i also saw a billboard about medicare that featured old people wearing Star Trek: TNG uniforms. it was baffling.

it was a store filled with shit that i feel like i should want but after thinking for ten seconds, wanted nothing to do with. tons of factory made meat and cheese. some crackers. some beer. basically the shit that comes in and out of my life and bathroom every single day only now it’s in a castle instead of a dusty basement with clothes laying around.

everyone ordered food from another asshole counter idiot and went and waited in the bar for their sysco sandwiches and dumpy fries. i opted for the dumpy pizza after interrogating the asshole counter idiot for more information:

“what does natural sausage mean?”
“its natural.”
“yeah, I can read, but what does that mean?”
“its natural sausage.”
“okay, give me a slice of the cheese.”

not even a shrug, not even one of those half-frown/lowered-brow looks people give you instead saying, “i don’t fucking know”…just a blank stare and a few blinks. oh well.

i sat in this bar and some dude decked out in Green Bay Packers gear and said, “ya want your last beer before ya hit 3.2 country?”

i admired that line and after realizing i had no pressing business to attend to in the back of Andy’s Dodge Intrepid, i went for it. my dumpy pizza came. the bartender was intuitive enough to pass me some hot sauce, suggesting he too knew the quality of the cuisine. i sat there watching truck commercials between football pre-game programming, quietly cursing at the TV for peddling some fucked up Go America Buy A Truck campaign to laborers – people whose professions have been dying. people who dont know that their Carhartts are made in mexico now. fact checking my complaining, Wikipedia tells me that Carhartts were also popular amongst crack dealers in the early 90s.

“They needed to keep warm and they needed to carry a lot of stuff,” said Steven J. Rapiel, the New York City salesman for Carhartt.

i watched people across the bar eat a wheel of cheese from a safe distance and talked about starting a YDI cover band centered around health, called YDIET. fuck, maybe Dan came up with that. it sounds like something dumb he’d think of. Pat started talking to me about Aaron Rogers and his resemblence to one of my best friends.

i kept trying to catch a glimpse of him on TV but kept missing him. so our bartender decided to help out.

“Aaron Rodgers? He’s on those State Farm commercials!”
i gave him the same blank stare that idiot counter asshole gave me.
“He’s on this commercial like, doing this dance because some other fucking idiot is doing some fucking dumb dance and he’s doing a dance and then oh man its so funny,” is what i think the bartender said next.
i shrugged and hoped he’d let it drop.
“He’s got electric blue eyes and a triangle nose, like it’s never been broken. Real piercing eyes!”
“okay, dude,” i replied.

just then i got a text from Andy that read, “our bartender is in love with Aaron Rodgers”. he was right. feeling uncomfortable, not from the gaying bartender but more from the trying-really-hard-to-not-be-gay football atmosphere, i went to go take a piss.

sometimes i’ll go take a piss even though i really don’t have to just so i can have an excuse to go somewhere isolated and very neutral. bathrooms are generally all pretty similar so they feel familiar which makes them safe zones for people tripping on drugs or, in my case, who just get tired of shit. i walked in, stood next to a dude, and unzipped my fly.

but i couldn’t piss. so i stood there next to the guy, obviously not pissing. making him think i am either some sort of “pee-shy” person or that i just came in there to mess with my dick. so really, my attempt to leave an uncomfortable scene just placed me in a more intimate and more uncomfortable scene.

i went back and gawked at a woman i couldn’t figure out the age of. she had hair like she listened to Whitesnake but was only old enough to earnestly enjoy Avenged Sevenfold. i stared at her until i realized she thought i was checking her out. then i stared at Terry Bradshaw until my eyes started burning. we finished our beers and left.

in the car we talked about teeing off (putting a golf tee in your urethra and letting someone hit a golf ball off your penis) and someone threw a cigarette out the window and it landed on one of us in the back. always a classic move.

we arrived in Appleton at the Poison Manor where there was a TV party centered around the football game. there was food. all sorts of food. good food, too. food that some guy named Remy made, too. Remy was the first person i noticed because he looked like he was on acid. he had bleached blonde hair with brown roots showing and big fucking eyes, staring intensely at you. it took me a while to realize he was not a threat to our personal safety.

he was engrossing to talk to, so much so that i stood in the doorway of the bathroom where i was preparing to shit without any sort of exit plan. i suspected the conversation would not stop and that Remy would continue talking to me while i sat there, shitting. but he got distracted and i managed to shut the door.

Minus 9 showed up in a small sedan. two guys – drummer and a bassist. Andy and something else. fuck. we shook hands.

anyway, eventually the house was packed. not to say i thought the show would be a bust but shit, there were tons of people milling about. art school nerds, underaged punks, all sorts of shitheads come out to shows in Appleton. it was really great.

we stood outside while people talked to Remy. someone asked him about drugs and his response was,

“ive got acid. i can get you acid.”
“of course you can get acid! fuck! look at you! jesus christ!” i drunkenly shouted at him.

i walked back inside and started talking to some girl. Andy emerged from the basement yelling,

“hey, drew, there’s three kids down there talking about Megadeth.”
“ah, fuck!”

so i ran down and saw that the first band, Vivisect….icide? ion? Too many bands with that name, hold on, let me get the fucking business card that those hesher fucks gave me.

anyway, those kids were setting up. i think Dan later filled me in on having a weird racist conversation with those kids that he excused himself from, but thats a pretty hefty allegation to toss around i suppose. so im not sayin’, i’m just sayin’. while they set up, we set up our distro and shirts up on a washing machine.

kids piled downstairs at the first hinting of noise and Vivisectionicideorama started playing. it was “death/thrash metal”, certainly. talented kids, too. i yelled “Megadeth” at them and shithead started playing part of “Peace Sells” perfectly, but then did not play the song, causing me to keep yelling. then they had some gear problems and who gives a fuck.

here is a very important tip from someone who is not very important:

if you are having gear problems, try to fix the problem in between songs. if it is not immediately fixable, your options are limited:

if you do anything else, your set will be shit and you will look like morons. doesn’t matter if its you, John Joseph, Harley Flanagan, and Bing Fucking Crosby on stage together. it’s done, leave it alone.

so that shit happened and then Minus 9 played, who were so good they beat the shit out of the entire concept of music. fantastic band, tons of energy and a singer/bassist who i later geeked out about metal with. and theyre like, 40 or something. all of us looked at each other after they played and decided we would not play after them the next night in Minneapolis.

after Minus 9, some mallrat kid came up to Andy and Joel to look at records.

“how much for all the records?”
andy shrugged and replied, “uh, i don’t know. $600? i have no idea.”
no, no, i don’t want to buy all of them. how much for each one?”
joel began screaming, “they’ve got fucking price tags on them!”
“i can’t see them,” stammered the mall punk.
“OF COURSE YOU CAN’T SEE THEM, THEY’RE IN A FUCKING BOX! FUCKING OPEN IT! WHO ARE YOU, SUPERMAN?”

oh joel.

we set up our shit in record time and started fucking around. everyone in the house came down again, a good 40 or so people. i introduced us as “Varix from Japan” or something dumb because they were playing Varix when we came in. figured i’d win them over with charm seeing as how we’re all too incapable and drunk to play typically and this night was not going to be much different. we played sloppy and violently for three songs when someone who lived at the house came up to me and pointed out a pipe very close by:

“hey man, this pipe is the sewage line. so if you hit it, shit and piss will go everywhere. so remember, stay away from this pipe.”

good advice. unfortunately in the middle of maybe our fifth song, someone had grabbed a pipe out of the ceiling, spilling dirty water all over the crowd and us as well. pat ran into the pipe and pulled some alice cooper shock shit, letting whatever was in that pipe pour into his mouth. we found out later it was whatever was drained from the sink.

and then the rest of the night, no one could use the bathroom or the sinks. we thoroughly wrecked appleton.

a bunch of kids bought our record and shirts, which is unheard of. we found out later Andy marked everything down and sold our shit for half. so that makes sense.

so we got more drunk. and i talked to kids about a cop in appleton called “Death Metal Cop” who i guess is some police officer from out east who screams at people in death metal vocals. the story goes is that he was involved in a swat raid that went wrong and had to change his name.

talked to some dude who was in Cock ESP, Jason Wade’s sink-throwing experiment. talked to someone about working in a group home. talked to someone about Dissection. wrote down the words “car burrito”. oh, and some gal had some crooked-ass bangs and i kept trying to cut them. eventually she said she would let me if i could name a line from Rock N’ Roll Racing for SNES, a game i used to play obsessively. “OLAF launches himself” was the line that brought scissors to her face, cradled by a bald man with a scabbed up head and 15 beers deep.

then i talked to Andy from Minus 9 about Chris Colohan. then someone outraged yelled,

“Shane! Someone took a shit in the toilet! Come see!”
“I know what a turd looks like,” was Shane’s reply.

we found out the next day that Dan shit his pants during our set or something and what was found in the toilet was the remains of the incident.

i met some dude who worked at a Hot Topic. i talked about Die Kreuzen. Remy sold someone acid. i danced to “Rock Lobster” and Depeche Mode with Joel and a girl named Erin while wearing nothing but my underwear. then i chased a dog around the house.

we woke up to one of the dudes in the house melting snow in a pot on the stove.

“i just need some water, man. i was trying to thaw the snow out in the toilet but it wasnt working very well.” (he seriously said this, still dont get it)
“oh that sucks. sorry we fucked up the basement. that Remy guy said he could fix it.”
“Remy? that guy’s a fuckin idiot.”
“he sells acid.”
“yeah, i think i traded my weed for some last night. i woke up this morning and tried to find my weed but all i had was acid.”

written on a beam on the porch

we crept out and went to a co-op coffee shop with some egg sandwiches or something. my last notes in my journal are as follows:

i could write another journal entry about playing Memory Lanes in Minneapolis, which we’ve done countless times. but i’m not going to. im going to sum it up:

we got home. we showered. we went to memory lanes. andy told us to wear suits. pat wore white denim. dan wore a sportcoat. i wore a purple suit. joel wore a sweater vest or something. Toilet all rode the bus to Memory Lanes and had no gear. they also had 10 members. they took an hour to set up and then played some mega-fucked up rock with kazoos and horns. it was fantastic. we played and i threw beer everywhere and got seriously fucking hurt. i have to go to the chiropractor again on thursday. minus 9 played and they solidified themselves as geniuses and that andy dude walked around the stage kicking and throwing shit. much worse played and they were

wait for it

much worse

nah they were good. 1-2-fuck-you!

okay, enough of whatever the fuck was going on there.

we left cleveland. on the way out there were multiple mentions of how we wished we weren’t leaving cleveland which were immediately engaged in combat by common sense.

“wait, cleveland fucking sucks. that town is horrible.”

we went to a starbucks off the highway. obviously there was a mutant working there. she was strange. i bought tea. she was strange. who gives a shit. another pimply dipshit in another giant pimple off the side of the road. you get the idea yet? at least when you tour the south there are crazy drunk people everywhere. in the midwest everyone is just kinda gross in a way that’s not even worth remembering. it was another snotty person that kept throwing out this, “i’m much better than this job, show me respect” whatever, wahtever, wathvere.

fucking asshole beef jerky

we went through a toll booth with joel driving. he drove past the toll booth to where the back seat passenger on the left, me, had to present the money.

“the guy driving teaches college kids. he teaches them mathematics. he studies theoretical mathematics and is highly regarded in his field.”
“oh, so he’s book-smart then,” asked the toll booth operator who looked line a mannequin thrown in a wood chipper.
“he’s nothing-smart, ma’am.”

after that we blasted some megadeth because it’s my fucking ipod and that’s all i’m good for. cro-mags audiobooks and megadeth. and making fun of the way people look despite the fact that i look like some sort of troll myself. brad pitt after a pie-eating contest and a near-fatal dose of radiation.

“can i do something stupid,” questioned Andy as he turned down the music
“what, you mean other than turn down megadeth?”

suddenly fireworks shot off in the car. apparently Andy had made it into his own glove compartment and was determined to relieve his boredom at the cost of our ears and whatever us dipshit frozen reptiles had fashioned into human skin at this point.

we stopped at another gas station where i watched a man enter the bathroom with two young boys. they all lined up to the urinals while i was staring at blackheads in the mirror. i overheard the man say,

“i swear to god, this thing just took a picture of my package!”

the boys remained silent. sometimes i wonder if there are horrifying things happening all around each and every one of us but i am just the one who notices. is that a talent or a curse?

we got to chicago and arrived at the neighborhood of The Juicer – our most feared show yet due to it’s sober implications. the neighborhood seemed fairly small and somewhat isolated for our impression of chicago with nothing near by but a high class bar and a set of gas stations off a large road. we found a place to park about a block away and stomped through cold and wet snow and down an icy set of stairs into an alleyway. coming through the back of the brick building, we had to ask some guy up a few flights of stairs on a deck where the hell we were going. we found ourselves at the bottom of a building, banging on a door.

we went inside and it felt like the place we played in New York, the other sober venue. not because it was similar, because it wasn’t – but because we had this fear: this giant looming fear that at least three out of four members of Brain Tumors have. this devastating thought of, “oh fuck, you can’t drink yourself stupid to disguise your insecurity.”

we walked into an area with a large hallway that led into some sort of hardwood floored area with a kitchen, then opening up to a larger area with a carpet laid out and some microphones. there was a bit of an pc/art school vibe, but i was determined to shrug off my bandmates’ anxiety and make the best of what was going on and not be the shitty old dudes who are worrying about getting fucked up. for shit’s sake, they were making food for us even!

we walked to a gas station and grabbed something. i can’t remember, but i know i picked up a root beer or something for a tall fella who arrived in winter biking warrior gear. oh yeah – wait, i bought cold medicine as by the time we hit chicago, i had discovered that excedrine sinus medicine fixed my illness and gave me an odd rush. by the time we got back, the tall man had made spaghetti and Ryan Lowry showed up.

i don’t know shit about Ryan Lowry. he’s in a band called Raw Nerve that whenever i think of, i hear Nerveskade songs in my head. so i always remember liking them but i’m not sure i actually do. i know he has a haircut of some sort and some black clothes. maybe like the kind of dude who has sex with human females without having to wander around advertising himself. i can respect that. i can also respect that because dude put together a fucking hell of a show for us at this fucking hardwood-floor sober house where every single person i met was nice and some were even fun to talk to.

GOD FUCKING DAMN IT, WHAT THE FUCK IS MY FUCKING ROOMMATE DOING UPSTAIRS? WHOSE SHITTY VOICE IS THAT, WHO THE FUCK JUST DROPPED A BAG OF MARBLES ON THE KITCHEN FLOOR, WHAT IF I WAS ACTUALLY ASLEEP WHILE YOU WERE DOING THIS YOU DUMB FUCK? YOU TALK LIKE YOURE DEAF

more people showed up including some fairly innocent and lonely looking kids who stood on the side of things as awkward observers. after sitting on the floor and talking to joel and pat and dan and whoever about whatever, i went over and talked to one of the kids. i thanked him for showing up and assured him that being young and feeling alone and out of place was necessary and that he is far cooler than nearly everyone else around. i felt good about that because i wish some bald fuckhead said that to me when i was younger and afraid of everything.

Culo showed up which meant Andy disappeared to get drunk in his car. Brian from Manipulation arrived with his special lady, Sarah. my friend Summer showed up with her boyfriend, who watched the bands and talked about wanting to start a punk house of his own. good stuff. a fucking dude named Tom that i knew from LIVEJOURNAL.COM from many years ago showed up, who i had never met. a bunch of other raggedy sideshows showed up, most of them wearing lace up boots and levis, which to me are a symbol of fucking bullshit of the worst kind. pull the red tag out if you wear those things – youre a paying advertisement of unethical horseshit that once meant something.

Brian and I drank a beer outside and walked around the block and eventually came across Andy and part of Culo and whatever remains of Joel in his car. I went inside and watched Kontaminat who killed everything. i think it sounded like Koro but i was sober so my judgment was certainly off. joel and andy came inside and got pissed after realizing they missed Kontaminat while Pat, Dan, and I laughed in their faces. then we decided to go across the street to this swanky bar that we certainly weren’t welcome in to get a few shots for ourselves.

have you ever walked into a bar that you didn’t belong in? not just because you weren’t dressed for it, but because it was clearly not for you. people were old. people were dressed up. we walked in and i immediately laid everything out for the person seating us:

“here’s the deal. we’re in a band and we’re playing across the street from out of town. we need to drink in order to play, however, it’s in someone’s basement and they forbid alcohol. we need shots, but we’re also very poor.”

somehow this worked and we found ourselves seated at a very nice bar with a man with a professional pony-tail serving us shots. after pouring the first round, we were informed that the gorgeous manager of the bar had bought us all a round of shots for absolutely no fucking reason we could discern. that’s why we missed SHIV, who i heard were excellent….some immaculate looking successful lady burning off karma from her past life of shunning guys like us who smelled of cigarettes back in high school.

Divine Right played. there were dudes there doing some heavy moshing – the kind of shit that scares aging men like me with male pattern baldness and lower back problems. people had a good time and i pretended i wasn’t too old to get it.

we set up and turned off some lights. there were a good 50-60 people milling around with a lot of bleed-out into the kitchen. i talked to a few kids standing in front about how this is the most sober we’ve ever played and tried to prepare themselves for something terrible or boring. the kids left over from Divine Right’s set were still lingering about, preparing me to get punched in the stomach by someone at least 8 years younger and less haggard.

right as we started “sound-checking” (whatever that means for a band like us), i noticed this tall kid with blonde hair. his name was/is Michael. it might even be Michael Angelo. he looks like this:

he is the kid on the right whose shirt looks like it’s 3d if youve done a lot of mushrooms before. anyway, i saw him and i remembered him from when we were in Chicago before when he smashed me against a wall and my arm got gouged open on a nail sticking out. so before we began, i pointed at him, waved, and started yelling,

“HEY! ITS THAT FUCKING KID WHO SMASHED ME AGAINST A WALL AND RIPPED MY ARM OPEN! HEY EVERYBODY, WE’RE BRAIN TUMORS,” or something to that effect. maybe it was funnier, maybe it was dumber. you won’t know and no one who would know will remember.

after that, some kid yelled “STREET SHARKS” at us, which is the name of Joel’s old band out in North Carolina.

street sharks

we flipped out and started interrogating the kid and later uncovered that he played keyboards in SHARDS back in NC! fuck! SHARDS! what a brilliant band. well anyway, the kid lives in chicago now.

SHARDS!

we played and people moved around, even if they were whatever was left over to hurt people from Divine Right’s set. i flopped around and yelled in people’s faces even though i wasn’t drunk; even though i didn’t have anything to throw or harass people with. and people moved with me. i looked up and i saw a tall figure with dumb hair and knew it could only be our favorite little boy: Negative Kevin!

Negative Kevin appeared and i ran and grabbed him by the collar, intent on throwing him at whatever and whoever was moving around in front of us. but he stopped me and yelled,

“WAIT! WAIT! I HAVE YOUR TAPES!”

and brandished a saggy plastic bag at us. there negative kevin held our 20 our so tapes he had owed us for roughly a year. so i grabbed them, threw kevin, and threw the tapes at the ceiling. the bag split and our tapes, which we had waited to receive for nearly a year, smashed to the ground. cases split open and shit went everywhere. some were trampled but many an art school kid dove to grab a copy for a reason i still can’t figure out. even dumber than we are, i reckon.

in between song blocks, a girl yelled, “YOU GUYS SUCK”. i agreed with her and stared at her as she still didn’t leave the fucking room, so i guess we’re at least fascinating even if we suck. i heard later that people were questioning as to whether or not we were even a real band which must be just a testament to how remarkably talented we are. right?

we finished with a cover of “I Hate Myself” by The Offenders where John from Culo and a few kids ran to sing along. it was the first time anyone tried to sing along to something we were playing so i didn’t know the dynamic of how to hand the microphone to people and ended up getting smashed in the face, resulting in a bloody lip. it was uplifting although slightly painful.

we got a lot of “good job” comments and pats on the back from a bunch of enthusiastic kids with neat haircuts. saw some more people we ran into at our last show, including some kid who geeked out with joel over records who had a cool cross earring and glasses. i also talked to the tall kid that made us spaghetti and he told me that he just realized that he was the fucking dude who helped patch up my arm from when Nice Shirt Michael ripped it open when we were in chicago in August! bah!

then i talked to him and a few other people about how they read this blog which fucked my brain. my note in my journal actually says, “PEOPLE READ BLOG????”

TOXIC VISIONS!

Culo played a completely brain-dead set, which i somehow still enjoyed. joel mentioned to me that he overheard someone say, “that was a wipers cover they played last, right,” which we all got a kick out of.

Ryan paid us well and we left. i remember talking to some girl outside who i think was dating someone in Shiv and we talked about drugs – all i recall out of that was her saying,

“do you think i pay for drugs? shit, look at me.”

normally i am incredibly cruel to beautiful people but i was tired and she had a point. we nodded and lowered our eyebrows, letting her walk through the icy alleyway. as we started to leave, Negative Kevin, our precious little hardcore punk prince, looked at us with big sad eyes as we told him we were staying at Brian’s house instead of with him. we invited him along and left with a bag filled with 20 loaves of bread that the equally beautiful man tall bike dude who patched up my arm gave us.

then i have some note about a Whoopie Cushion, which i guess we acquired at some point on the way to Brian’s. i don’t fucking know. we got to Brian and Sarah’s house and hung out with John from Culo and one of his friends. i have a note about how i was still wearing my Wipers t-shirt and how i kept checking it for a breast pocket over and over again and at Brian’s place, surrounded by nervous dogs, Dan told us a story about his friend Mikey hanging out with Don Decker (from Anal Blast) and Dustin Diamond (yeah, from Saved by the Bell). pizza was involved somewhere and John gave me a massage.

Culo is good at massages.

i woke up sleeping on Dan’s socks, which i guess Andy had launched at me because i was snoring. i had a goddamn cold still! i’m not some oaf. i dunno what dan’s excuse is. Brian and Sarah made us coffee and John and his friend had left in the night. we went to eat at some acceptable bagel place after two of us struggled with the latch on Brian’s house fence having no idea how to exit the property. on the way we passed a place called Barnum N’ Bagel, which is the dumbest thing i have ever heard of.

it was at breakfast where we also heard the other dumbest thing i have ever heard of.

last night, i guess Culo hid their heroin in a 7inch and then accidentally sold it to some kid.

oops

on the way out, someone punched Joel in the balls.

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

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!

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

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.

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