Thursday, 3pm
Stereo says: Long Shot Kick The Bucket… well that was a second ago; now it’s The Specials’ “Gangsters.” And it’s too beautiful outside the van not to say something about it. Highway 101 looks out towards the edge of the earth. A history student I met once told me that the United State of America has always narrated itself from east to west; even today, people living in Boston or New York unwittingly intone echoes of manifest destiny under their breath when they refer to this coast as being ‘out west,’ and people who’ve lived on the west coast their whole lives still call the original colonies ‘back east.’ So Highway 101 here marks the end of that story; in a sense, Californians live at the edge of the earth and the end of history. And the water stretches out into a vague great blue beyond.
I’ve been here and stood at the edge of the highway and looked down into clouds which reach out to the end of the horizon, and not known how far down they go. There’s one other person who knows that story, so I won’t tell it here.
Today, there aren’t any clouds, though… the water is as blue as a pair of eyes squinting in the sun, ringed with palm tree eyelashes.

The boys in the van aren’t quite veterans at this yet, but we’ve definitely started to get the hang of it. The giddy callous teenage anatomy humour of the first van trip isn’t gone—because it’s important to love your inner six-year-old—but it has found its place. It’s not the easy ubiquitous response to everything that it once was. Which leaves more time and space to talk about why we’re actually doing this, and what sort of a world we occupy and what sort of dent we’re hoping to make on it. That’s been there all along, but it used to be cut short far more often by the crass sullenness of four boys cooped up in small spaces together and figuring out what to do with their surplus testosterone. On this trip, I think we’ve learned to spend our surpluses appropriately during periods of sanctioned drunken bickering over absolutely nothing in particular… which is a lot of fun, actually. It’s hard to keep score, though, because the point system is so complicated, but usually everyone is disqualified by the second round on a foul or a technicality. Most of the time, the average net background crankiness in the van is no higher than 18%—about the equivalent of a hungover Monday morning at job which you actually sort of like, or a Thursday night fifteen years into a better-than-average marriage. We love what we’re doing, and we do it well, and we love and respect each other as only neurotic, navel-gazing, awkward-bastards-at-heart can. And we’re getting better at being grownups about it. Maybe that’s not very rock and roll.

But the Blue Beat lounge was a nice reminder that we’re not just a rock and roll band. Rock and roll is the language most of our audiences have in common with us (if they know anything about reggae or ska, it’s normally the post-card version of Bob Marley or Reel Big Fish, two-dimensional, ahistorical, fifteen dollars at K-Mart) but punk-and-or-rock can be a little bleak, and a little too self-consciously epic about its excesses or its abstinences sometimes. Ska and reggae, on the other hand, have been the sound of joy, resolve, and unity which gives purpose and direction to the nihilism-as-method of the punk rock bandwagon. And make it more fun. The very first shows I ever went to when I was seventeen were ska shows, and they won my ever-lasting allegiance because they were some of the first times I had found a group of people in one room with the same kinds of estranged experience of the everyday as me, and the same kind of fucked up technicolour fashion sense as me—and they were all smiling. And putting their energy behind one sound, regardless of what different quarters they came from. The bouncing-community-in-practice of the island music and the righteous deconstructive zeal of distorted guitars have always kept each other in check for me. Quoth Emma Goldman: If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.

We got to Bob and Marci’s, and they rolled out the red carpet. Bob and Marci are Cale’s second cousins, or something like that; well, one of them is, and the other is married to the former. And they live in a mansion (by my standards) so their red carpet is king-sized.
I’m normally a little ill-at-ease in large homes with expensive furniture, and spotless floors: I can’t help but see in every oversized television a month’s rent for someone without a roof, and I want to retch or scream.
But Bob and Marci are something of an exception to this for a few reasons. Firstly, they’re actually fairly progressive—they’re not Republicans, for a start (statistically, there’s a correlation, I think, between the accumulation of fixed capital and Newt-Gingrich-style cynicism), they grow their own food in the back yard, and they’ve raised two conscientious kids (who’ve both been connected to Food Not Bombs).
And secondly, they’re unbelievably generous to us. They’d already cooked spaghetti for us when we get there, and they’d made a distinct pan of vegetarian sauce for me. They shared their beer with us, they let us use their laundry, and here’s the kicker: I’m about to patch my jeans, and I ask to borrow a pair of scissors, and Marci offers to go ahead and do the sewing for me. She takes the pants upstairs and runs the jeans through her sewing machine, and now I can wear my jeans for a lot longer than I would have otherwise!

San Luis Obispo, The Frog and Peach
The Frog and Peach show needs little description here. It’s an English pub in a party town full of milky-faced college students. On a Thursday night. We played a really loud set to a lot of drunken folks who boogied and ran.
Trying to do more than piss in the men’s room is tricky, though. The door doesn’t lock, and the regulars know that there’s both a toilet bowl and a urinal, so they’re sincerely offended that anyone wouldn’t let them in while Cale or I are making our respective deposits. I successfully talked two meaty fellows out of barging in on Cale, although the first was very explicit about having a god-given right to get in: I told him that if it was me in there (which it was about to be very soon), I wouldn’t want anyone else busting in and looking at my junk. My junk, he replies with a deadly straight face, is God’s property. Not mine. I don’t see why that means he’s entitled to see it. I fend off one other bro who feels entitled to what he wants when he wants it, and then when it’s my turn, I hear Cale having the same conversation with another fellow who through no fault of Cale’s busts past just as I’m pulling up my jeans. What the fucking p-funk? How can so many fellows feel so entitled to so many things? And how did they all arrive at identical swaggers and polo shirts? I put a shorter, grumpier version of this question to him, and I’ve never sounded so pissy or cosmopolitan in my life, but he’s too busy burying himself in the urinal to give me more than a mumbled drunken complaint. What is it about San Luis Obispo that makes public shitting a perfectly logical prospect? Fucking horrifying.