Brain Tumors

we were on tour. so we went to McDonalds.

it was at an oasis. the name is misleading as it gives you the picture of some sort of salvation hidden in the desert, but i will explain what an oasis is to you if you have never embarked on a journey into nowhere: an oasis is some fucking dumpster off a toll road so you don’t have to pay an additional toll by getting off the road, technically. an oasis has nothing but bad gifts and if you are lucky, a Panda Express. that of course, depends on your definition of luck.

on the way into the oasis some dude stared at me as i stared at him. he was wearing a spiderman shirt. Pat told me when we entered the bathroom that he overheard the guy say to his female companion, “hey, that dude was wearing a Wipers shirt. they must be in a band.”

anyway, we went to this mcdonalds with this poor girl with rosacea working behind the counter. i only call her a “poor girl” because it was obvious that she had this attitude where she did not want to be working at mcdonalds when the five dudes somewhat close to her age happened to cross her path. going into extreme detail about the food, what the best values were, etc, whatever. i got a Big Mac mostly for novelty’s sake. it tasted like i remembered it – like the styrofoam they used to pack them in.

i went over to this counter that sold chocolate and coffee and grabbed a hot tea. the gal filled it up way too fucking high so as i walked over to the station to stir in my Kraft honey, i tried to take a sip out of the cup so it wouldn’t spill so much. the water was boiling hot so i immediately spit it all over the floor in front of everyone. then i tried to set it on the counter but it was still way too full so hot water just spilled all over the counter. i laughed as people watched me try to clean up my mess using nothing but a receipt and then someone gave me a napkin.

by this time we had acquired the fuses and Perfect Pat had repaired andy’s cigarette lighter so now we had the ability to use my fucking iphone. so we used my fucking iphone and we listened to the johnjoseph audiobook, which is incredible on multiple levels. real or not, it definitely made me feel pretty goddamned stupid for making fun of the dude for trying to get free t-shirts off of bands when i was in New York working merch for a band at the Knitting Factory once. i won’t spoil the story for you, but i’ll say that most of Brain Tumors now talks in an exaggerated New York accent now. but notice how i wrote johnjoseph because i know that dude googles himself and will totally kick my ass. or someone else will.

we stopped at another oasis. joel stepped in a pile of puke when we got out of the cramped sedan. upon entering the entryway, immediately some kid who looked like a crooked chubby version of alfred e neuman greeted me,

“hey pal, how’s it going?”
“uhhhh fine man, how about you,” i replied
“oh you know, another day, another penny!”

i paused for a moment, reflecting on the fact that i did not expect anything remotely clever to come out of that mutant. then i noticed he was wearing two different shoes and had a device for salting the parking lot. a working man, even. people wandered around, pissed and bought snacks while i watched a guy use a payphone and thought of that “Cleveland Tourism” youtube video. we were close.

i saw a kid that i saw at the last oasis walk by me – some dork wearing all Detroit Redwings clothes. a walking advertisement that paid to wear that shit. always reminds me of someone Joel claimed to have known in Raleigh who got paid to have the Sprite logo tattooed on his head in temporary ink. then i got distracted and wandered into the “convenience store” area of hell where i watched two satanic looking little girls in plaid skirts. one cacodemon was known as “zoey” while their horde leader, “mom”, listened to her kids read gas station plastic bullshit before it ends up being discarded into the kiosk center of some mall.

“Hugs N Kisses”
“I Love You, Dad”
“Look, girls! “Best Mom Ever,” exclaimed mom,

i pulled my burning eyes away and placed them on a fat guy in a red baseball cap reading license plate covers about bassett hounds or something and started to get upset, thinking, “if i knew anything i ever said would end up on some shit like this, i’d remove my tongue.”

maybe some day we can be like CIV and sell one of our songs to a car commercial. that’d go over well as long as the commercial was about running over your ex-girlfriends or something.

i bought some water and made small talk with the woman at the counter.

“how’s your day going,” i asked.
“well, so far so good.”
“…so what?”
“what?”
“so far, so good, so what – it’s a megadeth album.”

she stared at me and we all left in a hurry while the pudgy monster with the salting machine stared at us, no doubt longing for our friendship or maybe to eat our scabs or whatever lonely freaks in ohio are into.

i drank some nyquil and woke up hearing about how next to Now That’s Class was some “super gay” bar next door and about how someone in a band that played there was blacked out and ended up getting dragged into an alleyway with some random dude. we hoped to recreate that picture for andy.

we got into town and swung by a record store where andy knew some dude. it had a CD section and everything. made small talk with a guy buying a Scrotum Poles record about Desperate Bicycles and looked at a Screamers shirt. all while listening to The Scorpions. or maybe Nazareth. ah whatever, i’ve mentioned enough bands in this paragraph to prove i’m cool. i went next door to some pizza place and took a shit.

“i just saw a double picture disc of A Perfect Circle”
“you’re going to have to wash your eyes out with a knife, andy.”

we dropped our shit off at Steve from Homostupid’s house which i found out later used to be a mortuary. totally decent place – kinda made me wish i didn’t have some weird aversion to leases or paying security deposits. we drank a few beers and ate some pizza that steve was nice enough to purchase. some other dude showed up and immediately give me some look that scared the fuck out of me – i later realized the guy sang for Homostupids.

now look, i really like that band. i’d say 50% of doing this jaunt was because we were playing with them. and for good reason – homostupids are fantastic. but trying to explain to any member of homostupids about what a great band they are was like trying to explain to the most beautiful girl and intellectually attractive girl you know how enamored you are with them.

“uhhh thanks”

and that’s all you can really expect. i tried telling them when i was drunk how much i liked them but it didn’t matter. shrug and drink another beer, i suppose.

“weren’t you in Nine Shocks Terror?”
“um…yeah.”
“yeah, Andy told me once how you listened to our EP and said it awful.”
“hah, he told you that?”
“yeah, it’s okay, we don’t like ourselves either.”

we got to Now That’s Class and even entering through the back i was already enthralled by the place. a big fucking mural of a wrestler saying something about “pencil-necked geeks” (a media reference i’ve only heard my father make) leads into a dimly lit freakshow with a huge basement, second room, killer jukebox, and a free arcade game machine in the corner that Joel played Bubble Bobble on.

i met some dude who looked similar to me after pointing out to him that we were wearing the same jacket. he had tattoos on the back of his neck and he had a job making soup. he had been in the military, too. i don’t remember his name despite swearing i would remember his name. fuck. he bought me a drink, too, and introduced me to everyone he seemed to know as well. i met some other guy when i went outside watching him smoke.

“you’re from Minneapolis?”
“yeah”
“do you know St. Patrick?”
“what? no.”
“you don’t know St. Patrick?”
“i don’t think so.”
“From Dillinger Four?”
“St. Patrick? You mean Paddy, right?”

apparently dude is a saint in other states.

prostitutes played first which was a one-man noise thing. parts were extremely loud. some girl i had been talking to complained about noise music being boring. i cant remember if i was bored or not. then we played out of Homostupids gear, ensuring we would sound great. we didn’t.

people stood pretty far away from us which was good as by then, most of us were pretty screwed up except for shithead johnson, the unstoppable drumming force. i hit beers out of hands and threw a couple and smashed myself all around. between songs i yelled, “this band sucks,” and some girl yelled back, “i was just saying that!”

we kept playing. towards the back i saw a kid who i had already knocked a beer out of the hand of, so i went for the second one and managed to get it. his reaction was similar to the first time i knocked one out of his hand: he lunged at me. only this time he started throwing punches at my head. i don’t think he connected very well or i was too drunk to notice, maybe, but the immediate ten seconds after that i only had one thought:

“you must keep fucking with this guy.”

but i didn’t. some rare endowment of good judgment floated from above and i left the kid alone. we ended our set and the kid came up and apologized.

“i dunno why i did that, man. i do the same shit when we play.”
“it’s cool – what band are you in?”
“we’re called Bad Noids.”
“oh man, i love you guys.”
“what? really?”

through the rest of the night, whenever i would meet some screwball kid who looked like they were 22, they would also tell me they were in Bad Noids. i am convinced that band has 8 members and 4 of them wear backwards hats.

i went back upstairs and continued drinking and talked to Paul, the owner of the place about general life bullshit. stand up dude which is all someone could be that has pictures of Rodney Dangerfield up at their bar. went back down and caught Homostupids who were predictably excellent. somehow i ended up throwing most of my pocket change at Joel which caused him to walk over to me and spit a ton of whiskey in my face and all over this girl i had been talking to.

then he walked by and did it again which caused her to leave. i don’t remember a whole lot else other than some girl inviting us to go drink whiskey at her place and noticing that Pat had “FAT DICK” written on his forehead in sharpie. we got paid and ended up at Steve’s again where i passed out on a couch.

according to my notes, i woke up feeling like a million bucks. i went upstairs to take a piss and when i came out, that kid from Bad Noids was standing there and we kinda chuckled at seeing each other. he apologized again and fed me some bread.

then everyone woke up. andy wrapped his feet in saran wrap because i guess all he brought on tour were some slip on shoes. i looked in the mirror and noticed my skull was torn up either from punches or the microphone. dan started chugging beers.

“yeah, when we were here last, Lars got into a fight with that kid, too,” said Andy. Bad Noids get around.

Andy also told me some brilliant story that i don’t care if i’m not supposed to repeat but basically, someone asked the singer of Bad Noids to write his lyrics down so they could “sing along”. he complied and was then asked to draw a picture of a toaster. he did. months later, he was at work and his boss told him to take out the trash. when he brought the trash out to the dumpster, he saw 50 copies of a Bad Noids record that was pressed without his knowledge, sitting in there with the cover art being the dumb picture he drew.

we left when Dan started singing “I Can’t Dance” by Genesis with the lyrics re-worked as “I Can’t Poop”. we recounted the evening to each other on the way to a restaurant Andy had read about called Melt which supposedly had a billion kinds of grilled cheese sandwiches. while re-living the evening someone mentioned a punked out black dude at the show last night – something fairly rare in Minneapolis (very sad). Pat mentioned he had the following conversation with him,

“hey man, do you write?”
“yeah sometimes i write in my journal to keep the tears at bay, you know,” Pat responded.
“…I was talking about graffiti.”
“oh. uh…no.”

we got to Melt and got seated at the bar. the menu was about as close to an oasis in cleveland as you can get. tons of food and a beer list as long as your arm. we all order some local organic cider and look down the bar and see Dan Shithead Johnson drinking a Miller Lite. Andy mentioned Mr. California, a man i only know from Andy’s shirts and various youtube videos and how he was at the show last night (sidenote: Mr. California also used to cut fries at Melt all day). i guess him and Andy were talking and some attractive girl ran up to the two of them, crying and worried that she had lost her purse. after shrugging their shoulders for a few minutes the girl walked away and Andy noticed a purse behind the bar, which he asked the bartender for.

Mr. California then tore the purse out of Andy’s hands.

“hey, gimme that back! i’m single, god damn it!”
“i’ve been single for twenty years!”

Andy left Mr. California have the purse who then bounded after the girl to present her with her recovered item. she took a look at it and then burst into tears. it was not her purse and she now thought that Mr. California was just being a motherfucker. he walked back over to andy.

“see what i saved you from, man”

we talked to the bartender about a collective hatred for John Cougar Melloncamp, finished our food, and left for Chicago.

“lets hang out with Culo and do heroin.”
“lets hang out with heroin and do Culo.”
“i call the guy with the hat.”

fuck john cougar melloncamp

here it goes – a rundown of whatever bullshit we did for four days through the midwest, a land i’ve often admitted to hating. i suppose it has its charms, sure, but overall its a snowy mess of mentally regressive shitiots. ha ha ha, get it? shitiots? like that song of ours?

yeah okay

anyway, it all started with some sort of bad idea from Andy Peterson, the Fashionable Idiot and undisputed king of making bad ideas work.

hold on, let me sign into my AOL account and i’ll just pull the fucking thing up.

Alright, as far as a mini tour goes I think we should totally do it, be a fun weekend of male bonding, ha! A two month notice/approval to get the ball rolling would be best. Winter sucks cuz of the cold but honestly nowhere is as cold as here right? Id say the week before or week after xmas is the only bad time cuz every stupid band with one college student is trying to cram 19 days of touring into a week. Ill bet Joel has a good portion of January off and what better time to get the hell out of here? An idea or two to bounce off everyone……

andy

So somehow, probably due to the deadly effective combination of Andy and drugs at 4AM, this thing got booked and we piled into a 2002 Dodge Intrepid on a Thursday afternoon. Each of us threw our backpacks and gear (guitars/head/some drum shit) into Andy’s trunk and somehow made it fit, even with a few pillows, sleeping bags, and blankets. We brought a box of granola bars and Dan left some blow pops his uncle gave us in my kitchen which are still fucking there because no one eats blow pops. except for Joel, who throughout the journey, probably bought 10 blow pops because he eats like a child who also likes thai food.

we drove out of Minneapolis and hit a bit of traffic in St. Paul listening to whatever CDs Andy had that were given to him from other people. there was no tape deck and the cigarette lighter was burnt out, so we were forced to listen to a bunch of wacko shit that dudes like Tony from The Sinks/Cozy/Retainers threw together. we hit a snowstorm and talked about spraying Faygo on kids at our sober show in Chicago while i jotted notes every hour or so in a notebook i originally bought to help me learn to be more “appreciative” of my life as part of a therapeutic exercise. i used it for one day and i still dont appreciate shit.

“What are those, your memoirs,” Andy asked.
“Something like that.”
“Have you ever seen Under Siege 2?”

from there, somehow we got on the topic of Dan spending a lot of time drunk dialing Burger King when he was younger. we kept flying through the snow and eventually stopped at some shitty gas station after being unexpectedly detoured off of 94. of course after getting out of the car, i asked a state trooper for directions.

“hey pal, how many times tonight has someone asked you how to get back on 94 because of the detour?”
“none – i dont stop long enough to let people ask me questions.”
“alright, then i’m just gonna follow you and yell my questions then.”

turned out to be pretty nice guy. Andy bought a meatball sub from some overly tan pizza clerk of undetermined age (15 or 50) while I ate an apple and drank some water due to a stomach ache. I also grabbed some Nyquil so that if i died on the trip, i would be blacked out and would have something useful to pass to people to consume during my funeral. i also bought some bum wine because the shit was called MACHINE GUN MELON and some fuses to try and fix the cigarette lighter so we werent listening to The Electric Prunes for 30 hours. the woman at the counter had high gums and an outdated sense of fashion and made flirty jokes about being old.

maybe that was two gas stations – who cares. i think by the third gas station someone had bought some beef jerky and there was some goofball foreign dude asking if we were in a band. Dan told him we were punk, like Blink 182, and the gas station dude told us some band called Hollywood Ending was just in their store.

hollywood ending

brain tumors - pretty close comparison

anyway we got to Milwaukee where we were playing a show at this fucking rad place called QUARTERS. the streets were dead quiet because of the snow but there were a good amount of people inside the bar probably because we were playing with bands that people actually like. It was The Olives, Dharma Dogs, and Uh Oh – all rock bands. so there were a bunch of decent looking girls and kind people milling about under some blue lights.

we were late and there were five shots lined up for us. ran into Brian (formerly of Enabler) and then we immediately loaded our shit on stage and set up records. on the box of records Andy had made some super retarded image that said, “BRIAN TUMORS IS HERE” with a picture of some woman

“is that The Great Kat?”
“is that the name of the chick from The Adverts? then yes.”

i mean, c’mon, it looks like her if youre fucked up and cant tell its a bass.

after talking to andy i found out that there was a swaztika in the picture he used and people at our Chicago show got all freaked out. oh well.

we played a fairly awkward sober show which consisted of me terrorizing 30 or 40 people for 15 minutes, hitting drinks out of people’s hands, trying to grab some chick’s phone after noticing she was texting during our set, and standing in front of some dude who was trying to leave to go smoke. there was some wide eyed freaky fuck standing in front who kept headbanging or something and giving me beers which i would take a drink of and immediately throw across the room.

but mostly people just threw their hands up in that, “FUCK FUCK FUCK DONT TOUCH ME” kind of way, which is what we all get regardless of if we’re playing our set or just standing around. it was good, though. nice turn out thanks to Eric from Uh Oh and Aaron, who kinda turned Quarters into a decent punk venue.

the bartender was this long haired aggro-metal dude who liked us a lot. he was the kind of bartender who would give you a beer simply because he felt like it, or would ask you to hold on while you were ordering drinks because he was too busy playing Mortal Kombat on the TV above the bar to get you whatever you were trying to get. a great man, indeed.

“wait, i’m in the middle of something!”
“FATALITY”

we watched Uh-Oh while oogling their bassist (sorry) and spent some time talking to some locals including some drunk dude who drives a forklift at Costco and once got bit by a raccoon while he was wasted. joel and pat spent their time smacking each other in the face and then some black dude showed up and started harrassing dan to buy him a drink, insisting he was barack obama.

we scrammed outta there and went to Bryan’s house with him and his ladyfriend. i was hoping to see Worthless Bubba but he is worthless, so he wasn’t there or some shit. i slept under a sweet Imperial Leather poster while people got stoned and Bryan told us about how he has mice, but the cat catches most of them.

worthless bubba who did not hang

woke up early the next morning – or at least tried to. definitely heard Andy hit the snooze button around 6 AM and somehow i ended up with this note:

“DWB – DRIVING WHILE BONER”

we all got up and Andy said he slept in because he woke up at 4 AM with this freak, Tanner, a dude who dodges child support and is trying to change his identity through the mexican mafia, calling him on the phone.

“Hey, do you still have that hook-up on those benzos?”
“Fuck you”, said Andy, hanging up the phone.

we ended up at a Cracker Barrell where i yelled about how shit was made in China in the gift shop to the soft, sullen faces of 66 year old women in rural wisconsin.

butt beer?

PACKS A PUNCH GET IT VIOLENT COP HAW AHW

"is that jesus teaching soccer?" "yes" "that sucks"

TRANNY MAN! YES!

brain tumors will be in these cities in early 2012

1/12 – milwaukee at quarters
1/13 – cleveland at now thats class w/homostupids
1/14 – chicago with culo
1/15 – appleton with who knows

bring food

to throw

man, i’m a real fuckin’ bonehead. no excuse for why i havent updated this thing, but also no real excuse for why i do a shit job at work and dress like a dunce. but because people are asking me about this shit, well, i’d better write it and close this. then i can watch the X-Files without anything hanging over my head apart from medical bills.

so nashville made us feel bad, physically and mentally despite being surrounded by reasonably cool people the entire time. but that air. so we traveled down the road to St. Louis, lamenting that we missed a killer show in Kansas City with Negative Degree and Civilized who we were gonna play with later. we stopped somewhere and somehow Aaron acquired a confederate flag license plate. after some minor arguing about what it represented, we were overruled and forced to look like racists as we traveled through the dirt-midwest, the hated and sparsely populated part of loser america, the forgettable except for how forgettable it was landscape. walgreens, walgreens, fuck you, target

we stopped at a Waffle House giving me a case of corporate guilt and diarrhea. i used to go to Waffle House when i lived in the south and it was always fine, but my morals changed when i came back to frozen honkey minnesota and i decided i cant go somewhere like that. but we went while logan and maybe dan wandered to a subway – a place i revile even more. i ate some “all the way” hashbrowns sitting next to a couple with “if you can read this then the bitch fell off” stickers all over their motorcycle helmets. some people trash talked Pat for paying for his meal with a credit card.

we left and stopped again at a gas station where we encountered DAVID HIRSCHBERGER, a man who will likely never figure out how to google his name. when we stopped to get gas, he hobbled up to us and began insisting that we were fucked in a way we didn’t know we were fucked – that our trailer wheel (which was crooked looking anyway) was burning up. and wobbling as the same as he wobbled out of his truck. i looked at where he came from and saw he slunk out of a shitty pick-up truck with ladders, tools, and paint scattered across it. an every-man handy man. i looked inside and saw an older woman who, for lack of a more polite way to put it, looked like she was having “a hard time”. and a ferocious chihuahua skipping back and forth, barking.

“your wheel bearing needs grease! there’s an auto shop just right down the way, i can pack it for you if you go up and get some,” he said.

“alright,” and i started walking. then he told me it was a mile down the road and i told him i’d just give him twenty bucks and a handshake and some eye contact, and his word that he would return. that’s when he told me he was DAVID HIRSCHBERGER, a danish man. i gave him my name and he asked me, “what are you?”

“uhh i sing in a band?”
he looked confused. “what’s your nationality?”
“American.”
he looked confused. “where’s the last name from?”
“it’s french, but i’m danish. someone was adopted at some point.”
“alright, drew, the dane, i’ll be back with your stuff.”

i walked to hardees and bought a side salad from a girl who would have been attractive had she not been raised in Missouri. she hated her job almost as much as i hated the side salad which was the shredded lettuce from the burgers with other fixings that hadn’t made it’s way into the trash just yet. i walked back and waited for Dave, who returned with the product and the receipt.

“alright, now i gotta call my buddy to come over and help do the work.”
“wait, what,” i replied.
“yeah, he’ll be here in about 45 minutes.”
“we don’t have a lot of time or a lot of money, man.”

at that point i learned a lot about Dave – he used to be a train engineer. he’s originally from St. Paul, MN. he’s out of work now because of a coal mine. now he sleeps in that handyman truck with that woman. and that dog. i hoped for a minute that the dog crawled on his shoulder and slept between it and his face, so at least Dave had something warm. the woman didn’t look very warm. Dave told me that to pack the wheel bearings, it would cost $125.

“we can’t do that. and we’re late. thanks for the stuff, we’ll figure out it when we’re in town, buddy.”
“wait! wait! no, my friend told me to tell you $125. but it’s really $75,” he said while nudging me. “see, he told me to tell you $125 and then when you got mad, he told me to tell you the real price. y’see? yeah?”

after internal debates amongst the road crew, we agreed to wait and let them do what they were gonna do. we’re paranoid and stupid. and dave seemed nice, although totally fucked. forever. we stood around while Dave talked to Ben from Much Worse who got pissed off and walked away. then Dave bothered me about my side salad, sticking his fingers in it and explaining to me that the lettuce was bad, convincing me i should go squabble with the 20 year old girl at Hardee’s over some shit that cost me $1.17.

then the other guy showed up and got out of a chevy lumina and fished around in his truck. dave brought me over and introduced me to a man with overalls and a nascar hat – maybe that fucking confederate flag license plate holder was a good idea, after all. like a pit crew, they rushed to the trailer and began dismantling the wheel and showing us where the wheel was wobbling on the road. i found out nascar hat guy’s name was Wes and noticed how he looked like Larry the Cable Guy.

a Mexican with tattoos and a huge mustache biked by us while four of our dudes went into a nearby Mexican restaurant to drink margaritas and wait for us to leave again. i stood by the guys, asking questions. at some point, Dave walked away and i started asking Wes a few questions.

“how do you know Dave?”
“i don’t fuckin’ know that guy. he pulled up to my house this morning in that banged up truck and offered me some firewood to fix some things on it. i don’t need any firewood, but fuck, the guy looks like he’s in rough shape. his old lady looks like she’s dying or some shit, too, so i figure it’s my responsibility to help the guy. to tell you the truth i don’t know why i’m out here doing this for you.”
“hmm, i see. so how much is this gonna cost?”
“shit, $20? mainly just to cover the gas it took me to get out here.”
“i’ll give you $25.”

Dave hobbled and wobbled back up and started talking to me about my black eye, telling me he has some vaseline and i should put some of it on. i ignored him and kept talking to Wes who had moved on to telling me a story about how he got stuck on the top of a mountain for a few days and had to rely on a bunch of people. it made him realize that you have to help people in life. it was some basic, unexpected wisdom from a dude who i would have regarded as a total dipshit had i seen him in any other setting other than helping me.

later, we realized that Wes did not look like Larry the Cable Guy, but instead looked exactly like the coal miner figurine we had picked up back in Tennessee that we now had duct taped to the dash board. eerie resemblance. we said “thanks” and i gave Dave about 10 or 15 coupons for free chalupas at taco bell, feeling bad he didn’t get to rip us off the way he originally intended.

we drove to kansas city and made it to some dude’s house to meet the legendary Rob Ruzicka, the king of St. Louis, LEAD FRONTMAN SINGER/SCREAMER/VOCALIST of Cardiac Arrest. he was hyped to us pretty hard by Andy from Fashionable Idiots and i was yelled at through texts from Andy to demand that Cardiac Arrest come to Minneapolis. Rob’s the kind of dude who you are instantly comfortable around, mostly because he’s a super nice guy, but also because you show up and he’s got beer, soda, and chips waiting for you.

chips, man. i fucking hate chips. but whatever these were i couldn’t stop eating. Rob told us that a lot of rappers talk about these chips, and now i feel like i’m fucking 500 years old because the idea of rapping about chips makes as much sense as time traveling in your own microwave to me.

we watched Ghostbusters as a few people came over, including some older fella that i talked to about Cop Shoot Cop and a band called Missing Foundation. Joel and Pat played the game where you slap each other in the face. my notes are unclear but i do remember learning that you can drink in the car in St. Louis, which we did on the way to the club which was some old mexican restaurant turned into a club, run by dude named Mr. Vegas who makes tacos. funny because i play a character called Mr. Vegas as a side job in St Paul, working for a minor league baseball team.

by the time we got to the bar we were all pretty toppled and crazy. we ordered tacos and the lady working the door gave us whipped cream vodka, clearly the most effective tool for child rape. what a bummer reality is. the place was dimly lit and very clearly a reformed mexican restaurant. there was a stage and a dance floor with a disco ball. i have some other notes i can’t put together very well.

“ben threw up”
“joel fell on his face and i called him an idiot”
“joel is fucked for life”
“talked about taking a shit with Negative Degree”
“joel yelling about prostitutes, chemicals created some anger”

saw John Waltmann, a great dude from Minneapolis who recently relocated to texas. saw the dude i talked to about Cop Shoot Cop totally hijack my tacos and then run into the night, crying, yelling, “AW MAN, I FUCK UP EVERYTHING.” saw some dude named Chris that i sold some metal shirts to years ago back with Logan from Much Worse’s old band.

we also played our most fucked up insane set every for a pretty big group of people. we had to use medical tape to hold pat’s guitar pickups in his guitar and while we played, they kept falling out. so eventually pat just laid on the ground and rolled around, playing fucking nonsense while joel stared at everyone like a wild rabbit and dan, predictable fucking stable dan, dan with tourettes, adhd, bipolar disorder, and ocd, was the only predictable fucking stable member of the band. i smashed the microphone on my head until it hurt too much and at the end of our set, pat threw his guitar on the ground and joel followed suit.

moments later, joel was seen outside throwing his bass against the concrete over and over again. apparently he cracked his headstock when he threw his childhood lover to the wood floor and decided they were on the outs, permanently. smash, smash, smash. joel was fucked up.

what a strong adult male

i argued with Pat about a cigarette lighter which somehow led to me laying on the ground, yelling at everyone who walked by me. pat laid in the van, belligerent again, and i have no recollection of what anyone else did. watched some of Civilized who, in my chemical rage, made me mad for some reason even though i liked them. watched Negative Degree where apparently i got hit in the stomach so hard that my balls hurt. while everyone was inside, Pat snuck out to the van and threw away the confederate flag license plate cover.

“angriest pit ever”
“cardiac arrest”
“crowd ripped”
“great show”

these sound like goddamn Wesley Willis lyrics. i watched some kid named Carlos get escorted out of the club by his father, bought some shit from Negative Degree and the Civilized tape.

“can we go home now?”
“i don’t care.”
“are we dead yet?”
“i hope so.”
“cool.”

this looks like there was a transvestite Silver Surfer moshing

we got paid and loaded up whatever remained of our gear and merch and had some conflicting plans on where we were going. Logan was going to his friend Chris’ house, which we were offered to stay at, while meanwhile, Rob told us he had purchased the world’s largest pizza for us. so we went towards the pizza and went back to that house where we came from, not knowing that Rob meant a different house that i’m sure he explained the location of and we didn’t listen.

we parked the van and scattered around the neighborhood, joel pacing back and forth in the street, shirtless, yelling, while the rest of us sat in the grass and waited for Rob who had kept calling us with updates on our pizza.

“alright dudes, you guys gotta get here fast. the guys from the other bands are guarding your pizza but there’s all these shitty anarchist train-hoppers that keep trying to eat it all. i don’t know how long we can hold them off. hurry!”

eventually the anarchists won after they stormed the pizza, overhearing the phone call where we all made the connection that we had went to the wrong fucking place. i yelled at joel to stop being a creep and started punching and headbutting a tree. rob showed up with what indeed was formerly the world’s largest pizza, but now it was just the world’s largest pizza box. there was a little pizza left and some of it was covered in dish soap. the pizza sentiment was still appreciated. we ate and Rob told us some tales about dudes from Acid Reflux eating that entire pizza themselves which is part of the pizza place’s ultimate challenge.

meanwhile, back at Chris’ house, apparently Logan was there by himself and Chris fell asleep immediately. he kept calling us, worried that we were going to leave him there and trying to convince us to meet him halfway on foot. but again, Rob is the greatest dude so he went and just grabbed him.

i went to sleep while apparently Rob talked to everyone about juggalos. apparently somewhere during the night, dan apparently fell asleep on the toilet and apparently we were all apparently partied out and left a ton of beer sitting out, unopened – a sure sign that we must be dead or stupid, apparently.

we woke up and hugged Rob goodbye. then we drove back to Minneapolis. on the way, at some stupid gas station, logan spent a long time rearranging a sign in a way that scared some teenage girls.

“what? do they really have hamster chicken? thats so gross.”
“of course they do. do you think guys like us would ever lie to girls like you?”

the last notes i have in this notebook came from a conversation either in my head or in the van. i think it was aaron and me.

“i experienced a lot of emotions i didn’t know i had.”
“like what?”
“heartache and a loss of god.”

we all went home and i spent a few weeks being incredibly depressed and reckless.

i stood in a fucking mcdonalds like you have to in every crummy small shithole town behind a man wearing a WORLD WAR II VETERAN hat. i pay special attention to the hats of veterans as in my real life big boy adult job, i work with a lot of them. people will tell you that their hats mean something, but i’m not gonna tell you what they say. anyway, this fucker was in space or hell or something, staring into nowhere. someone he knew came up to him, patted him on the side, and said, “shit, you look pretty good for a 106 year old man!”

its been a few weeks so i cant say precisely what i got from mcdonalds, or even if i got anything. sometimes i get in these really self-spiteful moods like when i find out i have $5 in my back account, i’ll spend $4, or when my stomach hurts, i’ll do something like order a Big Mac. but in all likelihood, my ethics probably stomped on the throat of my soul and made me get a salad.

mcdonalds has a side salad. but all of their other salads have chicken on them. chicken which i’m sure is dug out of some sort of ancient chicken burial site where chicken families were buried together after dying from some unspeakable mutation or disease.

we stood around at the nearby gas station on the way to asheville and bought stupid souvenirs. aaron got some sort of old prospector statue and max duct taped it to the dashboard. we talked for a while about losing money and debated on whether or not we would cancel Kansas City, which was ten hours from Nashville. bummed at the thought, we decided to see how shit went at the show.

we left and i sat in back of the van trying to figure out how to sleep while aaron blasted Maylene and the Sons of Disaster or something like that. as we drove, it became abundantly clear that we had now entered the land of shit bible quotations and unnecessary crucifixes.

we stopped again and i saw a little sprite working behind the counter, cheerfully greeting every single person. her name tag said, “Little Thang”, or something that would be totally adorable if you never lived in the south.

somewhere along the way, aaron mandated that Taylor Swift would be the only thing played in the van for the next few hours and kept screaming some bullshit about “TAYLOR TUESDAYS”. you gotta understand, i toured with this guy four years ago and it was the same shit. honestly and devotedly pushing Taylor Swift out of any speaker he could get near.

we got into nashville and waited for the longest train ever on the way to Little Hamilton, which is this DIY art collective with a focus on what seemed to be gender/sex/trans rights. i heard recently that ‘transgendered’ is now kind of bad slang, but my fucking vanilla-ass doesnt know what else to call it.

we get out of the van and look around. a dude on a 4 wheeler tears by us with a stray dog chasing him. more stray dogs follow.

we walk into this building on a big, open lot, nestled in what seems to be a normal neighborhood and say hi.  look at some art on the walls and we read some sign about how disrespectful language, racism, sexism, etc wont be tolerated. aaron follows in and asks,

“are there any bars around here with some whores or something?”

taylor tuesdays.

eventually, someone informs us that there are a lot of muggings and tells a story about how some dude was in a van on his laptop and got his ass kicked and his stuff stolen. to be fair, the dudes told him to give him his shit and his reply was something super racist. but either way, it was enough to spook us. aaron dove around the van and started producing weapons from every single door-well and briefed us all on where they were.

these here are weapons

set some shit up, stood around, few people came. some transgendered people actually, which was pretty fucking cool purely from that “shit, this is real punk,” school of thought. wasn’t a huge crowd but it was certainly enough people to have a good time with and the space was real decent. Fucked Ethos played and all my notes say are, “Vicious!” i also wrote that i headbutted some dude who was wearing a headband with a  metal plate. we played and i twisted my fucking ankle again. Much Worse played and logan kept flying into the crowd which was a real treat. throughout all of our sets, there was some plastic, lawn ornament jesus that everyone kept throwing around. v. v. v. punk

the other notes i have are “bob sever” (written twice) and “nut collector”. i realized that Nashville is when i started singing Bob Seger in between songs and while drunk, but i’m still confused as to what “nut collector” is.

after we played, pat and i laid almost naked on this wooden loading platform. nashville is a hot motherfucker. then at some point, logan told us about this friend of his out in nashville that plays this game where you huff freon and then try and run down a hill as fast as you can. so we were gonna go hang out with that guy, i guess. i dunno if he was at the show or not.

we put all the weapons away and started out to the place we were staying at. when we got nearby, we realized we were kinda in the hood (so to say) and we stopped by the liquor store where we all felt sketched out by some dudes lingering around a broken payphone. luckily, they lightened the mood by walking by and air guttering at us. then i went inside and paid $18 for a 12 pack of Tecate. realizing what i did, i went back to look for the price. no price. a kid came up to me who seemed to be the owner’s son and i told him about it and he kinda shook his head and looked at his feet. then i yelled at the owner a bunch before leaving

in retrospect, i think that might’ve actually been the right price.

we went to dudes house and hung around bullshitting with some of the fucked ethos guys and some dudes and their girlfriends. totally nice people and it was the first time i had a conversation with an 18 year old that i actually enjoyed. we played mariokart 64 and then slept in the attic.  oh yeah, we also got some frozen pizza and in a gluttonous move, ate one of those grocery store pre-made sandwiches that only taste like whatever condiment you used on them.

“my mouth tastes worse and worse everywhere we go,” was the quote of the evening.

the next morning i woke up and went downstairs, showered, fucked around. aaron offered me deodorant, baiting me with the statement of, “i got ban, axe, old space – i’m like a bathroom at a strip club”. one of the dudes we were staying with, trey, then told us a story about how he went to high school with Taylor Swift. i’m not gonna do the story justice but basically, he had to apologize to her face to face after writing a song where he threatened to kill her or something. aaron stood with his jaw dropped, listening intently.

we rallied up to go get thai food at this tasty place which treated us excellently and we all ate to the point of exhaustion. then someone decided they needed weed, so we started driving across town to some dude’s place until we ran into a fuckload of traffic from a FOLK FESTIVAL. seriously stranded, can’t move type of bullshit. half of us cracked and just decided to wander through nashville rather than sit in the van, so we went to a gas station and bought some beers to wander around with. we sat in a parking lot and drank them, talking to locals about the weather, and then kept walking and walking and walking.

we ended up at some dude’s house. people got stoned and i laid on the floor, using a bottle of water as a pillow and looking at my phone. about every ten or fifteen minutes, someone would beat on the front door and it would get quiet because they were knocking like it was the goddamn police. i guess thats just how people buy pot from each other down there. we ended up sitting on the porch with logan and ben from much worse playing guitar and banjo with some of us singing nonsense. some dude was hanging out and left with a bugle or something, saying he was going downtown to busk.

we got back to the house we stayed at last night and went inside for a bit, watched some TV. suddenly some of the guys outside started to get screamed at by the neighbor across the street who was infuriated and accusing us of being the reason she didn’t get any mail today, because we parked in front of her mailbox for 20 minutes. pat went over to talk to her and got frustrated, prompting him to drive the van and trailer for the first time just to move the thing from that hysterical fucking idiot.

“i’m going to cut off that woman’s tits and feed them to her fucking children,” pat said as he walked back up to us.

see, pat is scary.

we watched There Will Be Blood and i took a nap. when i woke up, we made the decision that we had annoyed our hosts long enough and should seek a new floor to sleep on for the night. Logan had some friends in the northern part of Nashville. Max and Aaron decided they would go into downtown so they could hang out with Aaron’s estranged stripper wife at some karaoke tourist trap. we drove them out there and dropped them off, aaron chugging a beer on the sidewalk in plain view as we drove off. we circled the block during our escape and saw aaron and max in front of the kid from that weird house, playing the bugle on the sidewalk, begging for money.

after almost running out of gas, we made it to this gigantic fucking 6 bedroom house with a huge basement with enough room to cram probably 200 people in it. there was a bar, an area for bands to play, and pool tables in back. in the backyard was enough space for a ton of cars and there seemed to be a dried-up swimming pool. a bunch of super young dudes who loved shitty mosh metal lived there, although one of them did put on Victim In Pain by Agnostic Front and knew all the lyrics, so maybe im misjudging them. i sat around with ben, talking about chewing tobacco, texting whofuckingknowswho, watching people play pool and smoke gratuitous amounts of weed through some intricate glass pipes. i didn’t get a good look at the rest of the house, but it all seemed pretty empty. there was a big black dog running around too that all the members of the house seemed to be frustrated with.

scum mansion

“watch out for the nest of black widows by the pool, ” one of the said. fucking sweet, more spiders.

at one point in the evening, the kids who lived there put on some “hardcore” and started doing karate kicks and windmills during the “breakdowns”. joel calls it “dude moshing”. max and aaron came back, stating they had the most insane night of their lives involving free shots and meeting aaron’s wife’s reality show star boyfriend, who is a DJ or some shit. i think he was on uh….whatever the spin-off of Rock of Love is. i saw a picture of him and he looks like he’s in Avenged Sevenfold. i like how i don’t fucking capitalize anything while i’m writing but for some reason automatically do it for that shitty band.

after going outside and listening to joel and pat talk about tearing down their neighbor’s home and replacing it with a swimming pool, i threw my stuff in a vacant room with no lights and went to sleep.

i woke up the next day coughing up yellow phlegm, laying on the floor in wood paneled room that was completely empty except for a discarded box of bud light and a closet that contained U2, Rob Zombie, and AC/DC cds. i looked around the baseboards of the room and realized that, yes, they too were completely covered in spider webs and there was a small spiderweb partially built on my fucking pillow. there was an attached bathroom with some sort of filth floating in the toilet and a little bit of trash scattered about. there was a spiderweb in the sink. i left the room, too tired to really care about what i was just sleeping on.

i walked down the hallway and saw everyone asleep in front of the tv. i rounded a corner and saw what looked to be a dining room with a bunch of shitty mops and garbage laying around. i went into the kitchen, filled with dishes. it was then that i noticed the post-it notes everywhere. each explaining what was wrong with the object that they had been affixed to.

i walked down the hallway and saw everyone asleep in front of the tv. i rounded a corner and saw what looked to be a dining room with a bunch of shitty mops and garbage laying around. i went into the kitchen, filled with dishes. it was then that i noticed the post-it notes everywhere. each explaining what was wrong with the object that they had been affixed to.

i walked into the bathroom and before i could get to the toilet to take a piss, i noticed that my socks were soaked in someone else’s piss. i washed my socks in the sink and bitched until we decided to leave.

i named the place “Scum Mansion”.

in the van, we all realized we were coughing up bad shit. someone mentioned a pollution warning for nashville and we all decided that the city made us sick. i watched joel smack the shit out of max for a few minutes on rhythm to “Paint it Black” by The Rolling Stones.

max and aaron's night in downtown nashville

i added lyrics after refusing for a long time

on the way to asheville, we stopped and some kid talked to us. he was wearing one of those flat brimmed hats with the shiny stickers on them, but he had bent the hat. funny because Pat had bought this flat-brimmed retard hat with a dollar sign on it back in Ohio and i kept telling him he needed to bend the bill to be rebellious/incredibly dumb. guess this kid already beat him to it. at one point pat had that hat and a livestrong bracelet i pulled out of my friend’s old room, just to make sure our troupe was a tumbling embarrassment.

so this kid started talking to us (i think also wearing one of those target/wal-mart skull shirts, like the guy in richmond) and the conversation went like this:

“so yall in a band?”
“yeah.”
“man i just got out of jail. 18 months.”
“what for?”
“not paying child support”
“uhhh”
“i’m in a band, we play prince covers and shit. might sound kinda gay but we’re the biggest band in morganton.”

his band’s name is throwdown jones. here is a picture of them:

if you were on this tour and reading this, you will notice how none of these dudes are the kid we met at the gas station. you will also notice there is a whole fucking lot of KISS memorabilia around them. jesus. the kid also said there is a picture on the facebook of Bill Clinton staring at his sister’s tits, but i couldn’t find that either.

i drank some cheerwine on the way and at the gas station, we talked to this pudgy attendant about the dick pills at the counter and about how many people buy them.

so we drove and drove, and got to this dive in the town of Asheville, nestled in mountains of north carolina. the bar was called The Get Down. one of Joel’s old friends, Dennis, was there. nice dude.

me and pat went up to this venezuelan hot dog truck and tried to order the burger. the attendant, an older venezeulan man, denied our order and insisted we get a hot dog.

“stand here when you take your first bite. i want to see the look on your face as it changes your life.”

it did not change my life, but it was pretty good. some girl standing nearby us also offered us a place to sleep, which was a good start to the evening.

dan wandered off somewhere and had some hicks in a truck yell threats at him while i went into a nearby mexican restaurant with aaron and ben where they got some of the best tacos of the tour.

when people ask me about tour, i say it goes like this:

“hey whats up, i’m drunk, where are we, where are the tacos, when are we getting pizza, oh cool, there is a dog here”

the mexican restaurant owner started asking us how to connect with bands as he was interested in having bands at his restaurant, and we kinda dodged the question for his own sake. dude doesn’t want brain tumors and much worse stinking up his fucking restaurant, trying to steal strings of chili-pepper style christmas lights. get a clue, buddy

there was also some little lonely girl wearing all black, wandering around the bar staring at the walls very intently. i thought about talking to her and i guess joel ended up chatting with her and finding out she used to live in japan and wanted to learn what japanese hardcore was. i guess what she knew as japanese hardcore is probably like, this one fucked up band i heard that had Jamey Jasta doing guest vocals. like later Aggressive Dogs. bands that have hockey jerseys with their logos on them or fucking whatever.

some old friends of mine/joel’s, sean and erin showed up. we didn’t have a whole lot of people watch our set and that was fine as i think we were all reeling from being in raleigh. i think people mostly stood there and the few people i talked to outside who i figured might enjoy us seemed to stay outside. who fucking cares. i dont even remember much worse playing and i didnt check out the last band, pox americana. but the bar gave us a bunch of free drinks and we got paid.

i talked to some girl with wild hair for a minute who had a weird vibe, and then we all went back to cram into sean’s new apartment.

little bit of backstory: sean and erin recently broke up after many years together. from what i can tell, there is no difference in their relationship – erin still acts like a bitch to sean and sean shrugs, smiles, and goes to get her a beer. basically like every other couple in america.

so we got to sean’s place and got to listen to erin compliment him on what a big boy he was for getting his own apartment or something. we listened to herbie hancock and sean’s old band, Ahleuchatistas, while everyone sat around marveling at what a fucking killer drummer sean is. i think sean told me he used to drum for this band that i only know because joel has a sticker on his bass case – REGURGISTATE.

sean and dan deciding whose drummer feet are more mutated, logan in the back asleep

me and ben and dan branched off and went with erin back to her house and left everyone there to sleep. sean said erin’s place had fleas but i dont think it did. what it did have was this giant fucking black dog named Ivan that ran around the apartment terrorizing all of us while erin shreiked at it. i woke up in the middle of the night all crazy, hearing pounding noises and dan fighting with it.

“c’mon dude, gimme back my fuckin pillow! c’mon!”

erin let me sleep in her bed. i think her words were, “c’mon dude, its fine, i wont try to fuck you.”

we woke up and erin made us piles of food. piles of it. it was great. but the dog had to be locked in the bathroom – ben went in there and took a shower with the dog pacing back and forth. i guess when logan and the other dudes came over, logan sat down to take a shit and the dog kept trying to hop up on his lap and lick his face. i also realized i lost my tour diary because i am a fucking idiot.

somehow it came out that erin’s neighbor is Harry T. Anderson from Night Court and somehow this excited pat. i’m gonna ask him:

“why were you so excited about Harry T. Anderson?”

he shrugged.

“you know, when you first found out you kept pacing around going, “oh man, harry t anderson!”

he shrugged again and threw his arms up, “WHY? WHY? Because it’s fuckin harry t. anderson!”

i just started laughing and he sighed and goes, “i dunno, i dont meet a lot of people,” and went back to doing his crossword puzzle.

anyway, i went back to the van to get something and when i come back, fucking pat is talking to some dude with some hedgeclippers. now pat is a really charming and charismatic dude 95% of the time, but then there’s the 5% where i’m certain whoever he’s talking to is worried about getting stabbed and dragged away into the woods. so i walk up and of course, pat is talking to Harry T. Anderson. and he’s taking a picture on one of those disposable cameras that no one has seen since 2004.

i walk up and Harry starts aimlessly talking about a bunch of shit – i’m not going to recount it all but here’s a short list of topics: how you can’t use the term “pal” anymore, how saying “no problem” is stupid, how he used to hustle using magic tricks in new orleans, how he moved to asheville, how night court was like a vacation from real work, his old ass blind pug dog that the police bring back to him, how he makes magic props, how i look strong and should be cutting his hedges for him.

dude talked a lot. dude also wears hawaiian looking shirts that have skulls on them and he has a tattoo on his forearm of a rose or some prison looking shit. the most memorable things he said were

“so what the fuck happened to you? did you get beaten up by some bull dykes downtown?” when looking at my black eye and bandage, and

“yeah, nashville is okay as long as you can get past the white-haired nigger-haters.”

yep, white-haired nigger-haters. confusing way to put it. but he was cool and very down to earth. he also had a suit of armor and a giant polar bear statue on his porch. just sayin.

we walked to grab coffee and ran into some kid who was at the show last night who sold us a bunch of amazing prints of his artwork. i guess max had met him the night before.

then we left asheville. i laid in the back on the way to nashville. thirsty, i dug around for a bottle of water and excitedly found one buried under some pillows. i pulled it out and it was filled with fucking cigarette butts. tour is gross.

we’re shooting down the highway into iowa. tour is over and i’ve been a shitty note-taker. or rather, a shitty rememberer. erer er er. errrrrrr. i’m listening to Megadeth’s Peace Sells and eating a bag of corn-nuts of undetermined origin. aaron is listening to some band that pisses me off because a dude in it has history with an ex of mine. I have some sort of cold now.

Raleigh was an emotional blur for me. i’m sure it was hell of a time for everyone else, and it was for me, but you see, i lived there for three years. we even drove right past my old fucking apartment. things were different in that predictable way of how things change – i had a steady girlfriend, a cat, a job selling insurance

who fucking cares

i dont remember the trip down but at some point, logan decided to “cross the line” and tipped my tea over on me. then he felt really bad and tried to buy me more tea. i think it was in reference to a few nights earlier when he was drunk, tipping people’s shit over and giggling. i cant blame him for it given that sometimes i do that in our set. what i can blame him for is throwing the tire pressure gauge out the window after he tried to eat macaroni with it.

the ten of us arrived at joel’s folks’ place which is this bungalow house downtown that probably goes for a billion dollars due to the location. it’s not a mansion or anything, but it’s about the most comfortable place you could ever end up on tour.

i need to turn up the megadeth. i can still hear that shit music.

so we get there and joel starts running around and freaking out, making sure we’re all comfortable, prepping us to meet his entire family. i have no idea why these people decided it would be okay to let so many idiots into their home, but then again, i guess people had been doing it for the last week. they just weren’t what we’d consider to be “real grown ups”

we sat around with joel’s dad, who is a film professor, and talked to him about various animal movies like Most Valuable Primate, Most Verticle Primate, Babe, and Babe 2. dan did his usual weird guy bullshit and talked to every adult about history, politics, and documentaries he’s seen. we met his aunt, his sister, his sister’s husband, and a bunch of dogs. fucking people fixed us salad, chili, ravioli, and spaghetti. goddamn i could use some of that instead of these chalky corn-nuts right now.

after eating, i left and did some things. i don’t know what everyone else did and i dont care. we got to the show at this new joint called The Union that was pretty cool and me and joel both saw a shitload of people i hadn’t seen in forever. Lung Matter played and according to the rest of the tour, kicked fucking ass and were a bunch of young dudes.

i played in my underwear again to a pretty big crowd and stole some dude’s top hat for a few songs. i found out earlier today that i guess after the show, the dude with the top hat revealed himself to be a bona fide freakshow artist and nailed a bunch of nails into his face. how the hell did i miss that? no one got hurt during our set which was good because i’m not sure i would be able to keep standing if anything else happened. i guess pat flailed around and that night a bunch and told me that he wants to just play while rolling around on the ground from now on, and if i ever see him standing up and playing i should just kick him down.

we racked up a pretty impressive bar tab and pat ended up passing out in the van and when trying to close out his credit card and being asked what he wanted to tip, he simply responded with:

“i’m a sexy fucking beast!”

and then went back to bed. but Much Worse killed, as they always do and got a good reaction. but the highlight for me and probably one of the highlights of the whole goddamn tour was watching Shards play. fucking dumb band i guess has broken up or whatever, but man, what a blast. i yelled a request for “Watersport Olympics” and they obliged me by playing it, then making fun of me for liking that song.

everyone went out and partied and had a great time meeting all the characters in that amazing city, but not me. i disappeared.

i still woke up at Joel’s. we went to this Ole Time BBQ place that i used to live by and picked up a ton of fucking pulled pork. the place was in front of a trailer park. i put some money in a giant container to benefit a little girl with a brain tumor. we sat out front while we waited for our food and some dude in khaki shorts and a fender shirt came out and started bullshitting about us being in a band. pretty unremarkable conversation except he kept talking about how his buddy in fayetteville was in a “pretty heavy band”

“yeah man, my buddy is into some wild shit! one time, he jumped right off the stage and punched this dude in the face, right in the mosh! yeah man, right in the mosh. he punched him so hard that blood spurted out of his mouth!”

“like mike tyson’s punch-out?”

“yeah man, right in the mosh!”

for some reason we had to run by the campus area so a few of the dumber members of the tour ate a slice of pizza as an appetizer. we are adults and can eat pizza whenever we want, even before we’re about to eat more food.

i’m typing this in the car and there’s shitty light. i keep losing where the cursor is, so i freaked out a second ago yelling, “WHERE IS THE FUCKING CURSOR” and aaron replied with, “i gotcha right here, brother. damn, shit, ass, fuck, dick, bitch, pussy,” and continued in a forrest gump like manner. what a dude.

i can’t remember what happened after that but we left to go to asheville, nc, up in the mountains

taken by david from raleigh