when nothing really important is taken.

we woke up yesterday in austin about 10 or so.  we started loading our shit to leave.  as i went around to the driver's side, i noticed the back window was busted out, fuck.  so we looked in the car to see what was missing.

the first thing i checked out was the trunk, where my laptop and cameras were at.  they were still there.  after checking out what should have been in the car and was was left, we came out pretty lucky on the whole deal, as lucky as you can be when your window is busted out and you have at least three thousand dollars worth of electronics in the trunk.

they took:
- two books of CDs (mostly burnt)
- all the loose change (maybe five bucks)
- they partially broke my cd player trying to steal it, the face falls off when you hit bumps, but it still works.
- an unopened bag of cape cod jalapeño and aged cheddar chips (those bastards)

they left:
- an empty can of natural light
- some weird brown goo on the cd player face.

someone said we should report it to the cops, but i didn't see the point.  it's not like they're going to dust for prints or anything, they'd probably just search the car and give us shit.  ben duct taped the window up and we left town.

friday in wichita:

was awesome.  eric set up a sweet show with his new band, the peerless princess of the plains.  there were a ton of people there and everyone played awesome.  they put on a killer show with confetti and a crazy upside down american flag curtain they made earlier that day.  i'll be posting videos of ppoftp's set as soon as i get a chance.  we crashed at joey's apartment after the show.  thanks eric and joey, for real.

saturday in cache, oklahoma:

was also awesome.  tyler (novacaine promotions) and ricky rapechild (day of the sick, delusional 13) booked a place called the cahoma building in the middle of nowhere and got over 100 kids to show up.  we scared most of them out of the room because we weren't playing hardcore punk or death metal.  it had a really nice under the radar/diy type feel to it.  delusional 13 was awesome.  thanks tyler and ricky.

after the show we drove to phillip's place in texas to spend the night.  i was way fucking tired and hallucinating towards the end of the drive from sleep deprivation/road hysteria.  a deer almost ran into the side of the car.  we were able to take showers the next morning, and it was good.  thanks phillip.

sunday in austin:

this part of the trip was slightly cursed.  as we were getting close to austin, we got pulled over for having a theoretically stolen trailer.  i think we got pulled over for looking weird on a sunday.  the cops were pretty much total douche bags.  they pretended to be super cool, but were just trying to get us to admit to doing something they could bust us for.  they kept saying shit like, "you can tell us if you were smoking weed in the car, it's cool, everybody does it, you can tell us."  yeah right, sure, we'll tell you, then you'll give us a fat possession ticket, asshole.  

at one point, they separated us and asked me how i felt about marijuana laws, so i told him.  i told him how i didn't see how making things illegal does any good to anyone and how i felt about the hypocrisy of drunk people telling other people not to do drugs, as if alcohol is any better for you than weed just because it's an officially sanctioned and state sponsored drug.

then he said, "well, if marijauna was legal, wouldn't that make drug cartels more powerful?".  i really couldn't believe this guy was serious.  i told him about how the act of making things illegal is what gives drug cartels and gangs power.  

i told him about how when alcohol was made illegal in this country, it didn't stop anyone from drinking but gave tons of money and power to the mob because they had a new product to make money on.  as soon as it was legal again, it was taxed, regulated, and no longer a tool for the mob to make money, the same is true of all illegal drugs.  

if drugs were legal, those people would lose their exclusive ownership of the market.  making things illegal is what creates drug cartels and gives them their power.  the cop was silent, then he looked at me and said, "you know, i've been asking everyone i pull over that question for years, and no one's ever said anything like that to me before."  i didn't get it, i thought it was all common sense.  then he shook it off and kept trying to get me to admit we had drugs in the car.  what an asshole.

i had every illegal substance in the car in my underwear,
we kept our mouths shut, and escaped without citation.

that  kind of killed some of our chill time before the show in austin, but we still had time to get to dino's house, change broken strings, smoke, eat, and go over some lyrics of the songs i was going to do in my acoustic set before the full band set.

so we go to the bar:  club 115.   the booking guy comes up to me and tells me we're late, even though we were there an hour before i was told we were going to play.  this guy was a real asshole.  it was supposed to be us at 8 and karaoke at 9.  i guess they fired the karaoke guy and hired a country band to play every sunday at 8 in july.  no one told us anything.  after arguing with the booking asshole for a while, i went over his head and talked to the bands playing after us.  they were all very cool and didn't care if we pushed everything back an hour.  i told the booking guy what we were going to do, he was pissy, but stopped arguing with me.  our friends got there before we started.   

i'd thought about dosing before the show, but i'm glad i didn't, there was a lot of bad energy in the air for a while, all of it coming from the fat-fuck with his face buried in the laptop at the corner booth, the booking guy.  so i didn't get to do an acoustic set because all that time was spent arguing with the booking guy about set times.

the bar seemed decent enough though, even though it's about a mile away from where i thought it was going to be, in the preppy/martini part of town, and not really that close to 6th street.  if you look at a google map, it seems very close, but it's not really that close.  there was zero street traffic outside the bar.

the sound guy  was really amazing, and we actually sounded really amazing ourselves that night.  we killed in front of about 15 people.  the rest of the night was a lot of fun.  at the end of the night though, i talked to the bartender about what we were getting paid.  we were supposed to get a cut of the bar, and even though everyone we brought was drinking a lot, he said they weren't going to pay us anything.  super.

so.... touring bands, do not play at club 115.  the booking guy is an asshole, they changed everything about the bill without telling us, then tried to make us play before any of our people got there.  and they didn't give us our cut of the bar.

after the show, we rolled out to check out brian's new place, it was tight, then we went back to dino's.  on the way, we stopped because brian needed gas.  as he pulled the gas hose out of the car after filling up, it shot everywhere, soaking brian in gasoline.  it was kind of insane.  he changed into some of piatt's clothes when we got back to dino's, but gas is a hard smell to get off.

about three in the morning, we played a baddass acoustic and bongos version of paranoid android before we all passed out.

the drive home:

we made good time getting out of texas, but we were fucking hungry.  chinese sounded good so we stopped in norman, oklahoma on a mission.  after asking for directions from multiple people and driving around for over an hour, we get to the promised land, a chinese super buffet with statues of chinese warriors guarding the entrance.  then, as we try to open the doors... we can't.  they're locked.  we look at the sign on the door.  they're closed on mondays, i almost cried.

we sucked it up, ate at taco cabana, and rolled out.  in an experiment with time compression, we listened to ok computer the rest of the way home, about eight hours.  i think the experiment was a success.  it was hard to tell how far we'd gone at any given time because the music just kept looping.  i think it made the trip seem much shorter than if we'd been changing discs every half an hour, but maybe it was just me.

it was a pleasantly uneventful ride home with lots of insane, cracked out joking.  there was a period around the time of the norman, oklahoma chinese buffet debacle that my face was hurting from laughing so much.

so sometime this week before we go to minneapolis and chicago, i need to go to a salvage yard and find a new window.  oh, the glamorous life.

love/josh