alright, i’m not drunk now so lets try this again
i forgot to mention the totally rotted sack of potatoes on top of Negative Kevin’s refrigerator. kid has absolutely no food unless he’s a fucking goat. then i guess everything is food. i picked up this bag and this putrid stench floated out. i made the mistake of smelling the liquid i got on my had from the bag and had a nice wretch party with whatever moron was still awake. the other dudes took a $30 cab ride to wrigley and dorked around at a bar for a brilliant half an hour. max was not dead in the van.
the tour quickly turned into a shirtless dude/fuck ac party. but not me, dawg. we ate at some yuppie restaurant with pretty girls working and getting leered at while Negative Kevin sipping on a San Peligrino. i tried to take a picture but he told me to stop being mean to him. i felt bad, but i dont know why after looking back.
getting back to the van we discovered a quarter-sized spider had set up shop across aaron’s window and steering column, providing a priceless picture of aaron with a death chill. max burned it to death like John Carpenter’s THE THING. i still feel bad about killing insects. we left chicago and ventured out to look for an oil change in a land of nothing but payless footwear and other dogshit businesses that don’t matter. we didn’t find the oil change and i washed my arm out with some peroxide in a parking lot. the fun part was wandering into gas stations with what looked like a bullet wound asking, “HEY YALL GOT ANY GAUZE ROUND HERE?”
Joel is behind me explaining Civilzation IV to our friend, Rachael. and now Rachael is pissed because she found out her roommate has scabies.
“hey Rachael, aren’t we supposed to stay with you?”
“yeah.”
“hahahaha.”
and now our van window on the driver’s side is broken as we go into what has been dubbed “a fucking hurricane”. yeesh.
we drove through illinois where the most interesting thing was a few mile stretch of a river of garbage sitting on the side of the road. sea of shit. isn’t that a band or something? we went to guitar center and putzed around and bought some thing that will connect two guitar rigs so ben and pat will sound like they are summoning demons while they play. i’d call guitar center a guilty pleasure but there is nothing pleasurable about it – it’s not even some sort of laughable experience like going to a rural wal-mart. it’s just some bland, safe, sea of shit with strings. like if Nickelback was a store. regardless, it’s a better corporate death to our country than getting engulfed in fire. we are the spiders
a bunch of people took some drugs and it made absolutely no difference to the environment of the van. “it makes for a nice bus ride,” someone said. huh?
Negative Kevin is an alright dude. a dandy motherfucker for sure, but fine. a golden retriever in a total abuse shirt.
in illinois, we got our second flat tire on the road where Everything Is Fucked And Cars Go To Die. the fucking thing exploded and convinced me we were all Cliff Burtoned the fuck out of reality forever, but Aaron held it together and pulled us on the side. we were prepared (whatever) and got it changed pretty fast, especially after noticing that instead of the side of the road being filled with crickets, it was filled with giant spiders. jesus fuck, what’s with all the spiders? as we are loading up, the key to the trailer lock breaks off in it. driving away, we saw tire after shredded tire after dead car after dead cat sitting on the side of the road. fuck you, highway 70.
“fuck you, indians! we just lost Stonehenge one turn until it was finished.” we are not racist, just dorks. Civ IV.
we made it to Bourbon St Cafe in Columbus amongst a myriad of boarded up homes. there was a small market next door run by one of those dudes where no matter how nice and gracious you treat him, you can tell all he’s thinking is, “fuck off, kid, get your Butterfinger and go back to the bar.” the show almost didnt happen because they had some “Hip Hop DJ Night” going on, but there were just a bunch of dudes in baggy black pants and cheesy death metal shirts who were there for it. Hip Hop in Columbus must fucking suck. the show started and some band played where the singer looked like Jake Bannon from Converge. kid, if you ever read this, youre super nice but you look like Jake Bannon. Jake Bannon, if you ever read this, you also look like fucking Jake Bannon.
Man is the Bathroom. that bathroom was….i had to take a deep breath even thinking about it. that bathroom was a complete abomination. according to my notes, the bathroom smelled like someone baked a cake out of ground pork, fed it to a dog and then lit it on fire. it was worse than a moroccan bus station. we played our set and i don’t remember a whole lot other than i bit some guy wearing a polo shirt. why the fuck am i biting people during our set? the sound guy was also our cook and his lasagne was great. Much Worse played and sounded fucking great. it was the only time i have ever headbanged while eating a side salad. Subclinix and Male Nurses also ripped and taught us how to drink Black Label out of a straw. they also had a two week old kitten with them.
“where does the cat shit?”
“we don’t really know.”
we loaded our shit out and went to drive to get food and go find the kid who booked the show’s house while blasting Bohemian Rhapsody – Pat screaming like a 6 year old at his Chuck E. Cheese birthday party. apparently Joel sung that song the same night he blacked out in Austin, TX, and woke up with a mathematical equation tattooed on his leg. according to him, it’s an embarrassing equation. here’s another embarrassing equation: Brain Tumors + Much Worse. we ate some fried cheese at some weird “alternative” pizza place while Dan “Fuckhead” Johnson talked to some dude who writes for the local homosexual magnet about the gay scene between cincinatti and columbus.
the rest of these notes dont make a whole lot of sense:
van strobe light, bad potatoes, segway cops
logan gargling spit
god, i hope those arent my new lyrics.
we kept trying to find the house we were supposed to stay at but we realized we didn’t really get the address. so we went to where we thought it was and walked around the neighborhood, standing in a vacant lot, watching lightning while someone in the van blasted Seal’s Kissed By A Rose in the distance. eventually we made the adult decision to find a hotel. drunkenly, i flagged down some cops driving by and asked them where the nearest hotels were. they gave us some directions (navigating by the nearest “B-Dubs”) and suggestions and started to pull away. as they left, i came up to the van to find out that our trailer lights are fucked, so i ran back out in the street and flagged the cops down.
“hey man, we’re just trying to get to this hotel you told us to get to and we just noticed our trailer lights are out. we have an appointment tomorrow at 7 to get them fixed but for now, we’re just kind of worried about the safety issue. what do you think we should do?”
so then we got a police escort to the hotel while we sloshed around the van to “Purple Rain”. we got the room and bullshitted with the counter guy about his psychology homework, found a spider on logan from Much Worse’s back, then shotgunned beers on the balcony. somewhere over the course of the night, Rachael said, “there’s a net for my vagina!”
woke up and fucked off, called a million places for an appointment to get our van checked out and got turned down everywhere. we had some dudes at Faslube check our shit out as much was they could while they changed the oil and told us about a band called Lumberjack Death Squadron or some shit. one of those usual, “oh you’re in a hardcore band, you should check out this band that sounds like Mudvayne,” or whatever situations i’m assuming. whatever, nice dudes, real helpful. somehow ended up in this fucking mad max zone full of used tires and sat in the van while we watched Aaron negotiate tire prices and some dude who looked like Bas Rutten clean trash out of his car. Aaron said he was scary as fuck, but he gave him the “dude, i got tattoos too,” head nod. we got two van tires and a trailer tire for $80.
Male Nurses also have a shirt that Max is wearing that is an image where the background is a letter from The Zodiac Killer and over it is a big dude who looks like he is fucking planet earth, and below him is a image of two punks sucking a cops dick. HA!
while we were buying the tires, we decided we’d get the van looked at and find out what the high speed rattling was. it was $150 is what it was and took an hour and a half. we walked down the side of the road in rural ohio and tried to go to an irish bar that looked like someone’s house. predictably, it was closed so we went to a pawn shop where they lock the doors on you when you’re inside and unlock them when you try to leave. the vibe was “hey guys, welcome to the store. we will fucking kill you if you screw anything up and we have a room downstairs where we can incinerate your bodies.” they didnt seem too impressed by our presence but they asked about us and ran our band names by one of the dudes there who gave us a CD of his band. a CD of his band that definitely had some song like, “skinhead pride” on it. he told max that they’re going on tour with One Life Crew in November. tour is scary.
they also had a guitar shaped like a Shark for sale for $150. i bought one from some kid on Craigslist once – he had carved the HIM logo on the neck or something. fucking dork.
everyone split up for a bit and some of the guys went to some bar and hung out with a dude who’s name was seriously “Billy Bob” and other people sat in some grass and drank beer. Pat and I went with Ben from Much Worse to go to the hardware store to buy a new wheel for the guitar cab. we were walking back and talking about how we look like people who would get beaten up and fucking Paul Schaffer when this GIGANTIC FUCKING PITBULL barked at us. over half of it’s body was hanging out of the window. i immediately thought, “what kind of motherfucker lets their dog almost murder everyone while they’re driving,” then noticed the immortal ICP Hatchetman decal on the back. ohio juggalos fuck off.
got the van, paid the dudes, drove around listening to logan make techno music on his laptop.
someone told me to document this quote: “stop putting boogers on my bitch tits”. i think max wiped his snot on dan or something. pittsburgh next, as soon as i have time to write it