Greg was my summer intern at Someoddpilot, and he directed these images. He wanted to set up my 100 year old 4x5 camera in the water, which kind of freaked me out.

Our basement has flooded twice this summer, and we've poured gallons of water out of our drums and amps. Two feet of water, like a baby pool, sloshing around in our practice space. Two days ago Chicago had the closest thing to a tornado I have seen in my 10 years of living here. It's getting a little out of hand. This, I am told, was Greg's inspiration.

We're playing the Wall of Sound festival in Fort Worth Texas September 22nd. Pretty stoked. Bands include: The Sword, Om, Explosions in the Sky, Pinback and The Books. 40 bands in 1 day. I can't figure out how that will work.

So if you can, pick us up with our bags and sleeping bags and pillows, and 400 pounds of black musical things, at our house on the 19th. We will curse and make poor decisions for the 21 hour drive. You will laugh.

http://www.wallofsoundfestival.com

Denial Fest / Party for the Planet 7/7/07

Denial Fest is a new series of indie rock shows in Chicago to raise awareness for global warming. Our first show in the series will be held at The Empty Bottle and will feature 3 diverse but tonally-similiar, handpicked musical acts: The Timeout Drawer (instrumental epic post-rock), Plaque Bringer (grindcore metal) and Helen Money (a solo celloist with a rack of guitar pedals).

The rock show portion of the evening will begin at 10pm. The Party for the Planet will commence at 7pm sharp and admission is free. Attendees of the Party for the Planet who would like to stay at the Empty Bottle for the rock show will be charged a normal attendance fee of $8. A portion of the proceeds for the show will be donated to Native Energy.

The Party for the Planet schedule is as follows:

• We'll kick off on 7/7/07 at 7 p.m. with a potluck (please encourage yourself toward vegetarian items). Then, we'll watch a special message from Al Gore.
• We'll see a sneak preview of the presidential candidates answering MoveOn members' questions on global warming—part of our Virtual Town Hall on Climate.
• At 8, we'll tune in to the concerts on NBC with The Police, Madonna, Dave Matthews, The Beastie Boys, and millions of other human beings.

It promises to be a night of real and vital information and amazing music.

-------------------------------------------

Denial Fest
"Evil is the New Good"

Screaming about the end of the world in an effort to prevent it.
Dark music for the brightest of causes.

--------------------------------------------

Saturday July 7th 2007 @ Empty Bottle, Chicago
7pm to 10pm
Moveon.org's Party for the Planet
FREE

10pm to 1am
The Timeout Drawer
Plague Bringer
Helen Money
$8 (a portion of the proceeds will be donated to Native Energy)

--------------------------------------------

links:
http://www.denialfest.com
http://www.nativeenergy.com

bands:
http://www.myspace.com/timeoutdrawer
http://www.myspace.com/helenmoney
http://www.myspace.com/plaguebringer

April 29, 2006 Knitting Factory, NY

"Jersey HonkyTonk meets Diarrhea in the Big Apple"

The drive to New York is pleasant and were rollin' in on the Jersey Turnpike, a surreal Erector Set scape full of faded colors, barges, cranes and I don't care. Jon and I attempt touching for a moment and it's uncomfortable. But it's always cool to see New York from whatever angle you're comin' it at, with it's vast surrounding cemetaries, then the city. Then the spot that used to be the Twin Towers. Then the clusterfuck before the Holland Tunnel. Then cars that try to make the light with nowhere to go and wind up in the middle of the intersection. Then the reverse happens the next time from the perpendicular directions and no one goes anywhere. Then everyone honks, including the idiots blocking everything because they think it's a game and they wanna join and isn't this a wonderful song. Like retarded, gas powered crickets, confused because it's daytime. Then the tunnel and the (ir)rationsal fear of terrorism.



We load into the Knitting Factory, a mutli-leveled, poly-show, circus-mall venue with real nice bathrooms. The name feels true to form, it is a factory, and Chris reasons that it should just be the ass-end of a Guitar Center, selling the phony rock-sh*t dream in front, confirming it in back. Extra Blue Kind is somewhere, but we don't see them, and one of us talks to them, but I don't. My ex-girlfriend Stephanie comes to hang out with her little brother Stu, the flutist and violinist (respectively) on Nowonmai and Alone. Some dolt from another of the bands shows up from Rockford, IL or not, and is like, what kind of music are you guys. We say our wordy speil and are like, what kind of music do you play, friend. Oh, I don't know, it's hard to explain. He really wants us to ask more but we don't - it's embarassing to be alive sometimes. I hand our stage-plot (we're professional here folks) to the soundgirl (they only have soundgirls in NY. no, really. its true.) and we all go eat some real nice Korean food that will toilet 3/4 of the band with diarrhea up until the time we play. Apparently the entire club had the shits that nite so no one could point fingers. Our posters are, again, not up, but are rolled up in the stalls, ready to snap into place once the first roll of tp is done. Om is playing the same evening upstairs (who are 2/3 of Sleep) and it's great we're not playing with them. Instead, we have the honor of playing with the likes of invalid cousins of invalid cousins, crankin' out the hee-haw phish and frat fry specials. I'm not kidding. People were eatin' it up, too. It was downright strange and a perfect way too end a perfect tour. There were like 7 or 8 bands or some shit, too.

So while we're waiting all day and nite to play, some wonderful friends show up. Ananda (Ed's ex from Florida) with new boyfriend, Elvis. Heather, our neighborhood friend from Chicago and her cousin Livvy (a valid cousin), Justin (Demo), Zack (Caural) and James Stahl, our friend Chuck's little brother that we haven't seen since partying at their house when their parents were out of town 13 years ago. Totally crazy. Steph's been drinking since earlier that afternoon and can't stay for the show cuz it's her best friend's birthday somewhere else and we can't help but make out with each other but don't tell anyone cuz she's got a boyfriend and I just started seeing someone. Don't tell Jon, either, he's the jealous type. So then we play. We rock the fuck out and our friends love it. We love it. We're all so silly. It's the last show of the pretend tour and we bring it mighty fine. When we're done the remaining few leave and there is still the 20th band that is supposed to play, after us, despite the fact that the club closes in 5 minutes. That's how pathetic it can be. A girl from the band is crying . Zack gets Livvy's phone number and the Timeout Drawer go home with Justin, to all snuggle on his floor. In the morning we get some whoop-ass vegetarian bacon and sausage sandwiches from the deli across the street. On the way back we see a smoking garbage can and No Feesh confesses that he threw a cigarette butt in it on our way to the deli. First glass on the beach, now fire in the hole and I used to think he was an intelligent man. I save my breath. We have a long ride home now (16 hours), and I want everyone in a pleasant mood. But the world won't allow it.





April 30, 2006 The Drive Home

"Goodbye Sad Fun Tour, Hello Nothingness and Trouble"

The most memorable part of the drive home is the Super Wal-Mart, nestled high in the beautiful mountains of Pennsylvania. We drop in to help support one of the largest butt-fuckers in the whole world and get some groceries for the long haul. Everyone in there is fat and ugly in extraordinary ways and they may as well tear chunks out of the wall and attach them to their bodies. You could have cast the sequel to Devil's Rejects in there. I called Rob with the prospect, but he wasn't home. He was at the one at the next exit. I don't mean to sound cruel, but America can thank itself for choosing to make the dollar vote for the cheapest products, 100f the time, with no regard for what they consume for their homes, bodies and children and with no regard for where it comes from, how it gets there, what it does, and where it goes afterward. I hate all you people I feel so sorry for. These are your Bush Administration supporters. They are each and every other human you don't see in your one in a dozen major metropolitan areas in your country, with their SUV's and ribbon magnets and rhetorical pride. An article in Time magazine on global warming reported on a Wal-Mart that gets 5 to 15f it's electrical energy from a turbine fan on the roof. People are actually driving extra miles to see it, negating any energy the nice fan is saving, and let's all salute Wal-Mart for conserving a small portion of long ago wasted energy. New Wal-Marts also plan to have these great fans continuing to fuck our planet's ass, but this time, with a little lube. On the way out there was a sign that said Thank You for Choosing Wal-Mart. And these people are afraid of communism. What a choice we've made. There's a family in front of us, with a daughter, maybe 14 or 15. She is wearing very skimpy shorts, on her perfect little bubble butt, and it says "TROUBLE" across her jail-bait ass. How do you let your kid out of the house like this and parade her around Wal-Mart, amongst hundreds of porn-hungry churchgoers? Off into the sunset they go, off into the sunset we go. Let's everyone ride off Hollywood style into the great bug-zapper. Riding around the country in this fashion tells you this: hope for anything better is futile. This nation is done and so is the rest of the world. It's melting, like that green bitch in the Wizard of Oz...melting! We get home safe at 3am, thank god, thank Dorothy or Woody Allen, thank something, and it's a pleasure to service my own genitals in my own bed. Thank you everyone who we do it for, you make it all worth it. Thanks for being there, thanks for being friends, thanks for caring enough to listen, thanks for substances 1 through 4, thank you for kindly allowing us into your daily lives. You all know who you are. We love you and until we're dumb enough to do it again...

Jason

...oh yeah. Jon and I decided to call it quits. Sorry, no happy endings here!

April 25, 2005 New Brookland Tavern, Columbia (SC)

"Pelicans, Marital Stress and Substance No.4"

Now that we've played two shows out of town, it's time for a few days off. We find ourselves in the midst of Spring Break in St. Augustine, near Daytona Beach, and there's no rooms. There is however a beach that you can drive on. We roll up with the van and have ourselves a food and substance picnic by the water. No Feesh is a man of good of ideas, and during a nice stroll, decides to toss a Corona bottle into the air. It lands on the hard packed sand and breaks. He is surprised by the physics and we are surprised at his choice. This is why they don't allow glass on the beach, No Feesh, I say. He cleans while I scold. A truck full of awesome drunk dudes rolls pass and they yell have we seen their girlfriends. The ones in the back of our van? No. We haven't, potentially dangerous red-necked loose-cannons in pickup truck.



We roll out and the next day find solace at Edisto State Park in South Carolina. We have a beach to ourselves because everyone in the park is old and watching satellite TV in their RV's. We race, do push-ups, find seashells. Jon and I giggle and our pretend relationship is going fine. It's nice to see him frolic in the waves, getting salty stuff in his mouth. Lines of Pelicans, apparently known as the SC Air Force fly in unison, flapping and coasting all choreographed 'n shit. These birds are awesome and look nothing like the silly cartoons. They're large and proud and don't fuck around. Seagulls and other lamer species try to follow in the proud path. The Timeout Drawer laugh together. Night falls and it's us on the beach with two substances. It is awesome lying in the sand, looking at the stars, hearing the waves crash and taking psychedelic pictures with No Feesh's magic camera and flashlights. At this point we are tired of Spades and marked by thousands of biting gnats. Depsite the lack of shows, music and fans, this is a good time. OK.





It seems we get into Columbia like a month later or something after hyperacing through infinite billboards for peaches, naked girls and church. We roll up to a laundrymat, put our nasty ass camp sweat club sweat clothes in the wash and check out a record store, Scratch n Spin. I score big on some old school vinyl like Beat Street Vols. 1 & 2, Hashim, Man Parish...that's right. We play Spades and fold clothes. Jon has a bad habit of looking at people's cards when he gets the chance and now I'm skeptical of our relationship. Tonight we play with Raisins' girlfriend's brother's band, Rockefeller Horsecollar. He is also the chef at a dope Italian joint next door to the club and hooks us up. We open and sound good cuz we had one of those rare soundcheck things. Rockefeller goes on and kicks their avante garde rock to the crowd's face and it's dope. Alright. Here's where the real fun begins so pay attention. I'm gonna leave out names to protect the innocent. SC Peach, as we'll call her, is a very hot and revealing drunk girl who is talking to Jon. I am OK with it because we have an open relationship. I am talking to Girl A, a very nice lady who is excited about our music and buying records. However, she is married, husband in tow, has a kid, bla bla bla. Girl A also has nice friends at the show, B and C. Meanwhile Girl A's husband tells Jon that SC Peach has a boyfriend. Jon is like, cool. Girl A walks outside to find SC Peach on top of her husband on the hood of her car. Girl A kicks SC Peach in face twice. This scene is ugly. We roll out to the Art Bar, a place people go after other places. They are throwin' down some hard drum n bass and me and Jon get down (to the music) because we are apparently all each other has at this point. Girl A, B and C walk in, and we're all, hey, sorry about what happened, why don't you come back to Raisin's girlfriend's dad's girlfriend's house to partake in 2 out of now 4 tour substances (..4 recently acquired). They are like OK. RGDG's house has a hottub in back and it's nice to hang out with various girls of the alphabet and tour substances in a hot tub on a beautiful SC evening. You had to dump a bucket of water in the toilet, though, each time you wanted to flush it. Raisins pukes at the sun in the morning and passes out. The rest of the band gets rewarded with cheese grits by our gracious hostess and we roll out. Thank you everyone in Columbia for the most colorful nite of the trip! You are all wonderful people.





April 27, 2006 Velvet Lounge, DC

"The Finest Looking Women on the Tour. Forgotten Cymbals. Swinging at Cups"

DC, a supposed scene, but I've never seen it. Another promoter that does not promote. I actually forgot to bitch about that in the SC portion. SC was so drama packed I forgot about our own. You send posters months in advance, you get to the club, and there's either one or none in sight. You visit the record stores in town and there's none. We used to go through the hassle of getting posters to stores but then people started calling themselves promoters and made claims of having "Street Teams". A "Street Team" is apparently code for "F*ck Team" or better yet "No Team". You would think if an obscure band was coming to your area, someone may want to tell someone about it. Especially if it's your responsibility to make the club some money. But no, they'd rather holiday the whole thing off and react to sickeningly low turnouts no more sharply than the dull mood created by having to wipe after a messy shit. Well, my ass is messy again today, gotta wipe it. Ho hum, here comes another of those bands I didn't help promote, where's the toilet paper, snarf snarf, dag nabbit, blob...hey! you guys sounded great. Glad we could help you practice on the Mackie, bro. We played with, or I should say "for", Extra Blue Kind, a bunch of nice guys from Indianapolis. Oh yeah. I almost forgot. A Persian girl (I think) with a beautiful voice played first, with a super-sick dude on a the hand drums and broom sticks. They made nice music, but succeeded in explaining every song and it's lyrics to the crowd in between, like, the next song is called sky because I was looking at the sky when I wrote it and now I'm telling you about it and 1min and 23sec into the song you're gonna hear the word sky, so don't be alarmed...30 of the most beautiful women I've ever seen in my life were at this show, but left after their special friend went off. I could have dated strictly within that crowd for the rest of my life and been perfectly satisfied. After the show No Feesh guns it, the van, like he's No Feesh in hot pursuit, cause he is No Feesh in hot pursuit. He thinks he sees the other band's van and we've just been told, as we pulled away from the club, that the other band may or may not have left their cymbals, and there is hellfire in his eyes, this madman, this madfeesh, this chaser down of white cargo vans. Alongside the Extra Blue Kind van, Feesh at the wheel, partially but not illegally intoxicated, mind you, and I am screaming at their young and surprised faces, they look a bit scared at first, but then they get it. Right. Our cymbals. Yeah, right. Shit. Forgot 'em. We roll to a hotel, far away, late late at night, listening to some skits by Richard Pryor and Dane Cook. When I walk in to the lobby, the girl who looks like not a shit can be given, is like, can you turn that down? I've never been told to turn comedy, playing within a spearate vessel, down. I was like, uh, yeah. It is late and we're beyond tired and we burn our nosehairs on a roach and crash. About two hours later at 6:30am the alarm goes off, still active from the prior patrons. Jon attempts to slap the alarm off, sending a cup of oj down below to No Feesh's head, who is sleeping on the floor. No Feesh swings his arm like a baseball bat, deflecting only some of the juice pouring onto his head while connecting with the cup, mid-flight, and sending it spiralling across the room. This is the kind of chaos that bolts through your collective band soul in a matter of seconds, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere and from the middle of nowhere. We thank the lord for this sudden unnessecary panic and fall back asleep.






April 28, 2006 Five Spot, Philladelphia

"I Can't Even Think of a Clever Title for Philly"

God damn you Pennsylvania, you beautiful and boring state. I could have committed suicide the first time we were there in Pittsburgh. Luckily, Philly has a bit more culture and humans in it. And a lot of good record stores, by the way, including the native, Relapse Records. We check it out, with it's $50 obscure Mastadon vinyls and a great place to catch up on the singer of EyeHateGod's prison term. Apparently he's out. We tell them we're playing down the street at the Five Spot and that we sound like Mono and Pelican and Explosions in the Sky and they get all excited but have never heard of us, let alone a show coming to town that they'd all get off on, and, working 4 blocks from it, have never patronized the Five Spot. All of this makes our bruised cherries fall right off the fuckin' tree and we go to load in. There's a man across the street yelling at the top his lungs to passers by. "I AM THE LORD JESUS CHRIST! WANNA FUCK WITH ME, BOY? YOU BETTER BELIEVE OR I'LL KILL YOU! Once inside, we learn we have another stand-up promoter. This dude's not only not at the show, but out of the country. There's one poster in the stairwell, but with no date. That's like...I don't even know what that's like. The club manager is super cool, and let's us share the door with the rest of the club, a booty jigglin', hooptie joint. Needless to say, one of the most inappropriate venues we've ever blessed. We play for Jay, a girl No Feesh used to see movies with, and her boyfriend and the bartender and the soundguy. The Relapse folks do not show up, or attempted to and were scared off by the dress-code sign on the door. We are awesome, but a person you trust would have to tell you this, or you wouldn't believe it. Then we go to the lower level of the club and get crunk. The super-cool club manager gives us some nice cash cuz he feels bad and tells us we're awesome and to come back. We crash at Jay's place, a super cool live-work loft space you dream of having. We snore and dream of a real tour with real shows and get up in the morning to roll out. We run into Bardo Pond in the driveway, who apparently live above Jay and we trade some CD's. I wasn't gonna mention it because it was painful then and painful still, but in the few hours we chilled around town before the show, I have never seen so many hot chicks in my entire life. It was off the hee-zee. Life is rough, especially in Penn State. Excited to get home, though, to see if I'm still capable of erection. Don't tell Jon, though.

April 14, 2006
Beat Kitchen, Chicago (EP Release)

"Blood and Drums"

So we release an EP called ALONE, an appropriate title for the tour to come, and kick it off at the Beat Kitchen, a place we've never played, but have resided in close proximity to for years. I don't think I've even ever seen a show there. I did, however, indulge in their thai pizza several moons ago. The word "kitchen isn't part of the club's name for nuthin'. So there's an all ages early show with some post-hippie jam band and they have lots of friends there. They're late getting off the stage, like most bands whos every show seems to be their first and they have no idea where to go with themselves or their instruments once they've stopped playing. The drummer stood behind his set long after his bandmates were broken down, talking to some important friends like, "did you see that show i just did?" We knocked several lingering jamfans over loading in and soundchecked - a rare and valuble opportunity, apparently more common in chicago. Our friends DARKMOOR are there as well, a band our guitarist Andy had recorded about a year ago (I went in the studio one evening to perform one solitary filter sweep with my micromoog) and we're excited to play with each other...musically. Current and ex s.o.'s are roaming the floor and my brain is travelling inward. DARKMOOR open and perform a solid set, happy to be alive, happy to play a solid set. We go on and kick out our first show in several months with the piss and vinegar we know and love to cook with. We open with our Tubular Bells rendition, the Exorcist, and some fans fresh out of an allegedly bullshit Yeah Yeah Yeah's show are happy as hell we brought some rock. Next we play our newest and only unrecorded song, Birdhead, and it rules, and feels good to get out in the open air, like when yer panties come off after a day of hiking. Mid-set No-Feesh (that's Chris, our drummer), the skinniest and most powerful drummer alive, blasts his bass drum hammer through the head. We're on fire, and the two previously mentioned ingredients are burning in the pan and this is what happens when they do. The nice and active soundman responds in realtime and jumps on stage to assess why no bass drum. Seconds before DARKMOORE'S drummer leaves the venue along with his bass drum, realtime soundman catches him and saves the show. This shit is action packed folks. We close out with Come Any Closer...a song full of screaming, something that hasn't happened in the band for years, and it's as equally liberating as the panty thing. After the show, the promoter shows me a laundry list of fees sucked out of the door, but it's still some nice cash to start a tour out with. We roll around the corner to continue partying at the Underbar, but it's packed and there's a line and I'm forced to piss on the wheel of someone's SUV across the street. Yeah, that was me, asshole. We go into the bar next door, which has no name or does, and check out the scene in there. Apparently there's an all white reggae band in back, seemingly on a mixture of meth and whatever the billboards are telling your kids not to do these days, and you could've sworn that David Lynch was doing a casting call for his next bar scene. So this was Good Friday, and our first show out of town ain't til Tuesday, cuz it's Easter weekend and god forbid someone should blow off hunting for pink and purple bird fetuses to come see a show.





April 18, 2006
Springwater, Nashville, but not really

"Hey you guys...Let's go to Kentucky for Dinner"

So Monday morning, the day before we leave town, I wake and call Springwater in Nashville and apparently it's one of those times that there's just no show and the promoter there has no idea what you're talking about or any recollection of what he's talked about regarding your band for the last two months but we have to leave the next morning anyhow in order to make it to Athens by Wednesday, so we do, and stop off in Kentucky for some fine dining and decide to sleep in Elizabeth Town, a dry town, and we've picked up no beer on the way and decided to leave town clean as far as other substances go, all decisions so far, not so good at present. At the Inn, there is a red, white and blue sign with a jesus fish on it and a poster of the movie, "Elizabeth Town" with Kirten Dunst behind the counter. The lobby is shack like, with a bunch of old school video games, M&M machines, a large screen TV (also old school, like a van with no wheels) and a large garbage can full of empty beer cans, so I was like, if you have any beer in the fridge, I'll buy it from you. The sweet lady behind the counter and the old lumberjack type man carrying in a sheet of plywood (I guess there was something to build at 1am) were like, no we can't do that we could lose our license and I was like I won't tell anyone and they were like sorry. So I went back to the room with some hot water for some decaf tea cuz that was all the excitement we were gonna see for that night and anonymous band member was like, I brought something but didn't say anything. I was all smiles. Drank my tea, had a little something and attempted to learn how to play Spades. In the morning I went for a run through the quaint Elizabeth Town. Allegedly a marine on leave who was helping his folks move from Michigan to Florida with his time off, thought our room was his and tried coming in at 4am. I didn't hear a thing. Good, huh? When we were packin' up to roll out, he came over and greeted us, asked what we were doing. He was pretty excited when we told him, and cool marine dude bought a CD and gave us an additional substance (a personal favorite of his) to boot. So, so far we've sold merch and gained substances without having to play. Not bad.




April 19, 2006
Caledonia Lounge, Athens

"Where's all the Girls from Last Time?"

We roll into Athens around 8pm and Raisins (that's code for Andy) and I have a handstand contest in the parking lot. There's broken glass so we stop. No Feesh is taking pictures with his new ginchy digital camera with an exposure so long it looks like daytime. It was nite, OK? It was exciting. Some really nice girls we met last time we played Caledonia decide not to show up and it's really great not to see them again. One of them had come in town to Chicago several weeks ago and hung out with Jon (there was some spark the last time but no gasoline). I guess she was scared and told her friends to be scared, too. Welterweight opens, with one of the Kindercore dudes in tow, and lay out the mellow, audio-soothing ear tea. We play next, rumbling through our Chicago bad man act for the south. Sleepy Horses closes the nite, with a spooky desert, cattle skull ghost town thing and Nick and Brandi from the band say we can crash at their place. Real cool. As the Athens college town ebbs to a close everyone that is awake in the town spills into the streets and heads toward the same pizza joint for a slice. The dudes behind the counter are actually yelling the number of slices left to the drunken, greater number in line. Tonight there are less slices than drunks. Lotsa asscracks, makeup and important banter. An old lady with Tourette's is getting escorted out by the police. An idiot sitting outside on the ledge is throwing up on himself while checking his voicemail. You have one unheard voice message. BLAAHHHAAAHHH!! We get back to the club with our low supply/high demand slices and Rob from Welterweight blesses us with a picnic basket he had prepared for a date with an ex earlier that day but the date did not realize. We now had vegetarian sushi, grapes and cake. Real nice. Ran through he hills of Athens in the morning, watching folks manicure their lawns with small, gas powered machines, while their cars looked on in their driveways, saying, "That's nothing...watch this!"





April 21, 2006
New World Brewery, Tampa

"Reuniting with Foosball and Fans"

We leave Athens and look for a place to camp. We see a sign for 'Something' Falls and check it out. We stop at a gas station where the heads of animals line the walls and uncomfortable collectibles of the old south line the shelves. They have beer so we prepare ourselves for the next dry county. 'Something' Falls is a man-made dam surrounded by industry and a prison. See it later. We find an acceptible state park a ways down and the ranger or park dude or whatever is very happy to see young people patronize his grounds and tells us half his life story and gives us change in silver dollars, later to be accepted by the parking meter slots in Philadelphia. Where are the two silver dollars now? We set up camp. We now, including alcohol, have three substances at our disposal. We dispose accordingly and lie in the middle of a lesser travelled road and gaze at the stars. Jon and I decide to start a fake relationship. We stand up and almost fall down.



Then we go to Tampa. Ah, Tampa. Ybor City. Our favorite place to play, our most enthusiastic fans, a hot and generous bar tender, our favorite and most active promoter, Jack Spatafora (props, yo) dope pizza and foosball. Jon and I engage in a game (of foosball sillies) within 5 minutes of rolling in and he whoops my over-confident ass (in foosball sillies). There are very few foosball tables left in Chicago, if you notice. Then we all eat pizza and play Spades, which I can do semi-reliably now. Then we do it. We give it to Florida the way they like it. For some reason, in this hurricane and porn ridden part of the world, the music is given and received the way it's intended. Worldwide Zoo, who played before us bless us with moist and quality substances. We are forever grateful, and crash with Ed, who we met there last time, and his new roommate, Chris. Ed and Chris' apartment is a hundred and five times cleaner than his ex-girlfriend Ananda's place (who we will see later in NY) and we are grateful for that, too. We indulge in newly acquired and moist substance and check out the framed record jackets Chris has lining the kitchen. Slayer's "Reign in Blood" is among them, but it is the back cover that is shown, with the band tearing beers from a six-pack and looking gnarly. I inform Chris that this is one of my favorite record covers and that is would only be right if he took it down and turned it around to the front. He did this by morning. Other memorable covers included some wicked Miles Davis (forgot which one), and a rare Ian MacKaye project called Embrace. Good work Chris. We went out for lunch with Ed the next day and headed out for South Carolina, a show three days and many miles away, in America's spottiest and most spread out tour ever.

October 19th Chicago To go somewhere, first you must leave. October 19th Grand Rapids. The Ten Bells, you get there from the highway and you think you've rolled in to the industrial park graveyard midwest style, lots of space and cement. You just have to wonder how this way of life can last when there are 10 acres of parking lots eroding to weeds and holding 3 Budget rental trucks. There is a painting of a bravarian girl, holding steins of beer, reminding me a tiny bit of my german girlfriend Ines, who has a dress like that and goes to Octoberfest wearing it, but this painting injects way more Linda Carter or Bo Derek and an American burger to boot. Nothing about the club carries this German schtick, but whatever, and inside we plop down our equipment, look at Exodus posters, eat grilled cheese sandwiches and dig in to the case of Miller Lite that is waiting our tender lips. Tender and true. That is our lips. The first two bands offer 1- the worst kind of Dave Matthews bar rock, but done with class and sincerity (props) and then 2- cute boy poppy punk that reminds me of watching I Heart Huckabees, or some other hipster Details magazine cover come to life. We thought "this isn't the time or place for our pretentious overly long lyricless songs..." It makes no sense, but we did it, we brought what we had. We brought it. A little sloppy. Paucity plays after us, and they make instrumental music (just like us!) and we feel relieved because now we are APPROPRIATE. They are good. They are good enough to make me feel like we aren't. Matt the doorman says we can stay at his place. We sell some records. One human being, for a fact, shows up because he owns everything we've done and he wants more. So he got it. Matt's house is dirty, but this is standard, with the biggest TV we've ever seen. We watch a movie about John Holmes, half of us get silly baked, no, stupid baked, and we sleep. Matt is one of those unbelievably sweet men all tatted up and mohawked so that you think you should fear him but you should not. It would be a sin. We wake up and leave, beautiful sunlight, and a note on the door appears somewhere in the morning from the city housing inspection services warning them to clean up or leave. Wow. October 20th Detroit Oh Detroit, you have issues. You are the alien city, you are the future of the falling apart world. You crawl with weirdness. Nothing fits in, nothing feels appropriate. We can't come to this town anymore. I hate bringing the bands equipment up your Magic Stick stairs, the place no one walks past ever, because you have laws that force people to drive, because you dropped a bomb in the middle of your own city. Its a Clear Channel show, for christ sake, we are playing first, the second band doesnt show, and Clear Channel has to be called to figure out what to do with the schedule. What the f8ck? Can you imagine this conversation? The headliner, with a tour bus, 7 band members, a film projectionist, a manager, a driver, draws 40 people into the place. Jesus. The room is huge, the crowd is small. We rip it, honestly, but it feels like no one cares. I do the math for the headliner, i calculate the gas, people, bus rental figure and figure they need at least $1300 a day to break even. They probably got paid $300. The two drummers are nice guys, we do some nerd talking about equipment. I imagine their stresses. Our failures are much easier to endure. October 21st Columbus OH We arrive within the college town of Columbus, OH, and immediately realize we are in the land of young white people, girls with nice skin and ass antlers, guys with nice skin and baseball caps. Something quite unexplainable occurs as we sit in the van in the rain, eating cheese and triscuits and deciding to call this place "Clumbus" because we thinks its funny to drop the first vowel of words with hard consonants: next to the van a young overweight boy and his father emerge and walk away from us, across the street. I don't know why we are staring at them, but we all are, and then within 5 seconds they appear again, RIGHT NEXT TO THE VAN. This is weird. But Jason can explain it: he says its the The Chubb Portal. The Chubb portal sounds like a large, sucking fart. It has a taste for fat, lost Americans. There are plenty of those. Clumbus. The show is at Oldfield's on High, its small, we wonder about volume. We think of ourselves as loud. Our drink and food deal is completely embarassing: no food, half price liquor. Yes, you are so generous, you of the moldy carpet stink people, you grumpy dipshits. The frat bar next door offers far better looking servers, and a better food deal: free pizza and $4 pitchers. There is foosball too. The jocks get all the breaks. When it comes time to play we are too loud, way too loud, actually the sound man uses the word "blistering". But he tells us this after we finish, after our entire set within which he could have simply turned down the master volume at any point with his little toilet fingers. But he didn't, and he is mad at us. We are mad at us too: we had nearly cleared the room. Only the bravest remained, and somehow against all prevailing logic, they aboslutely loved it. I was self conscious about the 16 year old drummer in the room, thought he might look at me as his 15 year senior and think I was a wanker. Chris, from the Brown Notes, hooks us up with lodgings at him and his wife's place, and we divebomb into a night of substance abuse, Ween videos, all the tidbits of American alternative culture. Before filing in, Jon knocks over an entire cannister of cashews in the van because he is drunk, and because he is drunk he is completely unconcerned with his new problem. Andy and I scramble to scoop up his nuts, and just then Chris's wife emerges from the garage, flashing the van, OUR van, with her naked breasts. BOOBS. Jason breathes deeply and Andy and I are like "What? What?" October 22nd Washington PA No one knows that there is a Washington in Pennslyvania. We're not playing here. We are just rolling in to eat and sleep and watch A History of Violence. The Econo Lodge room smells and has flies and rolling papers under the bed and 50 cigarette burns around the perimeter of the bathtub. There is a tomatoe in the drawer. Inspired, we try to go eat some "fancy italian" food, but discover its too fancy and end up eating some crap at the local mall. This simple incident spawns 2 weeks worth of jokes based on the phrase "fancy italian" with Jason repeating it in the voice of an old new york jewish woman, the limits of humor pushed by four men who spend every second together and have no privacy. Half of the band fries their tender brains on pot as I drive us around the parking lot, realizing suddenly that there could be nothing more suspicious than a conversion van circling a mall with the curtains drawn. After the movie we discover that there is nothing on earth funnier than the site of us peeing at the same time into adjacent urinals, then rinsing our hands in adjacent sinks, and then the hand dryers- yes all four running at once, and we are looking at each other, drying. We leave the bathroom giggling like girls or sinister pranksters and I spot a girl waiting for her boyfriend to come out of there, looking nervously at us. I had to wonder what she was thinking. No, I knew what she was thinking. I apologized to her in my head. October 23rd Pittsburgh PA There is a cemetary that is huge and hilly and its autumn and everything is gorgeous like an acid trip and we take up exercising next to a masoleum with large egyptian lions gaurding its entrance adorned with perky boobs. We do push-ups on the decline of the hill, sit ups and pull ups on a nearby tree, all the while I am apologizing in my mind for our behavior until I realize the obvious justification - we are just being alive. What could be wrong with that? A man named Matthew, looking from far away like a woman wandering the cemetary and grieving and cursing our presence in my guilty mind, approaches our graveyard exercise field, and wants to hand us a show flier and we get to talking about music. Its definitely a scene from a movie but f8ck it its nice to be away from home and meeting humans walking the earth in the sun. We walk up some stairs to get a drink at a bowling alley bar somewhere, its dark, there are huge paitings of balls everywhere. The guy who serves us beer tells us that the neighborhood where our show is, is a place he would never go to, and we say why? and he says "the only nice way I can say it is that its a bad neighborhood" and from his Packers jersey and the glint off of the cross around his neck and the smile on his face I knew he was trying to impress upon us that he was a racist prick. Congratulations chubby. October 24th Brookville PA We run screaming from Pittsburgh, after a show no one wanted to see. This is the thing we are gonna be honest about, most bands would not, but this sh*t happens, and it happens to everyone: We played for almost no one, besides the promoter Manny, the two guys in the second musical act and their friend. That was the show. We got drunk and called it a practice. This is all u can do. Its something everyone should experience, it will put the "f8ck it" in the "lets do it". We brought it to the 4 sets of ears in the room. One of the lucky ones set up some mics on the spot to record the show because he thought that it was just that GREAT, a fact that later, while trying to fall asleep and justify this silly ass existence, is clearly the high point of the evening - this man, the recorder who was blown away. At one point, while discussing whether or not we should play, Manny was rythmically knocking his head against a glass door. He lived downstairs. We all spent a lot of time in what turned out to be his personal toilet. He offered us the venue space to crash in, we thought better of it. We drive, stopping at a Days Inn on top of a hill like in a scary movie. We end up calling this home for two nights and a day. We start to get mental- an explosion of laundry and substance abuse and Batman Begins commence at 3am despite our spiritual exhaustion. In the morning Jon puts in my contacts and complains that everything is blurry. Manic and bored, we grab our guitars and keyboards and write something new in the little room. We dribble away an entire day. Had we glanced at a weather forecast we would have shot out of those mountains like Batman with his eyes glowing and sh*t, but we don't because we don't KNOW. Following our instincts we get a 26" pizza and head to a basement bar we saw in town, where, I sh*t you negative, it is Men's Night. This means, apparently, an empty bar with free pool. Two girls roll in, fooling themselves ever so slightly that it is awesome that we are in a band. We chat it up with them and the bartender, doing shots and being funnny. These ladies are super sweet and buy our cd's unheard and we quietly wonder if someone wants to sleep with someone else. We chose to respect Men's Night, leaving finally only with the four men we came in with. Someone remembers one of the girls mentioning something about there being some snow or something tomorrow... October 25th More PA And it comes. Someone fast forwards from late October to mid January within a matter of two hours as we drive up and down in the western Pennslyvannia mountains. Ping pong ball sized snowflakes amassing on freakin everything including the beautiful fall colored leaves, who are as unprepared for this satanic turn of events as we are and droop like dr. seuss trees. We begin to see cars in ditches, than many cars in ditches, our awareness of our soft-fleshed brittle-boned bodies climaxing at the sight of a f*cking VAN in the ditch UPSIDE F*CKING DOWN. It is all too obvious to us that if our van rolled it would make for a gruesomely fantastic physics contest that at least some of us would surely lose. Cliff Burton, Exploding Hearts, people dying in bands in vans. No one speaks. Then the highway is like "I have an answer" and at first we are like "Bulls*t" but then we are like "OK, we can deal with this" as the entire interstate shuts down, everyone and everything stops and we sit for three hours. We, the band members in our shroud of band member righteousness with such a true and blessed mission to just simply bring ROCK for others to enjoy, we are spared and treated like kings, for it is our lucky fortune that we are prepared to LIVE in this vehicle of ours. We have leftover 26" pizza, fruit, vegetables, toilet paper, water, smokes, and frickin movies we can play on our laptop and we are not afraid to pee on the road in the plain sight of the others. Because this contains elements of most of our favorite things it turns out to be quite fun. We watch Election in its entirety and then it is time to drive again. 20 mph and a conviction that the entire Northeast must be covered in this avalanche of snow and that we will surely have to cancel our show in Boston the following night. We are comforted though by the knowledge that we will always be prepared to pee wherever we are. October 26th Boston MA 13 hours in the van ends abruptly at the front door of an old high school friend of mine - Chuck - the renter of a really decent apartment in Cambridge with green green grass. His girlfriend remains unseen in the bedroom because it is stupid late to be rolling in on someone and we tip toe and limit as best we can the flushing of the loud toilet. We eat fancy pastries the following afternoon because we think this is what New Englanders do. We play at TT the Bears with bands half our age (not really) and we bring it the way we know and somehow we screw up our set-time-to-set-list mathematical formula, end our set too early and then have to pull out our least energetic song to close out the night, which makes me apologize in my head to the young people who we have so confused with our misplaced ups and downs. But this seems to matter not, the humans are into it, the show feels good, and we are smiling. October 27th New York NY Hi large city. You are the densest thing i have ever seen. You do not care if my large vehicle can squeeze into your Ralph Bakshi streets, you do not care if there is a freakin Hollywood movie being shot around the corner from the venue where I need to get to and somehow park near in order to roll hundreds of pounds of bullsh*t through the front door, a hippie movie that has painted an entire block of Lower East Manhattan in 60's peaced out greens and yellows and lined the streets with large glistening new semi's. Your facades are rough and grey, you dont necessarily think your clubs need to have a sign. But inside your Tonic doors you present to us a female sound guy, yes it is an oxymoron, and she is sweet and helpful and one half of The Timeout Drawer drools. She tells us we can leave our equipment here overnight, rather than Justin's Brooklyn street apartment, where it would have surely been ravaged by little pirates. Avary, Bob Davies, Justin, Stephanie, Sean- these friends of ours, these good people show up to watch us play. A group of young guys and apparently their driver roll in and buy our things. Someone requests a song, they shout out "Play 'the Gift'...", referring to the opening track on our 2nd record A Difficult Future, probably the closest thing we've had to a hit single, and Jason, having no idea what this person is talking about, says "What are you talking about?". We are THAT professional. Jon recovers "We can't". And he's right. Enough line-up changes and there is some things you can't do. We play a different encore. We bring it. We party before the show and after all night and we see Sean Penn and Tim Robbins and Rober DeNiro kickin it at a speakeasy bar. We get crazy drunk and laugh with our friends and we are so thankful you people. So much. Money All things considered the band's cash flow is OK. We shot out of Chicago with cash in our pockets from a great night at the Empty Bottle, a wad of several hundreds. Our groceries, hotel rooms and gas is siphoned from the show money envelope, cigarettes and booze from the thin individual wallets. The shows have paid about a hundred smacks each, which sounds like nothing, unless you pretend you are on a road trip with your best friends, and you have the luck to roll into a different city each night with the proper equipment to rock out in front of strangers at a bar where you will also get to sit and drink for free and then get paid for being there. In the context of a road trip vacations, you simply cannot beat this. In terms of career success nonsense, you certainly can. October 28th Fredericksburg VA The stop that was never meant to be. Our conversion van, with its interior of wood panel and runner lights and carpet designed somewhere in Indiana at a shop called Sherry, which has led us to call her by that name, makes that f*ckin SOUND that you do not want to hear, a sound that means "things are gonna change". We pull off the road, get a room, gonna get her to a garage in the morning. The good news is that this is the first night of three that we have off in a row. We have time, we think to ourselves. No big deal. October 29th Fredericksburg VA We find a shop in the phone book down the street, drive the van over there at 9am, its a Saturday. She is making more sounds now and there is sweating involved in getting there in time before she sh*ts the bed entirely. Because this is America, there is no sidewalk to lead us back to the hotel, only a series of strip mall entrances and drainage ditches and I am just hating on it, this wasteland carefully constructed to eliminate the pedestrian. It is garbage. At noon we get the call you do not want to get: its the transmission, they can't work on it, no one else in town can until MONDAY. And it will be by god mother f*cking expensive. These are my words, not theirs. I am freaking out at this thought, this no work on sunday, half day saturday bullsh*t. Monday. It gets worse - once they start, its a 3 f8cking day job. Thats Thursday morning. We have shows every night that week, starting Monday, so we are screwed. And its still only Saturday. Jesus. We talk to everyone, the waitress, her brother and her boyfriend, trying to find an answer. Every phone number is called in the yellow pages. Then there's the issue of leaving the van unattended in a lot until Monday with all that equipment in it. STRESS. October 30th North VA Our good friend and ex-guitar player Chris Van Pelt drives out to pick our sorry asses off the floor and take us to his remote place in North, VA, a place where we wrote half of Nowonmai two years ago, by the Chesapeake Bay, a place that once adorned Jon's penis with a tic. Once again relief is sought in substance abuse and we giggle with Chris and his wife Cassandra into the night. In the morning we sit on the dock, play with a kitten and try not to go mental. We check van rental prices, quickly realizing rental companies have covered the angle of possible band customers very intelligently: there is nothing suitable. Mini-vans and overpriced cargo vans. Garbage. We get mental. Not knowing how we are going to get to DC the next day, we go to sleep, after watching shooting stars light up the night sky on the dock and avoiding sexual contact with a female friend of Cassandra's, choosing instead to shoot potatoes with a potatoe gun into the bay. This is how we roll. October 31st Washington DC We get to the shop in the morning. They give us the bad news: new transmission, $2300. Jesus. The good news, if it even matters in light of that hefty figure, is this: it will be ready tomorrow afternoon. Great. Next door is an Enterprise, they have a cargo van, we rent it for $80 for the day, load it up in the repair shop with all the gear in the world while the service guys look on in disbelief. One of them used to be in a travelling Marine Corps band. Jason, intelligently, is wearing his Millions of Dead Cops shirt, here in the South, in front of the good ol boys who will be working on our vehicle. Someone says "Interesting shirt." Thats code for "My cousin is a cop". We drive off, hoping the weight of the equipment doesnt end up crushing the two souls who have to ride in back with all of it. Jason turns his shirt inside out. DC is every band for himself. Our posters aren't up. No one sticks around for any band that their friend is not in. Someone shows up who saw our Empty Bottle show last year with Mono. He wonders if we do this full-time. His answer most certainly comes when we play to him and six others. Rough. We sell records, somehow, but it must certainly be because- no matter the size of the audience, our size remains the same: LARGE. November 1st Chapel Hill NC We get our van back and its like having a home again, it feels THAT good. Our crumbs and little seats and all the familiarities are there, including a smell that is attributed to an ONION, yes an onion, that Jon bought for a couple slices on a sandwhich and it sat in the cooler too long, and the water leaked at a drop a minute and now the van smells. It smells LARGE. Interestingly, or not, the onion was chucked out the window just minutes before the van trouble started days ago, but its spirit has remained. And with it, a further plunge into despair as we roll into Chapel Hill and the promoter has listed the show for the wrong night, meaning effectively, there is no show. No show. This makes DC look good. There is nothing worse than no show. No show is like coming out of hyperspace to discover Alderaan is not there. Nerd reference but you get the drift. We are bumming. The promoter hands us 3 six packs of Pabst and some money as compensation and dispirited we go see a movie and get drunk and laugh despite. Trying to keep it together. A phone call comes from tomorrow nights promoter in SC, saying the venue has been shut down by fire marshalls, and they are moving the show to a STORAGE facility. Jesus. But, I say to my good friends, either the show will be horrible or it will be awesome. Turns out its... November 2nd Columbia SC Awesome. What a f8ckin party out in the chilly air, in no man's land next to railroad tracks in South Carolina, pabst bottles and tons of kids show up at 8pm for chrissakes, a reality that could never be in Chicago. Our set closers, What Looked Like Morning was Only the Beginning of Endless Night and The Exorcist were meant, by god, to be played EXACTLY right here. It is a blast. The other bands are cool, the kids are young and psyched and we are old and psyched. We stay with Andy's girlfriends mom, who smokes up with the guys in her big southern home and she is a theatre professor and she's 60 and she busts out into 3 verses of an Outkast song and Jason thinks he's tripping on acid. She tells us she did that in class and her kids were like "huh?" and her response to them was: "What? You think you are at the apex of your cool now?" An awesome sentiment I think. What a cool lady. November 3rd Athens GA We played the Caledonia Lounge years ago and it was alright. But tonight something happens that is never supposed to happen for a bill of two instrumental bands: girls show up. And I mean tons of girls, without boyfriends even, when we play they are three rows deep of young girls. It is bizarre. The South is awesome we think. We sound really good and we bring it and we meet tons of nice people, Jon flirting with a nice girl named Renee and we go to some bars afterward with her and her friends and I have an amazing intimate conversation with a guy as skinny as I am who is on leave from Iraq and his girlfriend Beth who is against the war and his sister Katherine who doesnt say. These people are amazing. Its a ten minute talk on the sidewalk and I am reminded how great it is to meet humans walking the Earth when your are a stranger. Everyone should do this. We part ways with the Jon flirting team, hop in the van and we feel good. We discuss how impossible it would ever be for a nice girl like Renee to invite us to her house for the night when suddenly her face appears in the driver-side window and she's like "You guys wanna come over and get high?" Suddenly it 5am and we need to be in Tampa (8 hours away) by 7pm, which means we have lost our sleeping time because we are stupid and its time to hurry up, sleep for 3 hours, and drive like f8ck. Dammit. November 4th Tampa FL The day is a blur of sleep deprivation and endless driving but the good lord jesus christ has something in store for us tonight, by god. This night will go down in my head as one of the best nights of my life. Its that good. Sometimes everything comes together and a show is just that awesome. Jack is the promoter and he also gave us our favorite show of the last tour, here in Tampa. There's an instrumental band Red Room Cinema, and a grindcore band Light Yourself on Fire that play before us. RRC roll out the beautiful thick posty rock music. LYF has a stack of guitar amps that is unbelievable and they are LOUD. The show is outside in front of the club, under palm trees. You can't beat it. There is every kind of person streaming through the front gate - club girls, indie rock kids, jocks, metal heads- and they can hear the blast from down the street and heck if they are going to slow down to pay their dough and get in there to check out the rock freakshow and have a beer. This could never happen in Chicago. And the show is late for our hometown standards, its 1am before we start playing. From beat one of our opener, track 4 off Nowonmai, a mellow song called "This Narrow Room is World Enough", I feel so alive playing the drums in this warm air I can't believe it. When "Bursting With Tears.." comes ripping out of nowhere, the good people and the band are just going nuts. It is good to be breathing. And right up to the end of the set, people are trying to get us high and drunk and we keep bringing it. We are unleashed like little manic nerds because this is the last show of the tour, and these 200 people feel our mania, or maybe they are just drunk. Yeah, they are drunk. But we finish the set and there is a demand for more, and we bust out a 9 minute song from an upcoming EP no one has heard. And they want more, so we out comes track 5 off Nowonmai "Nothing Can Stop Me" which we play shitty I believe but what the f8ck ever. Thank you people. You kind and awesome people of Tampa Florida. May god have mercy on your good sinning souls. We proceed to get wasted, sell tons of records, make new friends and two really great people named Ed and Ananda allow us to come back to their apartment, for more beer and grass and we keep it rolling till 7am and the plan is beach time tomorrow and they will take us there and then out for some vegetarian pot pie on the coast and jon lets their cat out but she comes back in the morning and we have sh*tloads of fun with these two and sitting in the sun feels freakin awesome. It absolutely blows that we have to leave and leave our new friends and drive straight back to Chicago, but this is the way of it. And so we do and we are all good humor and there is money for all the gas and the silliness of driving all the way to Chicago becomes torture at some point but its a blur and there was a moment when we found ourselves peeing on the lawn of a Fire Department somewhere in the US and Andy said it was bad karma and we apologized to the cold air but this actually had to happen. And then we were home and sleeping like good citizens and then there is nothing left to talk about.

We just got home from our first full tour in a couple of years. It was an overwhelming experience and we have to say thank you to all of you great people, most notably those of you who gave us your homes and hearts while we were out: Matt in Grand Rapids, Chris + Missy in Columbus, the girls in Brookville PA, Chuck and Rumi in Boston, Justin Stephanie Avary Sean and Bob in NY, our former guitar player Chris Van Pelt and Cassandra in Virginia taking care of us while the van was getting fixed, Holi Kat and Mike in DC, Andrea and Huck in Columbia SC, Renee Becca and Erin in Athens, and finally Ananda and Ed in Tampa. Thank you people. What a blast. Tour diary coming. While we were out the East Lansing show coming up on the 18th got an update: Rainer Maria will be headlining now, and that is super. All you Michigan heads- come on over. We are ready to bring it.