Making the most of the night

2/23 - 1pm

I was driving last night a little after ten. Moving eastwards from Denver, the light pollution subsided into a wide sky of piercing stars. Everyone else was wearing headphones and watching movies or something in the back of the van. I had my music cranked through the stereo, singing along loud, roaring past semis on high from oily truck stop coffee.

All of a sudden, nearing the Kansas border, a thick thick fog dropped on us out of nowhere. It was all our headlights could capture, I felt trapped and on the brink of something dangerous. I pulled off the highway into a small town.

As we were idling outside a motel we were considering, the proprietor, a hobbling middle age man in flannel, came out and rapped on the window, offered us a cheap rate and we accepted.

The outside steps were covered in Astroturf and our room appeared to be furnished with belongings from someone’s deceased grandmother, like the plastic had just been removed after 40 years of use. The sheets were stiff, everything was floral print – or at least something leafy. Will was delighted to page through the calendar that hung on the wall – Quilts ’95.

It was too early to sleep and we had been in the van for twelve hours or so, so we wandered over to the bar across the street. Chairs were upside-down on the tables, and it was completely empty save for a woman behind the bar that welcomed us. We looked at each other and decided that this would be a fine setting to share a pitcher.

By 1:30, that one pitcher had turned into seven. We fed quarters and dollars into the Photo Hunt machine at the end of the bar, promptly won high score but for some reason couldn’t duplicate our success as the night wore on. We attempted new and interesting games, like the TV Guide Crossword Puzzle and Monkey Bash.

Eventually an odd group came in and sat down the bar from us – a scruffy faced guy and blonde girl in their early twenties and a large woman probably in her mid forties. At some point in the night, I was paging through my phone looking for someone worthy of an inebriated text message while Bryce and Joey were outside and Will was talking on the phone. I looked up and sitting alone next to me was the blonde, her sad and wet eyes lined with black and blue. I said hello. We started talking and the guys came back. She joined us in our games and eventually we were best friends with the three of them. They attempted to piece together what we were all about and why the hell we were there. Were we skateboarders? – we signed a bar napkin. We attempted to piece together their situation. I’m pretty sure the guy and the girl had a kid together, but by the way she pressed her legs against mine beneath the bar I gathered they weren’t together. The older woman was somehow related and I tried, to no avail, to help her figure out which hard rock band from the late seventies she had seen drive a Harley out on stage. She had been so fucked up on acid at that show, she said, that it was hard to recall and we never did come to any conclusion.

We said goodbye to our well enjoyed acquaintances at last call and walked back across the street, turned the TV on and, appropriately, episodes of The Jeffersons and Sanford and Son spilled out into the room. And then all of a sudden I was dreaming that poor bald-headed Brittany Spears was asking me for advice as I attempted to scale a chain link junkyard fence.

Back in it...

2/22 - 2AM


Sitting in a basement in Salt Lake City. I’m cross-legged on a green carpeted floor that I know pretty well, wrapped in my sleeping bag, flirting with sleep. We’re back in it again. I awoke early on my friend’s couch this morning in The Mission and found myself hours later passing the spewing refineries of the north bay area. The day was clear beneath clouds that floated above us like lily pads on a stagnant pond. We crossed the bay at the mouth of the delta and pushed through Sacramento, climbed up and over Donner Pass. We lunched in Reno at a deli that shares its parking lot with a classy strip club.

It was hot for February - I know that stretch of highway that runs along Donner Lake like a reoccurring dream, but it appeared out of character, nearly snowless. The colors were all wrong, it looked like a late May or early November palate…

The thin film of sleep stayed tightly wrapped around me all day. I’m getting reacquainted with the feeling of our tour van, but we all seemed to slip right back into old routine – all those weeks I just spent in New York are blurry, thrown somewhere in storage in my brain. What’s clear to me now is that vast sky that stretches over the whole middle of this country. It opened above us as we followed the river through Nevada. Nevada is nothing but stretches of land and sky, brittle towns with names like Elko, Lovelock, and Winnemucca, lonely decaying buildings. The mountains rise to the sky on either side of the highway and there are casinos at truck stops – we play the slots as we gas up.

Though the routine is settling upon us again, there is still a nervous excitement and electricity in the van. The touring season has just begun and we aim to be booked strait through it. We’re blessed to be opening for artists that we like and listen to, to have friends to put us up in each city along the way.

Our first show of the year was Monday opening up for Ben Kweller in San Francisco. There was a tension that got released on that stage. It was oddly comfortable after so much time away. That comfort in turn got me nervous. Kweller is a great performer and seems to write whatever sort of song he is feeling like writing. His people meshed well with our people too. That night was just satisfying, nothing out of the ordinary good or bad.

Anyway, its good to be back. Everyone sends their love.

Man this year is chipping away pretty quickly. I mean, a lot has happened already, and maybe that’s why its moving so fast. I think I may have felt a half dozen dull moments as of yet. There has been enough to do, enough to think about, to keep my mind in a sweat - even if my body is dormant, strewn about across a bed facing the ceiling, loosely clutching a guitar, strumming aimlessly… My mind wanders and wonders and fixates and churns and churns until I have to stop and remember to breath, to relax.

Will is living with me once again as he always does for a bit pre-tour. Its around dinner time and we’re back at my place. I just re-heated some cold coffee that was left in the pot from this morning. We’ve just been battling commute traffic all over Oakland running errands for tour after rehearsing. I needed a book, some jeans (as you may have noticed, I tend to be less than prolific in my accumulation of clothing), and some other shit before we leave. We’ll be out for a while, it’ll be May at the very very least before we have more than a couple days without a show – very excited about this - look for new tour dates for end of March to be posted soon.

Rehearsal is going well each afternoon. I expected that we’d be pretty rusty after a couple months off, but it all feels fine – just about where we left it. So we often descend into jangly songs by Weezer or Stone Temple Pilots, stuff that we used to play back in high school - then Will will start shredding, and I’ll sit down on my amp and get all jaded and nostalgic and talk at length about how much music has lost its way since the early to mid 90s…

…speaking solely as an avid music listener and fan, I’m sort of sick of a lot of what’s out there right now. I’d really like to hear some great songs. I’d really like to hear some music that was written for the sake of something other than fashion (maistream fashion, indie/folkey/dancey/whatever fashion, adult contemporary fashion, etc…). If it’s the style of a song that makes it worth listening to, then it will carry no substance when the trends change. I don’t care what genre the band fits into – in the end that shouldn’t matter. A great song is moving in any genre, and you can never really explain exactly why you like it - it just gets you. Its best played on a slightly out of tune guitar in someone’s living room a decade after it fell of the billboard charts. Its best sung by multiple voices, all off-key, all drunken... When the sun sets on this generation, on these paticular trends… when the day is done for all the music that is merely an accessory a current fashion… what songs will remain glowing for us in the night sky?

i guess it doesnt really matter all that much.

...and i dont even know how I got off the track.

For the last few days we’ve been getting all our shit together for tour again. Joey, Bryce, and I set up in a practice space for a few hours and played all our songs, talked about how we spent our time away from the van, from the stage.

Goddamn it feels good to play with a band again.

We're working on a cover song that may get added to the set.

more to come..

Before I left for practice the other night, I spoke with an old friend of my father who spent his entire adult life sailing on cargo ships and oil tankers. Over the phone he has the grit in his voice of a man that has walked and drank and fought amongst the cranes and shipyards in every bustling seaport in the world, has seen desperate men and women do the most desperate of things, has felt shit that most of us are not meant to experience. He summed up life in a way that hit home for me - and he always does, he has always had the air of a working class philosopher. He would sail through Oakland (which is actually a pretty big port city) and visit my family. Standing nearly seven feet tall with an alcoholic cologne, His presence would fill our house: always rolling his own cigarettes and smoking on the back porch, always bringing my brother and I strange gifts from across the world, telling us stories in a language we were barely old enough to hear, relating his thoughts on life - never talking down to us.

He says to me that happiness is the most important thing, that maybe we never get to experience pure bliss but living is just dealing with the shit that life throws at you - this thing and the next and the next and the next. If that’s your existence, you gotta be doing what makes you happy above all.

I hung up the phone and went to practice.

on the passing of famous whores...

When I read about Anna Nicole Smith’s life and death - on the front page of the BBC’s website no less - it made me sad to think about. I was saddened because her life exemplified pretty much everything we detest in our own culture - thats a hard life to live. Say what you want about the woman, but I doubt that she ever experienced one moment of pure and genuine happiness. I wonder if she knew that the response to her death would be such a loud and resounding, “Good Riddance!”

a few more things...

We forgot to bring cameras to the Brooklyn Bridge. I think that is how it was supposed to be. I’m not sure that the day was to be shared, but I’ll tell you it was as clear as an afternoon can be and every monument of the city sparkled before us. Apparently it was a whole bunch of degrees below freezing but we walked so much that I had no idea. We took the train back to Manhattan and walked across the Williamsburg bridge, then clear back to the G train and caught it up to Greenpoint.

I had gone to sleep too late, awoke too early, drank too much coffee at brunch, and sunk too much emotion into the conversation not to crash when I got home. I laid down and thought about the people I had to say goodbye to, the suitcase I had to stuff full. Someone cancelled, Someone came over, and it was all heavy words, heavy sighs, heavy looks, heavy embraces – all crumbling into a disassociated laughter. The weight of the day grew more and more burdensome but it felt beautiful – sometimes the heavier things are, the more they feel that way.

I drank a beer, a glass of wine. I washed some dishes. I put on some music. I sat on the floor. I laid on the floor. I felt like I should really feel something about something, but I didnt feel much of anything about anything. I decided I wanted breakfast.

After midnight I realized the cold. Stepping out onto the sidewalk, the wind rushed through the street. I was all bundled up and struggled against it. Nothing really makes you feel childish and vulnerable like icy weather and layers upon layers of warm clothes. There was no one out there. I returned a book I had borrowed from a friend of a friend, I bought an onion, a roll, and a cup of coffee.

I swear that I knew that girl walking from the cab to the bar. I had a lot to say to her if she was indeed she, but I didn’t follow. I walked along a diagonal street that nearly connected the bodega and the apartment. I thought a bit about The Pythagorean Theorem.

I got home and put the music back on, checked into my flight online. I made breakfast and went to sleep.

How did now become now?

A cloud of breath rose in front of my face. Standing at the gate, on the threshold of the airplane's door I could see the red and brown highrises of The Bronx, I could see men working on the concrete below, covered from the cold despite numb unsheathed faces. Some bitchy woman behind me kept complaining about the temperature. "Don't take this for granted," I told her, "Its 2 degrees in Chicago right now." "Well, I'm not staying in Chicago, I'm going to Dallas," she informed me, and without invitation squeezed in against me as I stepped on the plane.

Everyone settled in their seats and the overhead compartments clicked close. One of the workers from the ground came down the aisle with a big bucket of something to defrost the rear doors, we taxied, a pretty girl about my age had a panic attack, we returned to the gate, she walked shamefully quick to the front door of the plane and we taxied again...

In Chicago I had only a couple minutes to change flights. Descending, I marveled at the great sprawl beside the lake, the frozen solid suburban patches of white, the daunting black skyscrapers in the distance. Our steward just hoped his car would start. It was -5 now and the sun was still above the horizon. Inside the terminal I could be perceived only as a long transparent six-foot blur that came into the shape of a shaky twenty-something with a blue backpack at gate B11, the men's room, and the front of the line at the sandwich counter, which I intended to cut gracefully. "My plane takes off in 5 minutes!" I shook frantically from my throat, "Can I just pay for this?!!"

I'm sitting now beside my favorite coffee shop in Oakland. The passing activity of cars and people is but a refreshing murmur. The air is crisp and a thin fog is burning off. (Its not even 11am and I'm out of bed - sometimes time changes work in your favor). I'm not sure what to do with myself, what to make of anything. In a week Will is going to be snoozing on my couch, we'll be counting t-shirts and loading in and out of a practice space. We'll be breaking our bank on guitar strings, chords, drum sticks, and some more unfortunate purchases since our van was broken into a few weeks ago. Then its back to the highway and back to the stage!

I dwell beneath a constant drizzle of uncertainty. Always wet with questions that can't be answered, concerns that can only be speculated upon, one way plane tickets, knots in my neck and back, loves I'm always leaving, and long hours of impatient anxiety. The future is a hazy black curtain and a list of cities and dates on our myspace page. Its a constant competition, its a business and I am a businessman, contracted with numerous parties, employing, outsourcing, hiring, firing, signing and initialing, schmoozing and shaking hands, grinding gears and grinding teeth, clawing for opportunity....

But here I sit in a dull and pleasant moment. I am eavesdropping on the gossip of the pecking pigeons and coffee shop patrons. The sun is kissing my cheek. There are pretty girls and eccentric homeless folks to slyly stare at. Old folks are ambling by, paramedics are getting early lunch, and art school kids are just starting to get belligerent. James is gonna show up any minute now and smoke a couple cigarettes. I'll refill my coffee and our conversation will twist and turn and we'll pause and we'll sigh. And then this moment will quietly collapse into the next one and the next one and the next...

...and so on to infinity.