had great dreams last night. was somehow moving into the TOWER OF LONDON because i'd inherrited a part of it.  i was being shown around and wanted to be taken up to the attic rooms to see where the servants rooms had been (the building in my dream didn't look at all like any of the buildings which are actually part of the TOWER. there were a lot of gables at the roof and this is where the servants quarters had been). when i got up into the attic, a ghost girl from the 1600s appeared to greet me and show me the rooms.  she was wearing a bonnet and flickered a bit like an image from an old movie.  she pointed out of one of the windows to show me the grounds which were all tied up and covered in tarps for the winter. i was asking where the pool was while thinking a pool would be tacky in the setting and a pain in the ass to maintain. the ghost girl didn't even bother to answer but glided away in disgust.  a tv screen appeared and my friend katrina from the band PALODINE showed up on it. it was a video she'd made for her new song.  she was wearing a medieval gown with empire waist and was singing in her bedroom.  all the furniture in the bedroom was moving around by itself.  katrina started doing back flips and forward flips through the furniture without hitting into any of it.  she was flipping around in fast motion and singing this  alterna-country song. it was bonkers and hilarious.   speaking of new songs - got together with terry and james last night and worked out the basic bits to a new song entitled BOO TO A GOOSE.  it sounds like it'll be fun to play live.  since derwood left the band and scott took his place, we've refused all shows and have taken the opportunity to focus on new songs and a new live set. it's slow moving but hugely satisfying to work on a whole lot of new ideas. 

i'm down in Albuquerque visiting my sisters and have been laughing harder and more than i have in months. crazy, sly girlies and just the tonic to cure the winter blahs.  i've taken a solo road trip through the desert for my b-day and to work on some of the new songs. went up to Santa Fe today to see a dear friend i haven't seen for years - more laughing and pissing our pants down the ol memory lane.  got a serious farmer sunburn from sitting out in the sun. now me and the sis are gonna go check in on a place which is meant to be unpleasantly haunted.  we'll see.    

there is a bit of a video of footage from our CITY WEEKLY showcase show put to half the song SALT LAKE CITY on you tube now. have a look-see.  also the rock and roll academy kids doing a cover of OMIT-O-MATIC.

sweet farkin jaysus!  got home totally exhausted and flopped down on the sofa.   the TV was on and  inma was watching some show about  little girl beauty pageants.  i had the desire but not the energy to flee.  instead i decided to see how long until one of the moms or a coach mentioned "THE FULL PACKAGE" referring to the little girl.  under five minutes and that creepy term started getting flung about.  those mom's are bonkers. all the pageant people are bonkers.  and this judge woman, through her over inflated lips - clearly fake - is bitching about the hair color of one of the girls, saying "is that her natural color? can you even be that blonde?"  and now i'm bound to write a song or possibly a full rock opera called THE FULL PACKAGE. 

just up from more cool dreams and since that seems to be the only thing i care to write about on this - here goes.  a lot of the night i drempt of ghosts and poltergeists but the really cool part came when some friends and i went time traveling - the friends were sometimes my sisters come to think of it.  we were riding around in the back of a car which apparently was driving itself.  for some reason i wanted to research the history of soccer.  we found ourselves parked at the intersection of two very rural roads among fields and a few trees. a whole lot of school children were playing soccer in a pasture to our left.  they were all wearing navy blue long underwear with tighty whities on top of those - even the girls. it was their sporting uniform which i thought was an odd look - but hey,  i'm all for the odd.  the dream was in color but the colors were faded like old film stock or very early color photos which have been left in the light.  a large herd of the kids started to cross the road passing in front of the car on the way back to their school.  i leaned out the window and started to ask them what year this was.  they just looked at me strangely. when i asked a girl with long blonde braids, she looked at me as if i was crazy (she was probably the BAD SEED girl anyway).  along came their teacher/coach - a fairly young man in a heather gray sweat suit. i asked him what year it was and he too looked at me like i was out of my head but he answered 1934. i was excited about that! so this is what the past was like - BAD SEEDS in long underwear playing rural soccer in faded color.  i half crawled out the window and shouted to the teacher (who by now was a little ways down the road) "we come from two thousand six".  he turned to look at me and i continued "TWO ZERO ZERO SIX!" using some sort of sign language to aid my communication. he again looked at me like i was bonkers and there i woke up. i wonder why i said 2006 rather than 2009 - i must be stuck in the past.   Purr Bats are playing a show @ MONK'S again this friday.  it's for the CITY WEEKLY series of showcases and is with LASERFANG and THE FURS.  it'll be loads of fun.

just got out of a long hot bath taken while listening to massive attack's album MEZZANINE. great album and it always takes me back to when it first came out and i was living in london and working in a gay sauna. at the time i was doing a lot of overnight weekend shifts.  at 3 am or so, there would be only a handful of horny men wandering around in just towels and cruising for sex. the lights were very dim and i'd usually be hanging around the coffee/tea bar with a coupla the other lads who worked with me.  one of the lads would bring in this album Mezzanine and we'd play it very loudly through the sauna. there is a particular feeling that i'll never be able to truly articulate that came with listening to this album at that time of night in that low light and watching those men in towels mill about. at 7am we'd do our clean up and then walk out into the wierd world of first light london. only street sweepers, a few stray drunks swaying down the sidewalks, and mild traffic flying by.  i'd walk home to Spitalfields where the Petticoat Lane market would just be setting up, go up the back stairs to my flat, stuff toilet paper into my ears to block out the sound of the market below, and crash out into bed and hope to sleep until at least 2pm. it's strange how albums or songs can take you back in such vivid detail to a time and place.  anyway,  about BATTLE COW: several months back my nephew jammed a coupla cd's into the stereo of Inma's mini van making it so the stereo wont eject them and will play only one of them.  the lucky cd just happens to be our cd BIONIC FRESH MOVES. for a long while i refused to let that cd play while i was in the van even though my neice and nephew always want to hear it. i'd put the stereo on the radio or turn it off altogether.  eventually i softened and started to let the cd play once in a while. i do love the songs on it and rediscovered some bits that make me very happy. one of these bits is the song BATTLE COW. the general theme of the song is a reminder to me not to take myself too seriously. the thing i really love about the song is that it's made out of junky spare parts. while in london i used to travel down to my friend James' place in the New Cross Gate area. i'd take a train to the stop and then walk another mile to get to his flat which was hidden away behind other houses.  he'd just got a fantastic new KORG synthesizer.  we'd work out just small bits and ideas for songs and make rough demo cassette recordings. soon afterwards he moved away to Orange, France and we were unable to finish anything. i was left with just this poor cassette copy of ideas - in fact,  i had just a second generation copy of the poor cassette of ideas.  i loved this BATTLE COW bit so much with it's cheap 1980's sounding drum machine and deep spooky synth that when i moved back to Utah and started doing PURR BATS full-on, i had Dave Payne take the recording, chop it up, and make a song.  he added bass and i did the vocals and we had an anthem for the ages!  well,  at least i love the song.  now i'm plotting to transcribe it for live performance.  it'll be a challenge.

just awake from a long night and morning of really bonkers dreams. i slept through my alarm so i don't have time to type them all, but i'll give a brief description of the strangest and creepiest.  i was in a giant chamber like a missle silo which had been fitted out with all sorts of high tech screens and lights.  it had been turned into a giant full sensory video game where the walls were all screens and it was like a virtual game.  i was playing against a female friend but i got the feeling that a whole lot was actually at stake.  the girl and i were standing on a giant tube-like air cushion which was free floating in the middle of and near the top of the silo.  somehow we glided down tothe bottom of the chamber and walked into a series of tunnels. there was a person at a reception desk, and everything was in a dim red glow.  the reception person told us we were at the entrance to hell.  i looked past him and saw various tunnels and chambers going off in every direction.  but they were full of video arcade machines and toys and i exclaimed,  "hell is an arcade?".  the reception person explained that the hellish element was that none of the games could be won.  and each level was different.  the first and lightest level would actually let you play the games and get quite far on them.  a person just could never win. but people were addicted to playing.  it was the endless frustration. in this lightest level the frustration would be eased for a bit with the excitment of playing and seeming to get somewhere.  the next level down let a person get not as far. the machines would cut out more often and the frustration would be more constant. i picked up one of the bouncy balls which were spread around the floor with other toys, and our receptionist who was now acting as our guide instructed me to bounce it.  i did and it bounced just once and then went lopsided and just thudded down in a flop.  apparently the toys got more useless the further you went down. we got into a very low level where the video game machines were broken down, short circuiting, had broken screens and were unplugged.  there was a table at which sat a very bedraggled looking bunch of people.  another receptionist was here helping these people make name tags on which their photos would just appear.  this new receptionist offered to help my friend and me make our own temporary name tags and my friend was all for it.  her picture started to appear on a card and i pushed it away and said, "no! what if it doesn't go come off?"  our guide pointed out another nearby room for the even worse.  it was totally bare.  nothing inside but broken old stick-on linoleum tiles and stained, mangy ceiling tiles.  nobody was in there - and i guess if you were unfortunate enough to be in there,  you wouldn't see anybody else.  we declined a trip into that room.  the dream up to here had been kind of fun in a bonkers way,  but when we turned to make our way back out, a man suddently appeared in the doorway and just stood there staring cold at me.  no expression, and he stood in a paper doll pose as if to give a full and absolute look at him - his legs slightly apart,  his arms held slightly out from his hips.  it gave me the creepiest and most ominous feeling.  he was a totally normal looking guy - middle aged, bald on top, cropped on the side, blond, about 6' and seemingly a sturdy build.  50's style glasses with clear rims and not the usual black rims.  he looked like some suburban husband who worked for nasa or something in the early 60's.  but the feeling he gave off was purely evil. like a serial killer. he just stood there staring for a moment - said nothing and then backed into another room and disappeared.  i realized i'd seem him staring at me at the beginning of the dream up outside of the silo.  he'd been in a crowd of people.  the realization that he was following me really creeped me out.  my female friend mentioned that she'd seen him before too.  we cautiously stepped back into the dimmly lit passageways to make our way out - looking over our shoulders every second.  there i woke up.  gotta run,   i'm late

phew-  a long night of strange dreams: a hybrid of London and Salt Lake City that suddenly was under attack from kamakazi German planes from world war II.   I was talking with a group of people when a bunch of these planes came flying in from over the mountains that wrap around Salt Lake City's east side.  the planes just started nose diving around us- the first one missing us by feet and obliterating a nearby group of people.  there were all these London landmarks and buildings mixed in with SLC.  i thought it a bit strange that the German's were using the Japanese kamakazi technique, that the planes were from world war II, and that some of the planes were flying without wings - but i couldn't spend time thinking about it.  we were all running around in a panic and burrowing underneath rubble hoping to escape destruction.  that dream morphed into haunted house exploration with whiny and exasperating ghosts.  woke up, zombie walked to the bathroom for a piss, went back to to sleep and found myself back in a London/ SLC mash up.  this time i was with a few research types and we were floating around in the Thames.  not in a boat but in the water with just these small blue balloons to keep us afloat.  we were studying the currents and looking for some mysterious thing that was supposed to be on the bottom of the river.  we were floating against the bridges' support bases to test how the currents flowed around them - particularly the ship hull shaped stone bases of Tower Bridge.  apparently at Tower Bridge there were mysterious and unexplainable currents and undertows. just as i floated up to the bridge,  i lost my blue balloon.  ahhh shit!    luckily i woke up before finding out just what the currents and undertows did.

ok, today is starting out right if the dreams i just woke from are any indication.  i was dreaming for most of the night but it all got particularly interesting when i found myself aboard a touring double decker right-wing radio bus from which one of those dicky radio celebrities was broadcasting.  he was sitting next to the driver (being a bit of a back seat driver)  and almost shouting into his radio mic about the evil LIBERALS who hate america and want to take over and enslave the common decent god-fearing americans.  i was trying hard to hold my tongue and not roll my eyes - and i succeeded until we pulled up at a full-on rally for the enthusiasts of this kind of agitainment.  that sort of perpetual agitation is a kind of addictive entertainment for some of these folks.  at this rally were lots of other radio celebrities of the same type.  that rush limbah (or however his name is spelled) was there yelling into his own mic, beet red and near heart attack.  i made some stupidly snide comment about letting the heart attack in and embracing its full potential and then caught myself and walked away. i went through a door and found myself at a goth convention and tennis tournament.  i was welcomed with enthusiasm which i found strange as i've never played tennis in my life and  my goth dues haven't been paid since the late 1980's.  marilyn manson was teasing me saying "this boy puts horrid things into his body like carrots and celery".  i laughed thinking, "just what end does he think the carrots and celery are going into?"  suddenly i found myself naked - like one of those naked-at-school dreams but with not quite the humiliating impact since some of the fetish goths were bordering on naked themselves.  we were in a huge and ancient banqueting hall which must have been in europe becuse it was certainly older than the united states and any building in them.  i was frantically looking through my duffle bag for clothing but could find only ill fitting shorts and a purr bats t-shirt.  the shorts were too tight and i refused to wear my own band's t-shirt where i might be seen by somebody i know. some goth officials were helping me look for clothing in my dufflebags and it was discovered that i was trying to smuggle cow bell into the goth fest. i was uncerimoniously shown the door.