tore diarrhea – nashville

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

taylor tuesdays.

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

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.

“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.