July 25, 2008, Cleveland, OH, room 708, the Hampton Inn, Day 10, or maybe 7 or so, or 4, depending on who you ask...

How to get pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike:

First, drive a white short bus with California plates with your band's name on the side, the exterior looking a bit worn, kind of like you spent part of the day in the hot sun
scrubbing off the graffiti that has covered your bus since you parked it at various band members' houses in San Francisco and the local neighborhood kids treated it as a brand new canvas.

Then, turn the lights off, set everyone's flashlights to 'strobe', pump some Michael Jackson over the stereo and have everyone hang on the crossbars and twirl around, practicing their best John Travoltas as the bus makes its way from Philly to NYC at 2 on
a Monday morning, our very own mobile dance party on the most State Police-infested stretch of interstate this side of the equator.

Of course, to really do this right, you've got to have just played a hot, sweaty gig in Philly at the World Cafe Live, giving it all up for the city that let us run up the Rocky
steps last time through town. You've got to have hung out for a bit afterwards in the humid east coast nighttime air, trying to decide to crash on some new friend's floor or
pack the party up and move it to the Big Apple.
You've got to have done all that after a day spent lounging around Lara's folks' pool in Harrisburg, scrubbing the graffitti off your bus, catching crayfish in the creek and
enjoying a summer that you don't get in cold and foggy San Francisco, after rocking out in the city's outdoor amphitheater the night before for a set in front of a few
hundred families sprawled out on the city park lawn.
And before that, you've got to have drive ten hours from Kalamazoo, Michigan, where you met up with Lara and Mike, the band's plan of some people driving across the
mountains and plains and some people flying somehow actually working out, letting you work out the kinks on the first date of your monthlong summer tour in front of a
festival crowd more interested in sampling the local food bazaar than listening to a halfway mature band from San Francisco intent on cramming into a bus to small for
half their number and driving across the country in the heat of summer with no air conditioning.

So once you've got all that, cue the mobile dance party, flash the lights, hit the Turnpike and see what happens. Although the thing is, we did all this, followed it to the letter, and got nothing. Not even a drive by from the po po. Can you explain that?
Maybe they were busy posing for reality cop shows with confiscated garbage bags full of Columbian brown fresh out of someone's trunk, who knows. All we know is we took
the party to New York, where all of us crashed on Ezra's folks's living room floor on Bleeker street after we wandered around with pizza and beers, settling into the chess
tables in Washington Square park to greet the first shades of dawn. Go figure.