of all the stupid shit we did and posting pictures we'd taken and now there's nothing. Not a damned thing. So, in the interest of posterity, I will try to recall what all went on for that week or so. If nothing else, it'll give me something to do for awhile while I'm working at the most boring job ever.
We left in June. I recall the process of getting out of town as being an incredibly tedious and infuriating ordeal. First, Kolin's ATM ate his money. He got paid the day we were supposed to leave or something and when he tried to withdraw money he got none. His hands were empty. No cash. The machine, however, thought otherwise. It printed him a nice receipt thanking him for his business and for agreeing to pay the bullshit fee and let him know that his account had been voided of a nice $300. Cool. Next we had to play musical credit cards in order to get an AVIS rental car. My card, a debit card, didn't cut it. Kolin's money was somewhere in the matrix. Korey doesn't even have a card. We tried my mom. She drove all the way out to the other side of town and her card got declined. Sorry mom. Thanks anyway. Finally we got Landon to agree to help us, which was fun. The only stipulation he gave us was that if we fucked the car up in anyway, we should totally destroy it. We agreed to those terms. A carbeque was pretty enticing after the whole shit show, but we finally got underway. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. We had a lovely drive across Western Kansas under yellow, forbidding skies. If you're at all familiar with Kansas you know that yellow skies are not a friendly sight. They mean you're either in for a nasty thunderstorm, or you're going to die in a tornado. We dodged that bullet somehow and made it to Denver in the nick of time.
When I say that we made it in the nick of time, I mean it. It was about 8:30 or 9:00 pm when we arrived, and if you know anything about rock-star time, that's still cutting it close. We had just about enough time to smoke a joint in the parking lot (which we totally did) before loading our gear in and playing. I wish that I could list off all of the awesome bands we played with, but I really can't remember their names. I spent about 50% of the tour in an alcohol induced state of disorientation. The cool part about Denver was that a lot of my old friends from high school showed up. Some of them I hadn't seen since then, so that made it even more special. As you can imagine, with an impromptu class reunion of sorts, I was fed many a shot of tequila and whiskey and I got mightily tanked. The next days drive was none to pleasant for me.
The drive wasn't just torture because of my hangover. We were going to Salt Lake City by way of Wyoming. If you've never been to Wyoming, I'd advise you to keep it that way. People in Wyoming, at least on the interstate where we were traveling, are assholes. After much driving through blasted scrubland and barren wastes, we made it to Utah. Utah, by the way, is a gorgeous state. After driving through some of the most beautiful red rock mountains I've ever seen, we made it to SLC. That's about all you need to know about that stop. It was Salt Lake City, capitol of the Mormon faith, after all. The best part was drinking shitty beers and watching Animal Planet in a hotel room until 4:00 am.
Our next stop was in Reno. That trip takes you through a lot of open grass hills and pseudo desert. We kept ourselves entertained by trying to out fart each other and by reading articles about the many exploits of Creed frontman Scott Stapp out loud. Reno itself resembled something akin to a heavily storm damaged gambling town, which I suppose it is (minus the storm damage). The show was okay. There were about five people in the crowd. I have no idea what happened to the local band. There may not have even been one. Those five people dug it though, which is always an awesome thing. Again I got drunk as hell and passed out on a kind stranger's floor.
The next day we headed toward California. We crossed more desert and then came to a checkpoint marking the entrance into the Golden State. I was driving and since we were rolling up a dooby, I started freaking the fuck out. "What is this?" I thought! I was under the impression that ol' maryjane was legal, or at least decriminalized, in the great state of California! I told Korey to stuff the joint and all of it's makings under the seat and prepared myself for a trip to jail. The panic was completely unwarranted. It was a department of forestry or agriculture checkpoint. All they wanted to know was if we were transporting any firewood or plants. "No, sir," I said, and we rolled on through. Once we were clear, I laughed my ass off. You bet your khaki clad ass we were transporting plants, my friend!
Eastern California was prettier than Nevada, that's for sure, but once we got closer to Humboldt County things got positively heavenly. We drove through winding mountain passes in the midst of ferny forests with crystal clear streams running on either side of the road. It was slow going, but just about the prettiest thing I'd ever seen.
We pulled up to our old friend Kenny's house in Trinidad, CA sometime in the afternoon. Immediately upon meeting the guy we smoked and he took us on a hike out by College Cove. The ocean opened up to us and we drank cheap beer while we walked on the black sand beach. After that lovely stroll, we hiked on out to the cliffs overlooking the Pacific. If the winding drive through the forested mountains was impressive, the view from these black basaltic cliffs was simply awesome. The ocean just raged and pounded against the rocks. Note to self; retire in Trinidad, CA.
That night we played a show in Eureka, CA which wasn't too far from Trinidad. The show itself was pretty uneventful. The local act failed to show again, so we played with some guys from Washington State. The Curse of the Black Tongue. That was there name. Good surfy rock n' roll. The whole damn town smelled like day old, disemboweled fish though, and there were droves of the homeless milling about. It was good to get back to Kenny's seaside bungalow and drink more beers and listen to the Macho Man Randy Savage's hip-hop album. Great times.
The next day was our day off and we spent it running around in mother nature's playground some more with Kenny. We drove out to this place called Fern Canyon which was splendid. We hiked the stream as far back as we were willing to go, which was really far I might add. Once we got back there a good ways, the tourists on their sure footing at least a quarter of a mile behind us, we blazed some more and drained some beers. When we were done there we headed to the Lady Bird Johnson Red Wood Grove. We were warned by sings to look out for bears, but I was too busy looking up at a canopy that stretched hundreds of feet into the sky to keep an eye open on the ground. A bear could've eaten my dumb ass, but I don't think I would've minded a whole hell of a lot. A mist had rolled in that afternoon and shrouded the upper parts of the trees. It was, in short, phenomenal. The nature hike days with Kenny made the whole tour worth it.
We said our goodbyes to Kenny and hit the road, heading south for Oakland. The drive wasn't bad, but we had to abandon the Pacific Coast Highway to make up for lost time. Oakland itself looks about like you'd expect it to, if your expectations are Aleppo, Syria or Falujah, Iraq. The town even seems to have its own refugee camp full of the homeless. The show was still a lot of fun, probably the best of tour to that point, but our good friends in the Atom Age advised us that it would probably be a good idea to stay the night outside of Oakland. We did. I think the town we ended up in was Aurora, CA. We smoked that hotel room out, per standard operating procedure.
Now, I thought Oakland seemed pretty third world, but LA was even crazier. The part of town we played in, the part closest to all of those famous landmarks, directly adjoined what I can only describe as a George Romero themed amusement park. I have never seen such a confluence of the doomed and forsaken in my life. Entire streets seemed to belong to roving bands of junkies and the homeless. At one point I kicked what I thought was a pile of trash bags in the middle of a sidewalk. Imagine my surprise when the trash bags moved around on their own and looked up at me and told me to fuck off. Yeah, LA was insane that way.
The show was cool though. We played at Redwood Tavern. Now, I don't know if you're a big Zoe Deschanel fan, but that's the karaoke bar featured in the movie 500 Days of Summer. Pretty cool, huh? That's right. I played on the same stage that Joseph Gordon-Levitt pretended to drunkenly sing on. The other bands were legit too. The Lysol Gang were good and they were awesome human beings to boot. They took us to an excellent Mexican restaurant where I for-real-drunkenly pissed off the patio out back. It was a good show and good times.
After LA we headed to Tempe, AZ. Or was it Phoenix? I was honestly too terrified by the thought of getting busted for having drugs in Maricopa County and ending up in one of Joe Arpaio's Nazi death camps. Thankfully that didn't happen, but I still watched my back in Arizona. Kris Kobach is from there, after all. That's two strikes, Arizona.
The show was our best though. We played with lots of really good bands and the venue was next door to a shady-ass sex shop. It was almost as entertaining to watch the patrons of that shop enter and exit in shame as it was to watch the bands playing on stage. By the end of the night I was righteous-hand-of-God's-will drunk and woke up on a mattress spooning a dog. I was so hopelessly hungover the following morning that I left my bag with all of my clothes, my toothbrush, a brand new $40 multi-tool, and my disposable camera inside. When will I ever learn?
The last stop of tour was supposed to be in Albuquerque (God, what a stupid name for a town). When we pulled up to the venue, a flustered lady told us that we were late and that all of the local acts had dropped off the show. We stared at her with slacked jaws. In spite of coming at us like a tiger, she ended up giving us $50 and we didn't even have to play. That's called winning the game, folks. We drove across the street to a little café on the corner and had ourselves some burgers and beers. Apparently the place was famous because there were all these pictures of the owner with various celebrities. I can't remember anyone in particular, but I want to say there was a picture of Nick Nolte, one of John Goodman, and one of the greatest martial arts champion ever; Steven Seagal. When we finished our food, we lit out of New Mexico, determined to drive all the way home because fuck it. Why not?
On our way home, around sun up, we happened into my hometown of Pratt, KS. We stopped into the only place open, Don's Serviteria. It was worth it for the coffee and the huevos rancheros. That combination may have kept me glued to a toilet for a good half an hour, but at the time it was pure victory. Four hours later we were home and unpacked. I smelled like dog shit, but I didn't care. I took a nap like I've never taken one before.
Now, that summation of tour wasn't as glorious and hilarious as I wanted it to be, but I'm working solely from memory. I had the tour diary updated daily, replete with hilarious pictures of Scott Stapp and TJ and all of the scenery we passed through, but as I've said (and it's up to you to decide if you believe me) the damned thing is lost to the sands of time somewhere in internet land. Maybe I deleted it when I was clearing out room in the writing folder on my laptop for easily rejectable short stories and a novel I'll probably never finish. Who knows? All I do know is that I'm very sorry for wasting your oh-so-precious time and that you couldn't be dazzled by all the gorgeous pictures I took. Cheers!
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