Brain Tumors

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

i lost my tour diary in asheville, so i’m going to have to piece things together with the help of several other people who most likely have a worse memory than i do. who would’ve thought it would be hard to hold on to a little tiny book while sleeping in your underwear on floors and getting drunk.

i woke up in the van, sweaty and dry mouthed. dan was in there too and being the early riser he is, we both decided to wander around this scenic area of richmond.

teur-ror
tore
teur-ror
tore

the hurricane actually kind of affected richmond. we had to switch back from sidewalk to street, back to the sidewalk again. we rounded a corner and realized we were in a pretty low-income part of the city and went to a mini-mart. i found a Barney the Dinosaur “i love my dad” book that had some vaguely creepy pictures that could be turned into show fliers. we bought water and came back to the house we were staying with these dudes, mark and brandon.

we’re in nashville right now and max from MW is sitting next to me on a drum throne in his underwear, taking a beer bong.

“hey max, should i put this picture of you up with a beer bong?”
“ehhh. ehhhhhh. yeah, fuck it. my probation officer doesn’t know how to google. fuck her!”

i should just write his full name over and over and over and over again now, hahahaha.

we bullshitted around and everyone was still asleep. rachael woke up. someone in the house mentioned that there was a place with $1 tacos. we obviously went there. joel ordered 8 tacos and a margarita. of course he didnt even eat half of them. fuck you, joel. we were split amongst two tables and max overheard one of two servers ask the other server, in spanish, “do you have the table full of pussies or do i?”

no idea how he could tell the difference.

we went to the liquor store to stock up and max bought some “japanese fuck pills”. some dude in front of the liquor store wearing one of those wal-mart skull t-shirts tried to sell ben some weed and talking about rap music. then criticizing the tire pressures on our trailer. he also told a story about how he tried to smoke weed with Project Pat but he refused, saying, “this shit is business.”

“you know what, i respect you, Project Pat!”

then some woman came out and asked us if we were in a band and gave us five pounds of fake beef. she gave the sketchy dude a bag and he asked me what to do with it. i told him you could make some decent stir fry out of it and he told me he was going to make kebabs out of it. yeah, fake meat kebabs. good one, dick.

we walked to Vinyl Conflict to meet up with Brandon, who is also an old friend joel’s. hopefully some day people get to hear the band that they had when they were like, 16, as it rips. abikiyokon, or whatever its called. i’d say joel would correct me but i don’t think he’ll ever read this. man, why am i so mad at joel when i’m writing all this?

anyhow, Vinyl Conflict was supposed to be closed on that day but Brandon said he’d open up just for us, but we had to wait. half of us walked to a graveyard and logan and i walked to some cheesesteak restaurant to use the bathroom. we came back and walked around with sticks, hitting things like a bunch of children. max mounted an apple he found on the ground on the top of one of his sticks and then stuck smaller sticks on it to create a fruit stick mace. then we had a rock fight, like a bunch of children.

we walked back to Vinyl Conflict and shuffled around the store looking at records and buying shirts. i finally got a Channel 3 and an Acid Reflux shirt and we played our 7″ for Brandon. joel sold a few of the super rare records he’s been carrying around on tour, selling at the table.

we went back to the house and threw around a football and drank on the porch. i guess we got a noise complaint but we had already left for the show.

we were gone for an unexplainable period of time doing unexplainable things, then we showed up to Strange Matter. i ate a fucking half-priced portabello cheesesteak that was served to me by an unforgettably attractive bartender. or maybe she wasn’t the one who gave me the food – fuck, whatever. someone there was unforgettably attractive. dan got the bloodiest burger of his life and i tried to talk to some dude with some cheese fries who i could tell immediately hated me. joel made a rookie mistake and got a bunch of thai food that i guess was so hot that it made logan cry.

siren played – lot of echo on the vocals, i think it might’ve been their third show. they were good and there was a pretty large crowd that had turned up by then. before our set, i made the decision that i no longer wanted to wear pants during our sets so it was me in my underwear and cowboy boots. punched pat and knocked him down and started kicking him. he still managed to clock me across the face with his headstock and i thought i split my eyebrow open. pat kept rolling around on the floor and our set turned into some sort of shitty Sonic Youth thing, but people seemed to like it for some stupid reason.

much worse did their thing and everyone flipped their shit for a few songs. pat screamed unintelligably into one of the other microphones and we got to do our favorite “YEAH, RIGHT” into the mic for “Forced Hand”.

we hung out in the parking lot for a bit and although we were right across the street from a bunch of cops, they didn’t give us any trouble. kinda nice for once.

Unholy Thoughts played and were all really tall.

no but seriously, fucking killer band and all super nice dudes. couldnt tell if we were more stoked on them or if they were on all of us. during their set, some dude jumped off a bar and donkey kicked some girl in the face. glad i didn’t see that. i did get thrown into a few overturned tables a few time and now i have some giant bruises.

i went outside and talked to a group of people and a coy asian girl who was wearing a shirt that i wanted to be wearing.

somehow we got back to the house and we stayed awake until 7 AM. drinking, drinking, drinking. we never found that co-axial cable we kept looking for all night. ryan from municipal waste came by to see joel but joel was dead. i fell asleep on the couch on the porch.

i woke up a few hours later with two dopey fuck-up cops giving me a hard time and accusing me of being a vagrant. i guess the landlord drove by early in the morning and took a picture of me asleep on the porch and reported it to the cops. i still don’t get how that works – did he text the fucking police or something?

“what are you doing here?”
“sleeping.”
“who are you here with?”
“dude, i’m here with a bunch of people inside. there’s no place to sleep so i’m here.”
“yeah well, we’re gonna see about that when we knock on the door and talk to them.”

they bang on the door and aaron comes out, shirtless.

“is this guy with you?”
“yeah. what?”
“uhhh”

then aaron slams the door on them. the cops apologize and give me this, “we’re just doing our jobs,” thing and leave. their presence was so out of place and unnecessary it had the same effect as waking up with a room full of ex-girlfriends, glaring at you.

“why the fuck are you even here? what the fuck are you doing?”

later after i woke up and gathered myself, i noticed that i didn’t have a busted open eyebrow from pat’s guitar, i had a full blown black eye. i dont remember how we left richmond or even why we left richmond.

washington, d.c.

we got into DC and the show was at this house, wasted dream. as soon as the door opened, amelia greeted Dan from Lotus Fucker/Dirty Wars – guess she knew him. another small world, but the world kind of shrinks itself when amelia is around i’m thinking.

our dan is telling me that that dan once walked on ian mackaye’s car in once because he was blocking him from walking.

Veterans pulled up and we realized that we actually saw them sitting in a diner in west philadelphia that morning. pretty fucked up. dan also realized he stayed at one of their member’s houses, i think when he was out with In Defence. logan had played with them with Enabler, too. small world, over and over again.

we met james, the dude who set up the show and he was kind enough to make us spaghetti. we’ve been really lucky to hit such a string of accommodating and decent people while we’re out.

we stood on the porch for a few minutes and a dude in a rasta hat wearing a windbreaker walked by holding a fucking spear.

rachael and i decided to walk down to the grocery store as i was still hungry and didn’t want to be a greedy dick. i lived in DC for about two months once and it made me the most hypervigilant freak ever. rachael isn’t exactly the most intimidating person at 5’2″ so i kept glancing over my shoulder until we got into a more populated area. seemed like there was a pretty great seafood shack on the way.

big grocery stores are so fucked up. i’m always blinded when i get in there and overwhelmed with stress trying to navigate around a bunch of clueless cows. huhuhuh sheeple huhuhuhuh – whatever. i put a salad together and so did rachael, then we headed out and i stopped to get some sort of empanada from this place i wanted to go to last time i was in the area, but didn’t get to. i got the chilean style empanada which had hard boiled egg, pork, raisins, and some other stuff in it.

my notes say i ate fried chicken. i didn’t. why did i write that?

we got beer and got back in time to catch a good set from Dirty Wars. the house has a super fucking tiny basement so there wasn’t a lot of room, but it’s nice because we could get 20 people in there and it instantly became a good time. Veterans played and although theyre not my thing right now, they all made us look like the bumbling drunks that we are. very intense stuff.

dirty wars at wasted dream

two of my most favorite people in the world showed up, eran and mario. they are the wisest men i know and i cant express what unique and rare people they are. eran is a doctor and a walking encyclopedia of music knowledge – one time in a cab in nyc, i watched eran gab with the driver about some sort of mixtape of cuban rap that he picked up by ear. mario is a dog-walker and the author of a book called 44 Presidents – he is also the best writer i have ever met in my entire life.

Much Worse played next and max smashed his head into dan’s drums and started bleeding everywhere. i was a little jealous that he managed to hurt himself in such a sensational way, especially that rachael was recording it. i’m pretty fucking lame.

a dude who’s name i didn’t catch jumped on the show at the last minute to do spoken word. apparently he’s been around a long time and doing shit at hardcore shows – dunno the guy but he’s pretty hard to forget with cerebral palsy (i think? i’m a total dick if i’m wrong but i thought someone told me this) and also a fucking prosthetic leg. i didn’t catch his set but i was pleased to see when i came back in, there were still a fair number of people in there.

we plugged in as dude was ending his thing and started playing. pat was trashed so he immediately started flailing around violently, looking like a stretched out baby throwing a temper tantrum. somehow he swept his body in an upward motion and caught me in the jaw. the impact jolted my brain out of my body.

i kept singing and holding my jaw, struggling to finish our three song block and getting angrier after yelling each word and feeling stronger and stronger pain. the block ended and i announced we would play two more songs. everyone looked at me like i was telling a shitty racist joke – shocked and confused. we went into the next song and i came apart. i couldn’t close my mouth and my teeth felt cracked or something – something wasn’t right. i threw the mic down and started punching and kicking a beam in the basement. i stomped out and punched the back door and split open two knuckles.

eran and mario came out after me while i continued to lose my mind. i screamed as loud as i could and paced around and then stared at the guy with the prosthetic leg, realizing whatever the fuck happened to him was way worse than whatever just happened to me.

“you’re humbling me right now, buddy,” i muttered to him.

eran felt around on my jaw. he told me it was dislocated and brought me inside, rachael in tow talking about how she gets hers dislocated now and then. i could hear that our set kept going and someone was singing who seemed to know our lyrics.

“you don’t have hep c, do you?”

“no, no, i’m good.”

eran wrapped his fingers with a paper towel and stuck his fingers inside of my mouth. with his other hand, he gripped the side of my face and pushed his hands together towards each other.

“i’ve only done this once.”

everyone made a noise when it slid back into place. it hurt. it could have hurt more, but it hurt enough. i went downstairs to see how our set was still moving and saw max, face covered in blood, screaming

“MY NAME IS DREW, I’M RIGHT BEHIND YOU, I DONT KNOW WHAT TO SAY, I DONT KNOW WHAT TO SAY, I DONT KNOW WHAT TO SAY” over and over again.

it was fucking cool and sounded great, odd enough. of course, rachael did not record any of the incident or the rest of the set. bah.

i tried to help eran fish some toilet paper out of his ear from makeshift earplugs but couldn’t. mario tried and maybe had more luck but to be honest, i was distracted. james gave me some electrical tape and paper towels to re-dress my wound on my arm and to put over my bleeding knuckles.

we went back outside and i received more sagelike knowledge about women from Mario. eran and i sat on a bench and broke it. i took pictures of Pat outside, rolling around on the front porch, all drunk.

i passed out sometime after that on the way to richmond.

we got to eric from sickoids’ place as he’s an old pal of our bassist, joel, from north carolina. we had to fight Rachael pretty hard to prevent her from going back to her house and giving us all the scabies that her roommate contracted in turkey, or however the fuck they got there. difficult conversation. the next day, we spent our time lining up to shower and at some coffee shop that was described as a lesbian hangout. i dont think it was. they used organic eggs and had breakfast burritos for fucking $3.70! goddamn incredible. it was good, too. i met some dude playing chess and found out he was an EMT, so he told me to run to the drugstore and he’d fix up my arm. i think instead i just ended up using some tape from the shop and washing it out in the bathroom. or maybe i left it open? i cant remember.

there was a chick working at the coffeeshop wearing a SLAUGHTER shirt, for the thrash metal band, not the shitty 80s band. then another chick walks in and has a Nuclear Assault patch on her cut-off shorts. what the fuck

i think me, dan, amelia, and pat went to the drugstore where dan bought a male urinal and i bought some gauze and medical tape. we stopped by a farmer’s market and ate some apples while realizing that every fucker in west philadelphia is cool. seriously, any person who walks by you says “good morning” and gives you a huge smile. really unexpected and nice. we went back to the house and watched joel, eric, and amelia all geek out about japanese hardcore records and then made plans to go grab matt from Leather and to go to brad and john from Leather’s house, as our show got cancelled due to the weather and possible flooding basements.

joel and logan almost fought because rachael left with someone and logan wondered if she went back to her house. joel kept assuring him and logan kept pressing him. i dunno, someone smacked someone in the back of the head. wish it came to punches, would’ve been a fun battle.

we grabbed matt and i helped him carry a whole bunch of barbequed chicken, vegan chili, and about sixty beers and headed over to their huge house. it’s a huge place even by minneapolis standards, but gigantic by philadelphia standards. two staircases, a fucking dining room with a fifteen foot dining room table accented by a disco ball. covered back yard area for people to smoke.

we played a bunch of sega and ate a bunch of food. there were some horrible things that happened, mainly aaron and pat went out to grab some girl from the suburbs to bring back. after being gone for an hour, we called and only got, “dude, i’m talking to the cops right now, bye,” and then aaron hung up. we called pat and pat basically said the same thing – “uh, aaron’s up against the car and he’s getting handcuffed. i dunno, i gotta go.”

fuck. fuck fuck fuck fuck.

so then pat and this little lady come through the door. the girl said she drove the van and trailer and pat is all wide eyed and horrified looking. i’m punching myself in the head over and over and over again and suddenly aaron comes through a side door or something, smiling. that fucking asshole – especially because back in columbus, he tricked me and max at the repair shop saying “tour is over unless we cough up $2000. the van is fucked.”

and he fucking tricked me before we left when i called him and he told me that his van wouldn’t start. goddamn, what a bastard.

so in retribution i called joel and told him the same bullshit story. lied to him pretty hard, tried to justify it by talking about the time joel convinced me that Toad the Wet Sprocket was gonna tour with Burzum. joel seemed to take it rather well, but then didnt take it well at all when he found out i was lying. my joke fucked up everyone’s plans and freaked everyone out and caused some damage. logan reassured me that it wasn’t funny. i felt bad, but at least i could create some sort of “fuck drew” camaraderie to unite people.

we got really messed up with people smashing florescent lights over brad’s back and throwing beer bottles in the air and hitting them with a samurai sword while a tropical storm whipped through the city. dan got some glass caught in his leg from one of the bottles.

when it got late enough, we decided to go back to eric’s and max and logan used the male urinal. logan pissed 16 ounces and max pissed 10 ounces. the next morning, examining the van and the male urinal, we noticed there were only 20 ounces in the male urinal.

the male urinal pissed the van and one of rachael’s shirts. we walked around west philadelphia again and ended up at another coffeeshop after walking into one place and just kinda looking around before deciding there wasn’t enough room for us. we met a developmentally disabled boy named Daniel who was wearing a nice red hat and perfectly matching red golf pants. we went back to eric’s where i mopped his kitchen floor and pet his amazing cat, then listened to everyone gossip about who’s an asshole and who isn’t sending out records and who is taking money from who.

eric and mo are fucking great hosts. we left and it looks like all that happened from there is that logan unwrapped a fortune cookie he found and saw that it had a pube cooked into it. then rachael told the story of Lazy Jane, who was a heroin addict at a squat of heroin addicts out in philadelphia who overdosed and died on a couch. instead of calling the cops or doing anything, they just let her sit there and rot until she became part of the couch. apparently there are pictures of people with lazy jane, who no one ever really found out the name of or where her body really belonged.

lazy drew

i didnt take any notes on new york for some reason, but here’s what i got:

from pittsburgh we blasted out to new york. nothing was memorable other than the smell of new jersey and paying $800 in tolls. aaron had a panic attack in some tunnel with swirling lights. we get into new york and predictably, we don’t what the fuck we’re doing. we’ve got three dipshits with smartphones trying to navigate through space and time itself, all yelling different directions. we got looped around over and over again, all while checking on updates on the supposed hurricane that was going to decimate new york.

“you know Escape from New York? thats what this shit is gonna be like. you guys gotta take this seriously,” someone said.

after circling and denying internet maps long enough, we made it to the holland tunnel where we were informed we could not go in. they pulled us to the side and immediately some fucking asshole jersey cop started to yell at aaron to get out of the van. aaron grabs his trucker hat and puts it on backwards, then gets out and the cop starts yelling, “what the fuck are you doing, put on a fucking shirt!”

we hand aaron pat’s Organized Sports shirt and he cringes but slides the goddamn thing on, all while yelling back at the cops. they pull him back and start asking him questions about the trailer and demanding for him to open it up. after realizing it’s just a bunch of shitty band equipment the prick tells aaron, “i’m not letting you assholes go through the tunnel. nope. you got people who arent sitting in seats.”

aaron storms back up to the van and yells, “everyone get in your fucking seats, we’re going through this tunnel!” by then, the dickhead supreme cop seems to be getting talked down by one of the more reasonable cops.

YOUNGSTER ON THE FORCE! YOUNGSTER ON THE FORCE!

aaron jumps in and yells, “thanks a lot, faggot,” at the cop and we bail.

we get to stolen sleeves collective and it’s kind of this cool loft inside a big warehouse building. i imagine people from new york will understand what that means and no one else will. the kids at the space and the dude who booked the show were really nice, but there were a few fuckheads who basically rolled their eyes after any of us said anything. as you cant drink at stolen sleeves, i was in the trailer, having a beer to ease the extreme anxiety i was feeling from how stressful driving through the city was. and for fun.

then a cop car rolls up and gives me and joel and logan $25 drinking tickets. at least they were nice about it.

we played and pat broke two strings. for shits i grabbed pats guitar strings and started dragging him around and cut one of my fingers, but we still finished our set a few people seemed to care, but they all stood there. same thing for much worse, same thing for death rats who were pretty decent. dont remember or care about the other bands. after the show, we sat on the roof of this big building and talked. we also got to see one of my best friends, ryan, our friend michelle, the brilliant jason dorkleson, and one of the gems of minneapolis who just relocated out to new york – angie from varix/question. amelia joined our hell-party and will be with us until asheville, nc. now we have ten people at this point.

last time my friend ryan met jason, jason kept talking about blood and all sorts of weird shit, getting mega tanked and acting like a deranged asshole. so it was funny when ryan said, “hey dude, good to see you again” to jason and i interrupted with, “no it’s not, you hated this guy”. i think they got along this time.

we all went to some bar and stressed out about the hurricane. i sat and talked to the gorgeous bouncer about one of her friends that had died after taking some super powerful drugs that someone gave him and said it was ecstasy.

then we all drank and argued about what to do for the night, some of us wanting to stay with ryan and enjoy the city after such bullshit getting there, while other people thinking a little more rationally and realizing that there may be a major event that i dunno, maybe rolls our van and trailer over and kills all of us and that we should leave while we can. so we left, but only after aaron smashed a glass on the ground after arguing with ben from much worse. after that, all sorts of people started smashing glasses on the ground. glass party 2011 no rules

we drove to philadelphia with everyone pretty wrecked and me still out of my mind from lack of sleep. at some point, pat grabbed my leg and i almost decked him across the face just for touching me. someone once called me “the angriest man in the world”, but i like to think ive calmed down since then. i think i ate at burger king on the way, which, by the way, was a bad idea. logan from mw tried to order a veggie burger and they kept trying to talk him into having a vegetarian whopper, which is a shitty cheese sandwich. it was weird how much the dude didnt want to make him the fucking veggie burger.

we got to Kopec’s in Pittsburgh and i don’t remember what anyone said in the van or what anyone did in the van on the way the way. i think i tried to sleep mostly but sleeping in the van is like sleeping on planes. unless you’re drugged up, youre basically twitching in your seat with your eyes closed. so we got there and got a phone call from Garrett from Male Nurses.

“uhh, you know that epiphone that pat borrowed during your set?”
“yeah?”
“uhhh we have that guitar. we took it accidentally.”

we have no idea where the back-up no-name guitar that Tim gave us turned up as they said they didn’t have one. so two guitars lost on tour with plans for Terrordactyls, a thrash band out of Minneapolis, to recover them in Boston and bring them back. or Allston. no idea if they’ll actually do that or if we’ll just be out a guitar, but i’d like to think they’ll do what needs to be done.

so we get there and we meet up with Tom from Heartless and the honorable Dave Watt who did our 7″ art and is in Girlfight and a band called Sheep. i lived in Pittsburgh for a while and these gentlemen kept me sane along with other great company who arrived, Katie and then later, this kid named Jordan. but that’s all a bunch of personal who gives a fuck stuff – i could’ve just written “WE LIKED THE PEOPLE WE KNEW IN PITTSBURGH”. this first band played and i didn’t listen to them but i heard they were decent. Means to an End. that band name sucks. but so does Brain Tumors. then this band called Drug Lust played and all wore ski masks. noisy, angry, evil shit with dudes wearing ski-masks.

weird kids, too, in that way where you appreciate that there are people like that who exist and are not bullshitting about it. after the show, i had a splinter in my hand and within ten seconds, two members of Drug Lust were brandishing fold out knives and offering to help me remove it. i got it out, much to the dismay of everyone else.

Kopec’s is a fucking cool bar. most of the night was a buncha nice black folk downstairs and a bunch of grungy white kids upstairs, meandering about.

we played and Max from Much Worse said we did well. one of the dudes from Drug Lust actually bit me on the arm, i think. i’m not sure, i’m covered in tons of bruises. i screamed in a bunch of people’s faces and did my usual thing where i just stumble around and fall on people.

after the show i left with my friends Katie and Dave and went to some bar where i met a dude with the last name of SNOWDEN from Milwaukee. we talked about how he is black and people are dicks to him. dude’s an engineer i guess and i asked him if he went to school with a friend of mine from Minneapolis and his head exploded when he recognized the name. the world is small, but everyone knows that. he gave me his number and told me if i’m ever in milwaukee, he would fly back and hang out with me.

katie and dave and i went to the giant eagle grocery store and bought junk food, sat around and ate pizza and watched seinfeld. i rotted away for the night on the floor with cat dander fucking up my nose.

got a ride the next morning to a shopping center off the highway. after waiting a number of minutes, i called Joel and all he said was,

“we’re getting pulled over right now. call you back.”

last tour i was on, people got pulled over and arrested for a bunch of shit out in the middle of Tennessee, so i’m way fucking nervous about cop related things. i sat at a Panera bread listening to some woman with mutated arms scream at her grandson to do things for her, giving him precise instructions on how much ice to refill her coca cola.

“BRING ME MY CANE!”

at that point i’m tired and sick on lack of sleep, basically ready to throw up all over her. but the cop shit was fine, apparently they got pulled by a state trooper/truck inspector who noticed that everyone in our van is a fucking twit and gave us advice like

- You are not a band
- You are not on tour
- In the trailer is just luggage
- You are just passing through

we were pulled for having no lights (which we keep trying to fix) and apparently if youre traveling as a band, you need to have a DOT number.

somewhere in pennsylvania, a butterfly slipped into the van window and smashed into aaron’s face.

i keep buying shit at gas stations for pat to wear. he also has a flat brimmed hat with a dollar sign on it - which he bought.

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

we’re sitting at kevin from pass judgement’s posh artschool apartment. apparently chicago is a much better place than minneapolis, although that certainly isnt some grand accomplishment.

we left at 11 am this morning, maybe later. we had to go back and grab some of Logan from Much Worse’s shit out of a car. there, we discovered that we had left all of our shirts in his trunk. i wrote “drunk” instead of “trunk” for the record, then almost did it again writing “trunk” again.

joel sat in the back and drank whiskey and wrote love notes to our notorious weirdo driver, aaron, who kept blasting the mars volta and circa survive. it was fine. we ate at some weirdo diner where max tried and failed to charm the waitress into giving us a smile. i had some salad with lunch meat and too much cheese. there were cheese curds. who cares.

we got a flat tire around madison. who cares. it was kind of fucked because on one side, you have tons of fucking assholes speeding by and scaring you every instant. on the other side, you have an army of crickets shooting everywhere. i walked up and down the side of the road singing a song i wrote called, “master of crickets”

master of crickets
extending your legs
jumping away, and laying your eggs
blinded by me youre a fucking cricket

who cares. they managed to get all the bolts and whatever off but they couldnt get the tire off. so we called triple a and they smashed the thing with the hammer of thor in five minutes and changed the damn thing. then we bought a tire from some very cold and unfriendly wisconsinites for $100.

we got to the show at ranchos huevos with Aaron blasting “Dragula” by Rob Zombie. yeah. lot of kids there, made me feel like i should be a father. missed the first band and caught Culo, who actually played longer than five minutes. then a band called Birth Deformities played. good vocals from some dude who thought i was someone else and apologized over and over again for his mistake.

subclinix and male nurses played. both great. we played and it went well. the rock n roll show was awesome. it whupped a lama’s ass. we butchered Offenders’ “i hate myself” in a fantastic way. who cares. no one really bought our shit and we met up with our beautiful little pixie friend, rachael, from NC. who cares. who cares. who cares.

much worse played and some kid with a nice haircut and a stylish button up shirt killed everyone. i would later find out he actually paid a bunch of money for that shirt and Cody from Culo ripped it, all while being very close to fighting him. dude was not impressed but i’ll tell you, Cody seemed like the kind of dude who would fight you until he was in dead or in jail. i kinda care about that.

kid smashed in to me and busted up my nose. i bled a little and came back. last song i got shoved into the wall and tore my arm open. ranchos huevos gentlemen threw peroxide on the festering cut and bandaged me up before i had the chance to show everyone how cool i was covered in blood. then i threw up. maybe i threw up before. whatever.

blud

as of now, aaron and pat and logan went out walking somewhere. i think they were trying to go to a bar to “slam whores”, in aarons words. i have this song in my head from some band from dudes in fucked up/career suicide but i cant remember the name

we will come back to chicago and throw up all over its bushes again. hopefully max is dead in our van right now

who cares