this tour, i guess like all of our tours, has been a time of contemplation and observation for me... every night i've played the wallflower from behind the merch table and observed the interactions of the various attenders of our shows...

and i've got to tell you i am heart broken... not because i pity anybody, not because i feel better off than anyone but because i am part of a system of such brokenness... in every town we have come across i see the same things, i see people desperate for attention, affection, and identity... and in the end our souls are for sale... every night from stage i have been desperate to grab these people by the faces and tell them that their cigarrettes, band tshirts, sexuality, or name droppings have zero value... they aren't who you are and in fact they may serve more as disconnectors rather than points of connection... how can we connect on such superficiality... i am sure their is aspects of love in all of our friendships but no one is looking one another in the eye... no one is listening... we are all just trying to get everyone to like us...we are trying to earn the love of our neighbor... oh god!

i am broken hearted because this is the norm in this society... this is not the way it is supposed to be... we are supposed to connect because we dream together, we share a common imagination, we hope together... we connect because we see the same need and insecurities in our neighbors and we have compassion in them... everything else we think makes us important is vanity...

and i will be the first to say that i am sorry if i ever made any of you feel like you weren't good enough... i want to apologize on behalf of the rockstars, the preachers, the actors, the privlidged, and the bourgeoisie ... these things that we made to make us more valuable (bands, fame, power and wealth) in fact have no value.... they are simply fabrications we have made to keep others from getting close...but yet we put such a price on them and we long to be loved like this that we give away our humanity for affection from the elite...

bring us back to conversation, dreaming, hoping, imagining... that leads us to a universal community of love... where our favorite bands don't make us cool... where our troubled souls can be shared... and we can be vulnerable... i have come to conclude that the love i wanted from the industry (probably the reason why i started playing music in the first place), the attention i wanted from the crowd, the social status, the stroke i got from people's impressions aren't worth a damn...

however, this is the place i am in and i vulnerably beg of all of you, teach me to love you, and allow me in... i just want to talk...i just want to share...i just want to listen... every night we have a wonderful opportunity to bring hope... but i fear that we are only perpetuating the system of vanity...playing the old game and floating past one another... so buy my tshirts, tell me i'm awesome, and don't look me in the eye...i'm afraid of that place too...

be well,

steve