Journal - 2004

Phew

I have just completed a 3-day, 2000-mile car ride across the country. Actually, the car was towed behind my 15-foot moving truck. I am now a Californian. I suppose that this is as good a way as any to end 2004. Back in my high school senior dedication I wrote that "In Ten Years I'd Like To Be... touring the world and living under a palm tree in California." Funny how life gives you what you want in a manner that you might not have expected.

This new chapter of my life will bring some much-needed changes to the House of Joe. Here's to hoping that the changes are good. You shake the tree and you see what falls out. My attorney has already rung in 2005 in Australia. Glendale will do just fine for me this year.

Happy New Year, everybody - wherever you might be. 12.31.04



Four Legs Good

Her name is Sally. She's reddish brown with black brindle on her back. She also has white tummy and one white foot to match. She still pees on the floor. She still eats my dad's shoes. She chomped through my Ipod sync cable in one bite. Those things are expensive. She's been bitten on the nose twice by the other Armstrong Family Dogs, and there is nothing in the world more heart-wrenching than a bleeding puppy. She's fine now. Even though she has one old and one new scar. She has just about got the "sit" thing down and we're working on "wait." This is significant because two words is a good percentage of her total eventual vocabulary. I can't believe that I have a dog. I have no business having a dog. I can barely feed myself. And I wasn't even looking. She chose me. And that's how it happens. 12.23.04



Well, The Weather Outside...

Sucks. I have worn out my weather welcome with a particular friend of mine. She knows who she is. I'll admit that I have spent my life elevating complaining about the weather to high art. For now, it is cold and shitty and I am complaining. Not for long. Tee he. 12.20.04



If We Had a Puppy

There is a dog in my life. A little brown hound dog wandered into the perimeter of The Armstrong Ranch just under two weeks ago. I took her under my wing and into my schedule. She is a puppy and all that that implies. She pees on the floor. She eats shoes. She barks at the cat. She bays when I put her into solitary confinement in the bathroom at night. She thinks the catbox is like a bowl of Snickers bars. She sleeps where she is not supposed to sleep. She has the attention span of a goldfish. But I think I love her. Puppies have a way with this.

I have made several sorties to the pet supply store. I picked up dog training books and I pore over them looking for some semblence of hope and a chance at eventual sanity. I always said that if I were ever to get a puppy it would be in the summer when I was single. I guess I blew that one. It is cold, dark and rainy outside and there isn't a cute girl with two braids anywhere in sight.

But Sally looks at me with those puppy eyes and I am done in. I take her out in the morning. I take her out before bed. I take her out about a thousand times in between. In fact... between the 2nd and 3rd sentences of this paragraph someone caught her trying to pee on the floor and I had to take her out again. I bought her a squirrel that has squeakers in its belly and tail. I also procured an assortment of chew toys to see what she might prefer. So far the corn starch bone and the seemingly canine narcotic "greenie" are her favorites. 12.7.04



Hell

Tonight is one of those nights. I have some sort of stomach ailment which has had me doubled over in pain for hours. I've tried antacid tablets and the pink stuff and nothing seems to help. I'm not nauseous but I almost wish that I was. Maybe I'd feel better if I could get whatever is hurting me out of my digestive system.

Compounding the problem is an incessantly crying puppy in the bathroom next to my bed. Yet another errant dog wandered onto The Armstrong Compound tonight. Butch and Kenny were barking up a storm and mom went outside to see what was happening and we ended up rescuing a small female hound dog from the clutches of the territorial Armstrong Family Dogs. She was shivering and skinny and terrified so we took her inside, gave her some milk and drew her a bath. She smelled much better afterwards and eventually fell asleep on the couch. Knowing what there is to know about puppies, mom and I decided that she'd better spend the night in the bathroom. She has been howling and crying ever since. I checked on her a bit ago and ended up cleaning up some pee and a giant pile of shit. This is what puppies do.

All in all I think that it might not be such a problem if it were one thing or the other. The combination of the two has forced me out of bed and back to my desk. I have turned to the only friend who is up at this hour, my old friend The Internet. I have perused music sites. I have written e-mail to old human friends. I have checked my e-mail a dozen times in hopes that some west coast crony might have responded. I have downed the better part of a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. I finished an Orwell book. I ate some crackers. I have stared down my clock. I don't know what else to do. I guess I'll just attempt to ride out this little bit of hell and hope for respite in the morning. 11.24.04



Full Circle

Not quite but very nearly. Alabama to Dallas to LA to Utah to Chicago to Nashville to Alabama to Washington to New York to Hanover, NH to Burlington, VT to Washington to Columbus, OH to Washington to Alabama. Damn. It is now Thanksgiving week. I'm looking forward to catching up on some rest, sorting through mail and playing my Martin. I borrowed a Gibson Hummingbird acoustic guitar while staying in Los Angeles. Thanks to Jason Rossi for his generosity. They are great guitars but I miss my Martin. There has also been a saga involving a keyboard I bought on Ebay that UPS destroyed in shipping. I got my money back from the seller - a concientious member of society who didn't hang me out to dry in the situation - unlike United Parcel Service with whom the seller is still fighting in order to get them to claim responsibility for the damage. The moral of the story? Read the fine print. Purchasing insurance can sometimes mean nothing more than that some insurance company will have a paid representative to tell you to fuck off when they break your item. I found another good deal on another keyboard on Ebay and it is waiting for my return home tonight. This time it arrived in one piece. 11.22.04



Live from Han(g)over

OK, I'm not there yet but I'm on my way. I'm sitting in Reagan Interntional Airport awaiting my 2nd of the three flights it will take me to get to Hanover, New Hampshire. I'd wager that I'm not the first guy to make that joke. It is new to me as I have never been to Han(g)over, New Hampshire. I have, however, been to Hangover.

The last few days have been a little insane. LA to Chicago on Monday. My attorney and I checked into The Hopleaf at around 6:30pm and very nearly closed the place. This was an accident but not entirely unexpected. Tuesday brought lots of practice playing my Electrowhocardioflux for the Jeff Buckley show at Uncommon Ground that night. The show went well and I went to sleep on the couch afterwards. Wednesday morning brought a healthy breakfast of huevos con chorizo at Fiesta Mexicana, a walk to the corner liquor store for some Double Cream Stout and a 4-hour Soprano's viewing marathon. I did the second Buckley show and aferwards watched The Soprano's season finale. Thursday was up and at 'em after another couch night of dreams filled with snow and shotguns. I flew to Nashville to meet up with my brother who drove my Honda up from Alabama that we might see the band Hem play that night. I'm still in love with that band. We struck off for home just after midnight. I arrived home around 2:30am and picked through mail and passed out in my bed. This morning was up again, again and off to the airport, bringing us to where I am now - sitting in Reagan International Airport. 11.19.04



4 for 4

I have spent the last three days in Chicago. When I arrived on Monday afternoon the sky had the typical Middle Western slate gray pallor. When I awoke on Tuesday the sky was gray. Wednesday all day? Gray. And now, sitting at O'Hare International Airport on Thursday at noon, you guessed it... gray. At least it was relatively warm - and I really shouldn't complain. I honestly didn't expect anything other than gray.

November is typical of any month of weather in Chicago, which is to say that it is unpredictable. You'd think I'd get tired of writing, talking and thinking about Chicago weather. I guess I'm fairly predictable as well.

U2 is currently performing at the dedication ceremony for the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. It is pouring rain and Bono and The Edge are simply ignoring the downpour as they soar through Sunday Bloody Sunday. The event has an air of the end of Star Wars Episode I when the Jedi masters are standing next to Senator Palpatine, whom we all know is really the dark Emperor of the Sith. Standing under umbrellas on the dais are Presidents Carter, George H. W. Bush, President and Senator Clinton as well as that current idiot that half country elected a couple weeks back. Curse the red states.

5 for 5

I played my fifth consecutive Jeff Buckley Tribute Concerts this week. That's five in the last five years and this year was only the 7th overall. The every first was apparently only readings and poetry and such. This means that I only missed one year of music. I didn't even know that the event existed until I started playing shows at Uncommon Ground. The owner, Michael Cameron suggested that I come and play for the Buckley thing. That was five years ago.

This year brought in over five hundred submissions from artists around the world. I was once again happy to have been selected as one of the roughly twenty five artists who would be selected to perform. Over the years I've done a twang version of Eternal Life, an three-voice acapella version of Last Goodbye, a Nick Drake style 4/4 arrangement of Lover, You Should've Come Over, a subdued acoustic Mojo Pin, a foot stomping Yard of Blonde Girls and this year's peculiar arrangement of Hallelujah. Buckley's version of the Leonard Cohen song is a gorgeous multi octave dreamscape. The idea for my version of Hallelujah was hatched last summer shortly after I found a peculiar instrument at a used music shop. It is actually called a chord organ but I refer to is at an Electrowhocardioflux. It is a cheaply-made plastic keyboard instrument that words like a harmonica crossed with a pipe organ. It is a little out of tune with itself and is clacky and hard to play, but it sounds amazing. My arrangement wound up working pretty well. It met my primary requirement for this event which is that it sounded very little like the original version.

There were fewer of the usual cadre of Buckley imitators at this year's event. This is a welcome change. I like Jeff Buckley's music. Don't get me wrong. But I must admit that I simply do not like Jeff Buckley like a lot of the performers who show up for this event assuredly do. My music sounds nothing like Buckley's. I wouldn't emulate is vocal style if I could. I have always preferred a simpler and more direct style of singing. Buckley's emotive vocals are a big part of what made him unique, but if your name is not Jeff Buckley you might consider leaving that style to him. Find your own voice. 11.18.04



Thursday

Here's an interesting tidbit. ABC is planning on running the movie Saving Private Ryan sometime soon. Affiliates in 8 states are going to pre-empt the broadcast out of concern for decency. One of the affiliates said that they didn't want to show the movie in a time of war.

What?

Am I missing something here?

Some of the other affiliates make statements about potential FCC fines and possible complaints from viewers. Perhaps the strangest aspect to all of this is the fact that this is at least the 3rd television airing of the movie. 11.11.04

WE'RE FUCKED !!!
(51% - 49%)

It Seems Like Only Yesterday

But it was long ago. All the way back to last Monday. One week ago today the future seemed like it might be brighter. Good sense and forward thinking just might prevail. In the last 6 days I have endured transcontinental slander sessions, dejection, incredulity, exasperation, disgust with christian conformists, anger towards the ruling class, a teleconference pub session head check with my attorney, and experienced a call to even greater action. Something must be done.

The prideful evangelicals are attempting to lead us through the storm with one hand on the bible and the other on the pilot wheel. They are truly deluded into thinking that a book of fiction will help them steer when the reality is that they're going to need both hands regardless of their color.

The word on the street is that the votes were all tabulated on a few PCs just like the one you're staring into right now. Let me ask you an honest question. Does it always work as it is supposed to? I am no technophobe - I carry a small cadre of computing power nearly everywhere I go - but I am quite leery of electronic voting. The process is barely legitimate when there is a paper trail to follow. Any 8th grader could have hacked the voting computers bribed with on a new copy of Halo and a bag of Cheetos.

This train of thought may or may not even get me/us anywhere. Bullets with little American flags on them are spilling blood the world over. Those bullets were bought with Christian tax dollars. If you're a Christian you are going to have to answer for that one way or another. They don't like to think about it. I'm proud to say that I am part of the 48%. There are an awful lot of us out there and it is up to us to not keep out mouths shut. We'll charge the pilot house when the time is right. 11.8.04



Ahem

Tonight's CNN.com headline story title reads "Poll Find Americans Hopeful." To whom do I write a letter that simply says "Fuck You?" 11.4.04



Donkeys Live A Long Time

We are so fucked that I don't know where to begin. I try not to be pessimistic but I really think that this is the beginning of the end for America. Sound drastic? Look at the numbers. What kind of national debt are we going to have after four more years of incompetent leadership? Our great grandchildren will be paying off the debt as it currently stands. How are those same young people going to feel when they have to pay off the national debt on a military salary once compulsory military service becomes a reality? How are we going to stretch our already overextended military enough to invade a couple more countries? Like trees? Take a picture. We're going to cut them all down to get at the last drop of available oil to make gasoline for our Hummers that the government already gives us a tax break to own. The future of Iraq? It will continue to blossom into the best Al Qaeda training ground that our money can buy. Be careful not to trip over that pile of bodies. Gay marriage? The kooks actually think that it is important enough to amend the constitution in order to take away the pursuit of happiness. Roe Vs. Wade? Forget it. The republican party will own your uterus. Once that fucking idiot appoints a couple more zealot right wing supreme court justices the republicans will have control of the executive and judicial branches, the house of representatives and the senate. Big Brother is watching.

I am embarrassed to be an American. I am frightened for our future. I am sickened to look into the eyes of my countrymen and women knowing that fully half of them actually cast a vote for that man. In a word, I am disgusted. Oh, and I'm thinking Costa Rica. The weather is nicer. 11.3.04



By A Nose

It's late for the likes of me. I'm on the west coast but my body still operates on Central Time. It has been a long day of election coverage and typing tests. I have tortured myself long enough and I am headed to bed with the race 249-242, according to CNN. My guess is that if this is where it stands now it will be pretty close to this in the morning. All the zealots in Alabama got their way. All the city folk in New York, Illinois, California, Boston carried their respective states as well. As usual, I am embarrassed to have anything to do with Alabama and proud to call Chicago home. And, come tomorrow morning I might be even more embarrassed to be an American, period. But I'll withhold my concession until the numbers have all been tallied up. For now, goodnight America. Sleep well. Never had a valet. Most likely kill you in the morning. 11.2.04 11:46pm PST


Wake Me When It's Over

OK. It's getting on towards the end of this farce. It's 249-200 according to CNN. To no one's surprise, Fox is calling 269-211. Those assholes didn't even count California until just a bit ago. I have to admit that things aren't looking good for my side. All in all the little red and blue map of the states definitively outlines the states where I might like to live. 11.2.04 - 10:28pm PST



Not a Finger

My middle finger is getting sore from pressing the f5 key - the key that refreshes my browser thereby updating my electoral college count. I'll be using that finger for something else if Kerry doesn't win this election. 11.2.04 - 8:12pm PST



Blue Vs. Red

The games have been raging all day. Polls have closed in a few eastern states and the outlines on the little map are nearly all red. This was expected and is well within the game plan. My attorney and I have spent a goodly amount of time chatting about this nonsense today. We have done all we can do and the election will go on without us whether or not we watch. But we are in agreement that we simply cannot look away. I know that watching won't change the outcome. In fact, it will just stress me out. But I can't not watch. So, like last week's world series the elections is a game of numbers. Will I sleep a little better tonight knowing that the pendulum has swung a little back towards logical thinking or will I stay up late in order to begin to iron on the letters to my home made "We're Fucked" t-shirt? 11.2.04 - 4:21pm PST



D-Day

OK, folks. This is it. The future is in our hands. At least I'd like to think that it is. Given our system of government it is supposed to be. Is this one going to be decided by non-elected officials like last time? The lawyers have been in a frenzy for four years after the Lake Michigan-sized bucket of chum got dumped into the water during the last election.

What I simply can't understand is how so many Americans have been duped. The christian masses have been courted by a decidedly bloodthirsty administration and they fell for it. Never mind the piles of corpses in the sand. We make decisions with god on our mind! Never mind the likely fact that stem cell research could lead to cures for millions of people who suffer every day. Never mind that even the widow of their holiest saint, saint Ronald, publicly supported lifting the ban on stem cell research. Never mind the spiraling budget deficit and the billion-dollar-a-week war against Islam. Major combat is over! The banner said so. Our C-student warrior president landed on an aircraft carrier. (I wonder how much that little stunt cost.) We saw the whole thing on TV.

The republicans just couldn't let go of the flip-flop issue. Well, what is it when someone tells you one thing, like "we are invading Iraq to protect ourselves from weapons of mass destruction" and then change their tune to "we invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator?" That's called a lie. Would you rather follow someone who changed their mind when the choice proved to be incorrect or someone who marched on in blind stupidity. In business school it is called escalation of commitment. Dubya and his war-profiteering cronies are guilty of hubris, among other things.

It could be argued that at one point it was important for our elected officials (Kerry) to support our commander in chief (Dubya) trusting that he'd Do The Right Thing, but that they (Kerry) change their minds when he (Dubya) blew it on a grand scale.

My own sister will cast a republican vote today because she only cares about the issue of abortion. I feel for her. I have my pet issues as well, but it is so frightfully shortsighted to not consider the big picture. It is all-too-logical that the republicans don't want abortion to be legal. In the hyper-militaristically industrialized future we're going to need every warm body we can get in order to throw them at the enemy of the week and show our resolve.

The christian right actually think that they're doing the right thing by voting for Dubya. A conservative friend of mine chants "peace through strength." That might have made some sense in another time when the war was a sickening battle of stockpiles. What we now have ourselves embroiled up to our necks in is "senseless killing as a means to peace." I have said it before. War begets war.

This just in from my attorney. "I feel that I don't need to explain to you the irony behind me voting in a church this morning."

What is perhaps frightening is how logical our enemy sounds. The transcript of Osama bin Laden's recent Al-Jazeera tape is case and point. Although I don't agree with his methodology he has a better battle plan. It's almost funny that he just tells us what he's trying to accomplish. And here we are marching around in the desert. He's fighting a religious war by undermining an economy and we're fighting an economic war and trying to hide the fact that our president thinks that it is a religious war.

But I must digress. I could sit here ALL DAY and address this topic from every conceivable angle in this obtuse universe in which I have come to live. My fingers are crossed. My vote is cast. I can only refresh by CNN.com browser so many times a minute. There's a good chance that I'll be updating this several times today. For now I will attempt to avert my eyes. 11.2.04 - 1:00pm PST

BOO!

Happy Halloween! 10.31.04



Aye

I have voted. I went to the local circuit clerk's office today and filled out my absentee ballot because I won't be around come election day. There were many people doing the same in the rather small Lawrence County Courthouse. The rumbling from all across the land is that this election means something. People are registering, and by all accounts of absentee balloting they are actually voting. The country is polarized. The fools who support Dubya are trying to hold on to the current climate of warmongering and corporate greed in the sheep's clothing of alleged moral superiority. The rest of us are attempting to wrench the pilot wheel away from those white-knuckled war profiteers. Oh, I'm sorry. Are you voting for Dubya? Are you offended because I called you a fool? Well, I'll say it again. You are a fool. What have I got to lose? I don't sell a lot of records anyway. I'd venture to say that most folks who are reading this would have found a more like-minded place to while away their idle afternoon hours in their pen working for The Man a long time ago. They likely think I'm a fool and the feeling is decidedly mutual.

All in all I am throwing my vote away. Not because I'm voting for the wrong person or some renegade third party candidate but because Dubya will carry the state of Alabama. Alabama is filled with Dubya-heads. They don't care that he was a boozer. They don't care if he skipped out on Vietnam by joining the Air National Guard and then even went AWOL from them. They don't care if he has waged a war against the environment or that he made the budget surplus go "poof" by simultaneously waging a war and cutting taxes. They are not concerned that his pet war has gotten thousands killed, maimed or worse. They are only concerned that god told him to tell them that he should be "president."

But my civic duty is done. Now it's time to sit back and watch the inevitable come to me. Someone will be president when we all wake up on November 3rd. If the judiciary and the chum-crazed lawyers can stay the hell out of it we may even have our man by the time we go to bed on the 2nd. 10.22.04



Damn Yankees

I watched baseball. I actually watched baseball. And I'm not talking about my nephew's pitching machine aluminum bleacher little league brand. I watched the ACLS between the Red Sox and the Yankees. I caught the end of one of the opening Sox losses in Chicago at a friend's house. They'd all but been written off. I'm sure that there were many New Yorkers who were having a hard time picking out what outfit they'd be wearing to the World Series. The fat lady was warbling. And then Boston stole a game. That's when I started paying attention. Fighting my father for the remote is a tricky business. It was halfway through the Sox' second win when we tuned in on Monday night. "Ain't nothin' on anyway" was his declaration when we settled on the baseball game.

I'll admit that I got caught up in what seemed like might be a wave of history coming towards the world. The Red Sox won that marathon game five in extra extra innings. Then there was last night's 4-2 victory, also watched in the Armstrong Entertainment Module. Not a domination by any sense of the word, but record-breaking nonetheless. Even dad - exclusively a college football devotee - seemed marginally interested in this snowball's chance in hell of a 7th and final game of this series. He was asleep by the 4th inning. In some ways I can't blame him. Boston jumped to a strong early lead - mostly on the Paul Bunyan bat swinging of Johnny Damon. Why is it that his pretty boy looks and flowing hair don't rub me the way that poseur Rick Fox does?

The Yankees started to fight back but they simply couldn't get it together. History had already dictated that their gig was up. All that Yankee hype. All that pin striped nonsense. All that A-Rod off season sports radio blather. The tea has been dumped into the bay. Boston is going to the World Series. 10.21.04



Now Or Never, Too Close to the Latter

I'm sad to report some bad news. Son Volt is not reuniting. It's actually worse than that. Jay Farrar is recording another album under the name Son Volt but he will be the only original member. This development has saddened me greatly. I got a nice little bump in good feelings knowing that something I truly loved was going to once again exist. It now looks as if my beloved Son Volt will be just another Credence Clearwater Revisited. Hats off to Mike Heirdorn and the Boquist brothers for attempting to make more music with the obviously difficult Farrar. For me, it's back to autumnal brooding. We're all living proof that nothing lasts. 10.17.04



Stay on Target

Well then. Here I am. Back from another whirlwind trip to somewhere or other. The debate season is finished. The word on the street is that Kerry won all three debates. Based on my observations I would tend to agree. It was subtle, but Bush's incompetence and lack of speaking ability cost him the only chance he had to face his opponent. I guess you could say that he showed America what he is made of. The thing that gets me is that lots of people - roughly half of those polled - don't seem to mind.

For now, the race is a dead tie. We have the inaccuracy of polling statistics to confuse the matter. We also have the fact that people who use exclusively mobile phones have no way of being polled. Michael Moore is out on a speaking tour in an attempt to get the slackers off the couch, past the piles of Taco Bell wrappers on their floors and into the polling halls. Michigan alone has shown record numbers of newly registered voters in the past few weeks.

Not so long ago - before debate season - I was talking to a friend who had all but conceded the election because Kerry had been slipping in the polls. I told her to stop that nonsensical talk at once, explaining that having that sort of attitude can be contagious. Water cooler gatherers all across the nation could start convincing one another that there is no point in fighting. I simply cannot let that happen, if only in my own sphere of influence. I made it up on the spot, but she bought it and I still think that it is the right thing to perpetuate. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Obviously Not Left Behind

I happened across an article about the Alabama educational system the other day and thought I might share some important statistics with you. Alabama is 45th in per-pupil expenses $5,937 and ranks 29th in classroom size, averaging 15.7 students per teacher. Incidentally, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Massachusetts rank 1,2, 3 in top-performing public schools in America - with Alabama staggering in at a shameful 47th. Money might not be able to buy happiness or love but it actually can buy better teachers. Anyone can tell you about a teacher in their formative years that made whatever subject they happened to teach seem fun. Education is the key as far as I'm concerned. Education and some magic beans.

Texas Tea

A barrel of crude oil set a record by selling at a dumbfounding $55US today. One can actually see this exorbitant amount reflected in our local at-the-pump prices out here in Hip-de-do. The gas station closest to The Armstrong Compound has a posted price of $1.9299 for the cheap stuff. Some of these folks might have to make fewer trips to town on the tractor. 10.15.04



The Dog of War

I actually listened to the Vice Presidential debates last night. My father was dozing in front of the TV so I opted for NPR, which was fine. Cheney is scary to look at anyway. I also watched the Presidential debates last week. Boo ya for John Kerry. Bush stuttered and stammered like an old lawn mower. More on this later. All I have time to mention now is that the very first thing out of Dubya's mouth last week was the word "September." Can you guess what number followed? It seems to me that the prevailing word and dogma for the republicans is fear. Edwards' eagerness counters this with a message of hope. So there you have it. Hope vs. Fear. You choose. 10.6.04



And in This Corner

From Texas, the world's most incompetent semi-freely-elected man, Dubya. Facing him, from Massachusetts, an exceedingly wealthy and moderately engaging long-faced man, John Kerry. The presidential debates start in 24 minutes. And yes, I refrained from capitalizing that title on purpose. Hold on tight, folks. This is going to be quite a ride. 9.30.04



Sky Captain

Burt Rutan is The Man. Not The Man who made you wash dishes for minimum wage every Saturday night at the local retirement home when you were in high school. The Man as in the Grand Poobah. His company, Scaled Composites, is halfway to winning the Ansari X Prize. What, you might ask, is the Ansari X Prize?

Modeled after the aviation awards offered to the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic ocean in the early 1900s, The Ansari X Prize is a ten million dollar prize that will be awarded to the first non-governmental group to send the same craft, a pilot and three passengers to sub orbital space twice in two weeks. Rutan's company successfully made the first of the two flights today, sending pilot Mike Melvill 67 miles into the sky over the Mojave Desert.

The whole concept of the Ansari X Prize is to foster the space tourism industry. As for now, this industry doesn't exist. Denis Tito paid the exorbitant price tag of $20 million to get himself launched to the International Space Station in 2001. Most regular folks probably can't fit that sort of expenditure into their monthly budget. Granted, the $200,000.00 estimated price tag for the first rounds of suborbital space travel is also a little steep, but it is getting closer.

Moreover, this feat of science is unparalleled in human history because it is the first time that a non-government-sponsored spacecraft actually has gone that far into space. It is an astounding accomplishment. Move over, NASA, let Burt have a crack at it. 9.29.04



Glory Day

One never knows what news will befall them upon waking on any given day of their life. We wake up to births, deaths, miracles and cataclysms all the time. This morning I woke to find that one of my favorite bands ever - Son Volt - is reuniting.

Son Volt was borne of the dissolution of a short lived but widely revered little band from Belleville, Illinois named Uncle Tupelo. Their name was chosen out of two lists and their music was an amalgam of punk and pre-rock and roll American styles. Not jazz, but the simple folk music of rural America. The band was eventually torn asunder by the desire for a shared spotlight from the songwriter who hadn't spent his formative years working in the family used bookstore. Jeff Tweedy wanted to be a rock musician. Son Volt's founder and the prime Uncle Tupelo visionary was Jay Farrar. Farrar was a seer.

Tweedy wrote about inner space - what lies inside and between people. Farrar's songs came from a more universal worldview. Tweedy went on to form the band Wilco after the disbanding of Uncle Tupelo at Farrar's behest. In Wilco, Tweedy mined new depths of those intensely personal spaces to critical acclaim and slow but steadily growing revenues. Farrar formed Son Volt before the Tupelo dust had even settled.

Son Volt's first album, Trace, is seen as a watershed moment in the alternative country/twangy rock movement. The band had a little success and sold a few records, going on to make two more CDs before Farrar again grew restless and put the band on indefinite hiatus. Most of us thought them gone for good while Jay Farrar released a pair of solo albums and toured the country mostly alone.

And then I woke up this morning. An e-mail from an old friend had a subject line that read "The Volt is back." A quick visit to Jay Farrar's website confirmed what would turn out to be another stellar moment in what has already promised to be a brilliant fall for music.

A new Steve Earle record is already on my Ipod. October 5th brings us new records by Tom Waits and Hem. Later in the month we'll also see new releases by Beck, Elliott Smith, Camper Van Beethoven, Mark Knopfler and John Fogerty. When it rains it pours. What a great day to wake up.

Falling

Autumn is upon us once more. Here in Alabama the days are noticeably shorter but still warm. The nights are cooler than just a week or two ago and there are plenty of trills and chirps and creaks from the forest to help me sleep. The sun has slipped to that slight sideways, yellow angle and that always makes afternoons seem to last forever. Halloween is the first in a series of holidays that are about to whirl past you like a crazed sparrow. I recall making a mental note to write about the cardboard school supply list kiosk that showed up at the entrance to the local Wal Mart back in July. It is now long gone, along with the memories of the first day of the school year.

I love fall, I always have. I've said it a thousand times and no doubt penned it in here more than once, but I have always felt that fall is the most beautiful story ever written with a tragic ending. That ending doesn't stop me from enjoying the ride. In fact, it has a way of making the plot development all the more sweet.

To me, autumn has always been the most romantic of the seasons. It occupies a smoky, yellow, crisp-night place in my heart. It is corn shocks and pumpkins. Apples and smoldering leaf piles. The high school musical and first kisses. Indian Summer and caramel apples. It is mustard-yellow long sleeved shirts and picking pumpkins out of the patch at a farm.

Carving pumpkins is one of my absolutely favorite things to do on the planet ever. Halloween has long been my favorite holiday and carving pumpkins is the prime tradition. I have snapshot memories of pulling them in off the cool of the porch, cutting a round hole around the top and removing the cap and then sticking my hand inside to feel the frost around the sinew dangling with seeds.

Dad would always remove the screen from the wooden storm door and don some sort of ridiculous mask - something usually involving a flashlight. A giant, stainless steel bowl of candy sat next to the inside of the door, and just outside sat the pumpkins with whimsical, tortured faces flickering warm light into the night.

I'd tear out our front door and run through the darkness, the chilly air stinging my lungs through the Hong Kong Phooey mask, astronaut helmet or brown bigfoot face paint. I'd jump and land on a porch where a set of some other family's carved orange faces were staring up at me. As I ran from house to house my bag would slowly fill with a sweet smelling mélange that would keep me up nights nearly until Thanksgiving. It was a dentist's dream. And as the night wore on and the bag grew heavy the jack-o'-lanterns on the porches would sag imperceptibly and the smell of candle-cooked pumpkin would welcome me to every door. Sometimes, I'd hit the mother lode as an elderly woman would dump the entirety of her remaining candy into my bag, smiling and saying that there probably wouldn't be any more children by her house that night. She'd hear my voice shouting "thank you!" as I ran back into the darkness with a mouth agape from the good fortune.

And then I was back home. Halloween, although well into autumn, always seemed like a last rite of summer to me, and that made going to bed on Halloween night a somber event. It was at once the climax and the sudden end of the warm weather and all that that entailed. I would dump out my bag on my bedroom floor deflecting my father's hyena-like pilfering of a few Butterfingers or Snickers. I'd stash it all in a desk drawer and climb into bed. Mom would always let me bring my pumpkin into my room where I'd set it on the dresser. Out went the light and the pumpkin and me would have a staring contest - me with my sugar-fueled but sleepy green blue and the pumpkin with a flickering yellow. I always imagined it outlasting me and protecting me from the spirits of Halloween as I slept. And that is likely what it did, year after year.

You'll still find me carving pumpkins on Halloween night. In Chicago it was on my porch starting before dark with an array of carving tools, a bowl of candy and a bottle opener for my Octoberfest or Pale Ale. I'm bigger now but I'll never outgrow the boy who ran from house to house in the ghost-filled darkness. And this year I'll still go to sleep with a jack-o'-lantern on my dresser. Summer will officially be over and once the pumpkin has won the stare down yet again I'll dream of me in a bigfoot costume as a big, yellow smiling face flickers on my ceiling. 9.28.04



Down to the Wire

OK. Here we go. Six more weeks to go before a genuine, bona fide Judgment Day. Are you registered to vote? If you aren't, why? Write to me here and give me one good reason. I have heard right thinking people conceding this election and am proud to say that I have talked them out of that sort of mindset. This is important, folks. If we don't vote this privileged, unqualified, undereducated dolt out of office in six weeks' time the madness is just going to continue.

We still have our buddy Kim Jong Il giving us the finger. A big, ballistic missile-shaped finger. There are bodies floating down the flooded streets of Haiti and thousands of our own citizens living on the street. Dubya got us into a king-sized mess and has no legitimate plan for getting us out save for imperialistic proselytization. He lied to us about weapons of mass destruction and his resulting spin should make us all nauseous.

So, get up and get out. Get off your feet and register. And get out on November 2nd and do your patriotic duty. John Kerry is not the most charismatic man in the world, much less the Presidential race. But there is one key thing that he isn't and that is George W. Bush. That is all he need be. 9.25.04



Ivan vs. Alabama

The latest scourge from Hurricane Season '04 ravaged Alabama while I was gone on the last Dashboard trip. I didn't escape unscathed. The outermost arm of Ivan was parked over Atlanta when I arrived there for my connecting flight last Wednesday. One must naturally go through Atlanta to get from Alabama to Oklahoma. I wound up sitting inside a steamy prop plane on the tarmac in Alabama and then spent nearly 7 additional hours killing time at Heartsfield International Airport because I missed my second flight as a result of the delay.

The Armstrong Compound is a long way from the gulf but Ivan carved out a path of destruction hundreds of miles inland. For my parents it was some serious wind, sideways rain and downed trees that led to a power outage. The yard still is covered in leaves from the trees that surround The Compound. The view off the top of the moutain usually consisits of glimpses of sky in the day and just a few distant lights at night. Now, with half the leaves gone off the trees the valley is plainly visible.

My brother Mike and I had been planning another mountain biking trip on the trails close to our parent's place since the last one had to be cut short because my rear derailleur needed some serious adjustments. After three hours, much toil, some carefully chosen expletives and some Internet research I got the Cannondale back online and Mike and I hit the Pine Torch Trail yesterday morning. The weather couldn't have been better. Only September seems to have skies like that. I sort of expected slow going as there was likely to be trees down across the trail, and if the number of leaves covering the yard at home was any indicator we might even have a hard time following the trail at points. The trail turned out to be worse still. There were points when we just walked our bikes between downed trees. There were giant pines sure to be filled with chiggers, cowcumber trees with their giant windblown leaves covering everything, majestic thick-trunked oaks which we were incapable of riding over and slender elms covered in poison sumac vines complete with scores of berries. I found a product that blocks poison ivy from bonding to skin, thereby preventing infection. So far so good. 9.24.04



A Brilliant Writer's Almanac

Something I stumbled across that was penned by Garrison Keillor. Man, can this guy write or what?

As always, brought to you without permission in hopes that the subject matter justifies my e-theivery. 9.22.04



Deep in the Heart of Texas

Live from Austin. I am homeward bound from a weekend in Austin, Texas. I really love this town. I have echoed this sentiment before more than once. What other airport in the world plays public address music that I might listen to? Dashboard came down here to play the Austin City Limits Music Festival last night. This is my third visit to Austin in a year and I have to say that I never grow tired of the place. It is such an oddity that I don't know where to begin. (Another great song on the airport PA.)

It is hot here. And I mean HOT. It was 97 degrees through the afternoon yesterday and it was just as sultry the previous day when my cronies and I came down to the festival to see whatever acts we could see. Our flight arrived late in the day so we only made it down to Zilker Park - where the festival is staged every year - in time to see Gomez and Ryan Adams. Seeing a band perform live can sometimes codify any preconceived impression of them that you might have. And it can work either way. In the cases of both Gomez and the other Adams it seemed to do both at once.

I had forgot that Zilker park was as far as it was from the main north/south street of central Austin and the two band members who had walked over with me were rather dour about the miscalculation. Those of us who had at some point run 26.2 consecutive miles on purpose didn't find the walk to be particularly strenuous but those of us who have successfully made a living playing in professional rock bands were not amused. Having arrived at the festival after the slightly-longer-than-anticipated walk over from the hotel my associates and myself made a beeline for the backstage area at the Heineken stage where there were sure to be libations. Our artist-level passes allowed us backstage access to any stage that hadn't been deemed VIP-only. We loaded up on Dutch beer and enjoyed the warm embrace of a Texas September evening. Beer, as they say, heals all wounds and Scott the Bass Player soon forgot about the arduous hike. (Yet another great song on the airport PA system.)

I had heard a couple tracks and many good things about the British band Gomez and thought I might like to see what they were about for myself from the prime vantage point of the observation platform just off stage left. The beer was also free and readily available at this stage. Gomez both impressed and annoyed me with their Stone Roses-meets-Widespread Panic noodle pop. The songs were good and thankfully free of the posturing that British bands traditionally eschew. The annoying facets were just behind the backline of amplifiers where an unnecessarily large percussion setup and Neal Peart-sized drum set sat and fell victim to no less than two overplaying drummers. I am of the opinion that drummers simply don't need more cymbals than brains. Less truly is more and most mature, accomplished drummers prove this time and time again.

To me, Ryan Adams has always been like the Lenny Kravitz of roots rock. He has some good songs and brief moments of beauty but one generally can draw a straight line from any one of his songs that leads straight to another song in the rock and roll lexicon. In other words, it is that he is simply too derivative for my tastes. I'll admit that I like Lenny Kravitz. For the most part, at least. I'll admit that I sort of like Ryan Adams as well. He has apparently released three albums in the last year - a stat that uniquely and precisely equals the number of shows he has given in the same timeframe. On Friday night in Austin Mr. Adams sounded as if he has been spending a lot of time lying around listening to Dead bootlegs.

His accomplished band ambled through songs that sounded a lot like The Allman Brothers or a number of other 70s staples. Austin pedal steel guru Catherine Somethingorother wept her steel around the changes. Adams' good guitar tone made up for his definitive lack of ability on the instrument. The nicest surprise came with the introduction of the band when I learned that the chick bass player was none other than Catherine Popper, who also just happens to play in what has become one of my favorite bands in the world - Brooklyn's quiet and disarmingly beautiful Hem.

This year's must have ACL Music Festival fashion accessory - the Lucinda Williams signature stylized straw cowboy hat. Every other beautiful young Austin girl at the festival had one to go along with her bikini top and hemp necklace. Some of the guys had them, too. I have tried to buy a cowboy hat more than once in the last year. I have checked truck stops and gas stations in several states as well as the local farmer's co-op near my parent's house all to no avail. Not only can I not find a hat with the proper balance of kitsch, square and manure I just can't find one to fit my head. It isn't even as if I have an unusually large head - although I'd invite you to try and convince some former girlfriends and band members of that fact.

Trey Anastasio just walked by. Amazing. There is a world class guitarist walking past me with his solitary carry on bag wearing a black long sleeved t-shirt and blue jeans. I just watched him headline two whole time slots at the festival last night and here he his headed home to Vermont.

There were still several acts performing on various stages when I finished packing Dashboard's gear. I decided to start with the Heineken Stage where I had just filled my belly with gratis green-canned beer the prior night. The Wailers were playing on that stage and a little reggae sounded like it might fit the bill. Maybe I'd even be able to use my pass to get backstage to get some more free beer. When I arrived the backstage was VIP-only and The Wailers weren't onstage. G. Love and Special Sauce were there funking it up with their cracker groove.

After G. Love there were only two more acts left from which to choose, Trey Anastasio and The Pixies. I decided to check out Trey first. He had a large band which consisted of the usual rock instrumentation augmented by a percussionist and a horn section. The worst player on that stage could likely play circles around just about anybody. Trey was the painter - calling out changes on the fly with hand signals. Purty cool. Once I'd had enough of the noodle dancers I made my way to the opposite side of the sizable festival grounds to see The Pixies do their thing.

The Pixies were big when I was a disc jockey back in college. They were a seminal alternative band in the period when alternative was beginning to be spelled with a capital letter. The inception of Alternative music as a genre is a little peculiar because it originally encompassed any music that couldn't be easily put in a definable category with a matching label-taped bin at a record store. It was Robyn Hitchcock and The Cowboy Junkies. It was Toad the Wet Sprocket and all of grunge which would eventually become its own capitalized genre. Everything now seems to be sub-sub-sub genres. Post-emo-hip hop-core-punk-tronica. But I'm getting off topic.

After a long walk from one side of the festival gronds to the other that gradually faded from Texas hippies into Texas hipsters I arrived at the Pixies stage, where they were indeed doing their thing. They weren't bad but they seemed to still lack whatever it was that didn't draw me to them back in their heyday. It might just be because I am not cool enough. They played the song that rolls over the credits of Fight Club and I nodded and grooved. It was then time to stand in the throngs of countless sweaty people and make my way back to the hotel.

It was a balmy night and there was an energy in the air. I like hot nights and the unnamed something in the air gave me the energy to walk back to my hotel. I stopped for a treat and then a delectable taco from a street vendor. I love Austin. I walked down Austin's answer to Bourbon Street, 6th Street, where the cops block off the streets after a certain hour and the smells of the local freaks' patchouli mingles with the out-of-towners' fragrance counter scents. I marched past them all and headed north. Stubb's BBQ is exactly what you would imagine it to be. It is also a live music venue that plays host to some amazing acts. This night it was hosting Wilco. I happened by during the latter portion of their set and sat down on the sidewalk to listen and sneak peeks through the loadout door behind the stage.

I had just spent a day loading in and out of that very door on another sultry Austin night a few months prior. When I first sat down it was just another girl and myself. Then there were five, and then ten, and soon there was a crowd milling about in front of the bus and one of the venue security guys asked us to shove off. I noticed a group of people standing on a parking garage next door and made my way up there. Just before I arrived at Stubb's I had noticed a solitary beer sitting on the back bumper of a parked pickup truck. I walked past, noting the beverage, and made deal with myself that I would walk back and check to see if it was cold, and if it was I'd claim it as my own.

I climbed the stairs to the top level of the parking garage with a cold beer in hand. Those of us gathered up there couldn't really see much of the stage but the sound and panoramic view of the Austin skyline were both much better. I popped the cap and enjoyed my latest haphazard discovery. (My attorney is convinced that my super power involves finding random objects at opportune moments.) I managed to catch the rest of the Wilco set and both their encores. It was most enjoyable, at least until some excitable-looking youth slowly saddled up next to my spot and began making bad conversation that eventually worked itself up to him asking me "hey dude, do you like mushrooms?"

For once, the cops arrived at the proper moment and asked all of us in the parking garage crowd if we were employees of the Austin Police Department. As it turned out they were the lease holders of the garage and those of us who were not on the city payroll would have to leave the premises. The last notes of the last song of the last encore were already diffusing into the humid air somewhere over I-35 when the cops showed up so I packed up and did what the officer asked.

And that was that for Austin. I've been there three times in the last year and every time I always think that I'm one step away from moving there. That one step is assuredly the rest of superconservative Texas. Case and point. I just saw a t-shirt with a confederate flag and a caption saying "If this flag offends you you need a history lesson." Perhaps they need a grammar lesson along with their revisionist history clarification.

I had the runner stop at an HEB grocery store on the way to the airport to stock up on Bob's Texas Style BBQ Potato Chips as they are unavailable outside of the Lone Star State. Beer from Michigan and the Pacific Northwest. Chips and Mexican food from Texas. Seafood from New England. Pizza from Chicago. You get the idea. I am now sitting in the poorly-designed George Bush International Airport in Houston awaiting my connecting flight back to 1950. Which reminds me... I never did talk about Alabama water pressure and the Republican National Convention.

Sponge Bath

The night before my last Dashboard one off weekend show was a study in contrast. The entire Armstrong Family Unit had driven off to North Carolina for the annual Family Rafting Trip. I had been planning to go for most of the summer when Dashboard decided that they wanted to play a show at a small, private university in Rhode Island the same weekend as the rafting trip. After the parental units split around noon on that Friday I reveled in the fact that I would had the house to myself for half an entire day. I got out my tube amp and cranked it up. I cleaned the kitchen in the traditionally fastidious Joe Armstrong manner. I didn't turn on the TV once. The evening was progressing perfectly right up to the point when I decided to take a shower. I'd noticed that the water pressure had been dwindling over the course of the afternoon and hoped that it would improve by nightfall. This was not the case. In fact, over the course of my pseudo sponge bath the tub only filled with about an inch and a half of water. There wasn't even enough pressure to make a single drop of water come out of the shower head when the little valve was switched. All of Alabama isn't like this but this latest water pressure fiasco is just one of a thousand things on the list which remind me that I don't belong there.

I'm With the Asses

The 2004 Republican National Convention passed without too much of a fracas. There were fences and there was barbed wire. There was John McCain vs. Michael Moore. There was just another flickering screen that gave me another set of reasons to not be a Republican. I hadn't thought too terribly much about it until I saw Pat Buchannon give his hate-filled, gay bashing convention speech a few years back. What an asshole. The fact that guys like Buchannon are Republicans is enough for me but you can just add that to the list.

I am not a Democrat but I think that Republicans are full of shit. All in all I feel as if the two party system on the whole is broken. I could rant for hours about the Democrat's inability to maintain any sort of cohesiveness. Perhaps this is because their platform needs to unite everyone left of center. The left is where the would be freaks reside. The freaks are sometimes as suspicious of one another as they are of the rest of society. Basically, if you are a zealot, wear camauflage for a living, have a desire to tell everyone else to live by a strict set of moral standards or you are deluded to the extent that you believe that corporate profit motive will make the right call when it comes to human well being or the protection of the environment you fall on the pachyderm side of this partisan chalk line. Me? I'm with the asses this time around. 9.19.04



The Cat Came Back

It wasn't the very next day like the song, but the Armstrong Family Cat has returned. Various search parties had been sent on foot, car and ATV to no avail. It had been days since the altercation with one of the Armstrong Family Dogs and no one had heard or seen Gato. Then, the other night, just as we had resigned ourselves to the fact that she was gone, dad came walking past the back of the house with one filthy cat in his grasp. This is funny because historically dad harbored no love for the cat.

She had tooth holes in her ear and head but seemed otherwise more or less OK. We set her down in the house, gathered 'round and lavished her with attention. Even cat-loathing dad admitted that he'd missed her rubbing his leg every morning. She was given food and water and she set to drinking more water than I've ever seen an animal get down. It was determined that she'd live through the night and that we'd take her to a vet in the morning. Since we hadn't seen her in so long I was of the opinion that Gato had been injured to the extent that her flight into the woods in hurried escape was her tragic mistake - sending her right into the maw of forest Darwinism. I figured that she'd already been eaten and pooped out. I'm glad she's back and I'll chalk that one up as a happy ending. Meow. 9.10.04



This Just In

Here are a couple newspaper articles that I have had sitting on the music stand in my bedroom for months. My original intent was to scan them and post a picture of the headlines here. There is a funny aspect to some words when they are listed in title print.

Here is another article. This one was snipped from a Melbourne, Australia paper back in March.

Perhaps it is unfair to label Dubya an asshole. He seems like a he'd be a good guy if he were merely the bumbling zealot who lived next to your parents - always coming over to BBQs and eating all the shrimp and usurping your father's ladder. But he is sadly not this relatively harmless caricature. He might be a bumbling zealot but he is perpetrating these bumbles on a grand scale by starting wars and supersizing the national debt. Why does no one remember that the younger Bush had never once been to Europe when he took office? Wouldn't one think that one would want the Leader of the Free World to have at least been to Europe before he took office? It wasn't as if he couldn't afford the trip.

Am I crying over spilled milk? I don't think so. It was one thing to rail about Dubya when the election was suspended in the ether just under four years ago. It was another when he was running at the mouth trying to convince us all to start an unfounded war because Saddam Hussein, a genuine asshole by all accounts, was responsible for the events of September the 11th, 2001. It is yet another now that he is running for reelection. Would you send your son or daughter to Iraq or Iran to "show our resolve?" Would you volunteer to go yourself? Would Dubya? Does it surprise you to see the word Iran printed up there? It shouldn't. Mark my words. If that inept fool is reelected we will wind up hearing the party line about... and shedding blood in Iran, and maybe a few more countries on the imperial shit list. I'd bet good money that a reinstatement of the draft is out there somewhere as well. Cast your vote and just you wait.

Minus One Feline

One of the Armstrong Family Dogs had a row with The Armstrong Family Cat last week. I wasn't there for the confrontation but witnesses say that although it was impossible to tell which party started the dispute the canine party was clearly the victor. After a series of barks, hisses and caterwauling in the flower bed next to the front porch the vanquished feline reportedly escaped the grasp of the much larger dog and escaped into the woods in a rapid fashion. The cat, commonly referred to as "Gato," seemed unharmed at the time of the tussle but remains at large. In the unlikely event local residents are reading this page and come across a small, ill-tempered calico cat please do not be alarmed as Gato is not thought to be dangerous. Please contact this website at the link above and an Armstrong representative will pay a visit and collect the cat, or perhaps hose it off your driveway, as the case may be.

I got caught up in the feeling of all those formal articles and it amused me to pen one about the missing cat. I can honestly say that I don't particularly care for the little bastard. It has met the front of my foot on a number of occasions after unprovoked attacks with teeth and claws. They were gentle punts - just enough to get the idea across that that sort of behavior was unacceptable. I would never dream of harming an animal. I am sad to think of what fate might have befallen Gato in the wilds of the Alabama mountain forest. There are foxes and bobcats and such about the hills. The last time this sort of thing happened Gato was reputed to have stayed under my parent's bed for three days. I am hoping against hope that she will be hiding near the porch when I return home from my weekend in Rhode Island in a couple hours. I would then let her back into the house and resume our sporadic low-intensity claws vs. foot conflict.

I used to have cats. I have had four over the years... Runner, a gray tiger back when I was in gradeschool, Frisky and Feisty, a pair of sandy tigers from the same litter - the latter of which survived until after I graduated from college - and Gabby, who was a Valentine's gift from my high school sweetheart given after Feisty RUNNOFT one winter's night. Frisky and Gabby lived together the longest in relative peace, even spending some time at my college apartment.

Dog Love

How does one explain the love for a pet? Perhaps more inexplicable is the love for a cat. I used to count myself among the legion of Cat People. I respected the feline sense of independence and the convenience of their care. Cats are very nearly idiot proof. You get a kitten, take it home, throw it in a box of litter and give it food and water. The cat seems to know where to poop. You take the poop out when you are good and ready. One of my ex-girlfriends got a puppy while we were getting to know one another. I recall endless tales of round the clock trips outside, botched attempts that resulted in poop and pee on the kitchen floor and ceaseless barking and yelping. What I saw wasn't the pride and unconditional love of dog ownership. What I saw was work.

And then something happened. The dog got older. The dog accepted me as part of her pack - her family. The dog was beside herself when I returned home from anywhere. The dog listened to me when it was time to "go lay down!" Imagine a cat listening to anything I'd ever had to say. With a cat it was always "Hey! Get the hell off of there! Damn cat." The cat knew nothing of the words. It knew only that I was pissed and that it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. I yelled and the cat scampered away. The dog understood words, granted, not many. But the dog was eager to please. The dog actually wanted to do what it was told. My happiness was her happiness.

I'll never, ever forget sobbing into her fur at the curb. I was leaving because the human relationship had gone sour. Sadly, humans are more complicated than dogs. In truth, it was the girl who left - bound for Colorado to sort out deep-seated confusions in her heart and thoughts. But that night it was I who was leaving because the dog stayed with the girl. I'd had countless conversations attempting to salvage the human bond and she and I could at least talk. The dog couldn't possibly comprehend why I was clinging to her and soaking her neck that August night. My heart was broken twice and it was more than I could bear. I pulled away from what had up until very recently been my home and cried all the way... all the way to somewhere or other. So, good-bye Sophie. You taught me the divinity of Dog Love and for that I'll love you forever. 9.6.04



Statelet

Live from Rhode Island, a wifi connection and journal upate. Coming Soon: Hurricanes, a new Hem album, Alabama water pressure and more RNC coverage than one man can handle. 9.5.04



Welcome Home, Son

Where's he been? What is it about coming home that is at once glorious and harrowing? Just like anything in life, absence gives one perspective on their own little universe. On the good side, people know that we walk on the right side here in America. Walking down the street in London is a challenge. I know better than many travelers and I make a concerted effort to respect their culture and customs. One way to do this is to walk on the left... all the better to brandish my sword to a would-be adversary. The problem is that it isn't as simple as switching to the other side of the road. People from every nation on earth walk the streets of London every day. The problem is that they are in No Particular Hurry to be anywhere and that they walk on both sides of the sidewalk, diagonally at times and four abreast other times. This especially sucks when one is trying to get to the pub before last call in order to acquire one of their delicious indigenous pints of cask conditioned ale before the incomprehensible closing time of 11:PM. How can an entire nation of Olympic drinkers shut down their watering holes during my prime drinking hours? It's a travesty with which I wrestle every time I'm over there.

London is incredibly expensive. It has always been so but it seemed worse this time. It was £2.00 to ride the London Underground. That's damn near $4.00 for a one way ride. I can't stand McDonalds' food, but double cheeseburgers were only £.99 and that was just about my price range. I don't know how anyone can afford to live in that city. New York was akin to that when I lived there. I shudder to think of how much some poor actress and her musician boyfriend are paying for that little shoebox at 9th and 49th today.

And then there's America. Jesus. Where do I even begin? Well today I'll start with its namesake air carrier and the fact that three out of three of the last times I attempted to fly into or out of their headquarters airport in Dallas my flight was seriously delayed. Coming home from Australia it was delayed for hours and they started and aborted boarding the plane no less than three times. Then, on my way to London last week, the plane that was to take me to Dallas to make my connection to O'Hare and then London hadn't even left Dallas bound for Huntsville at my scheduled departure time to go to Dallas. I wound up arriving at an entirely different airport on a different carrier and I missed my shot at riding to the hotel in my private car. Balls. Guys like me don't ever get picked up at the airport by private cars. We walk past the rows of potbellied guys with placards bearing the names of their appointed drivees and down to the public transportation trains in the basement.

So, this Saturday evening, I piddle away my life awaiting a flight originally scheduled to depart hours from now and now it is simply more hours.

Virgenes

Dashboard played the V2 music festival on this last run of dates. Festivals are insane occurrences. I have never really been able to tolerate more than a band or two in a night. Honestly, I don't know how people can watch a day's worth of music. I guess I don't know how people can do a lot of things. But I'm glad they do. Somebody has to pull the wings off of all those chickens. But back to the festivals.

You show up in the middle of nowhere a couple hours outside of London. There are acres of multicolored tents in the surrounding fields. Camping at designated campsites can only be considered enjoyable in the loosest definition of the word. I simply can't imagine living in some giant field full of inebriated morons for several days. It threatened to rain the entire weekend but it never turned loose on us. Good thing, too, because it would have made an already bad situation inordinately worse. Traffic getting into these places is always daunting. The rural infrastructure isn't made to handle 80,000 people in the woods. The local high school kids with the yellow vests and flashlights they've hired to direct traffic aren't really versed in things like urban planning or common sense.

Once inside, you discover that you can't just back your van up the the stage to load in. You have to wait for a shuttle van so that you can unload your van into that van and then have your gear driven three miles out of the way in order to get three hundred yards across the festival grounds. Once inside the back of the giant erector set stage you are thrown into a melee of gear and technicians and bands and girlfriends and industry pukes and hangers by all milling about in a semi-drunken mixture of attitude and stupor. Nine out of the ten bands all use Marshall half stacks but it is imperative that each musician have their own. Then there is the SVT.

Somewhere in the lineage of rock history the Ampeg Amplifier Company invented the coup de grace of rock and roll bass amplifiers. Some guitarists use Vox amps, some use Fender and some use Marshall. Those three brands or their general circuit design accounts for the majority of what the majority plays. If you are a rock and roll bass player you either have or long to have an Ampeg SVT. It is that ubiquitous.

The SVT consists of an amplifier housed in a black box - called a head - and a large speaker cabinet housing no less than eight ten-inch speakers - call the cabinet or 8x10. The head sits on top of the cabinet making the entire stack roughly 6 feet tall, depending on case options. The outfit is about half the size of a refrigerator and weighs in about the same as a tow truck. The caveat is that they actually sound great. It is the physics of electric bass and as a result of some complicated math every single band must have their own SVT. There was a band on the last tour that actually played every show with TWO of them. One for the bassist (of course) and another for their kitschy keyboard player. I would loathe to be their tech. Carry your own goddamn refrigerator.

Edinburgh

A week ago last night, in a London pub with my friend Scott and his wife Rosie, we were discussing the concepts of traveling and the expectations of the human experience. Scott and I were of the similar mind that we found ourselves walking up to various famous places and placing our hands upon them. My point was that doing this made it real to us. I had coincidentally just done that very thing when I stumbeld upon the Royal Albert Hall during a run through Hyde Park earlier that day. I simply walked up to it and placed my hand on the stone of the wall. I have done the same thing at the Golden Gate Bridge, at the World Trade Center in New York back in 1997, at Blarney Castle outside of Cork, Ireland and at a myriad of other places.

Scott spoke of how the angle of the sun was different in London than it was in our home in the middle west of the United States. I added that I spent a lot of time looking at the angles of the sun when I was in the southern hemishpere. Perhaps only he and I think about such things. When I have visited a new place I tend to think about the fact that I simply knows what it feels like to have been there. I know what the air smells like in Larkspur, California. I have tasted the water in Lake Tahoe. I watched the sunrise from my hotel room in Osaka, Japan. I have heard the peal of the bell inside the Big Ben clock tower in London. I have stood next to the Sydney Opera House in the rain. And through all these things I have realized that it isn't enough. It is never enough. I want to go everywhere and see everything. In fact, in moments of clarity I have realized that I want to be everywhere at once. Perhaps that is the closest thing to heaven that I can imagine.

What does Edinburgh have to do with all this? Edinburgh is part of everywhere and than means that it was on my list of things to see and I have now seen it. I know what it feels like to be there. The smell of the air, the angle of the sun, the din of the conversations on the street. As luck would have it I was even there on what seems to be a very rare sunny day in Scotland.

On the flipside, we had to load in down and out back up a steep cobblestone corridor between the venue and its neighbor. Not good. The venue was so small that a taller band would have chipped their teeth on the lights hanging above the stage. Before the show our cases took up the entire floor of the house where the audience would stand later that night. The venue hired several local hands to assist loading out back up the ancient corridor and that was perhaps the only thing that prevented me from leaving the country in foul and vindictive mood. OK, it didn't rain, either.

And now I'm in Dallas. I awoke roughly 19 hours ago. I have another hour and a half to sit here and then I board the 1:45 flight to Huntsville and an hour's drive home.



I'll Get to Scotland Before Ye

It might not be the Highlands, but it is Scotland. It is close, at least. I am currently riding in the back of a van somewhere between Birmingham, England and Edinburgh, Scotland. It is a large van but it has small wheels. Pete, our driver, is intent on finding out just how fast those little wheels can turn. We have one show left on this UK tour and then it's off for home. As I traverse the land of my ancestors I can say that I am ready to go home. It isn't that the place is bad or that I am not having a good time. It is even sunny. I am just ready to sleep in my own bed and not pay twice as much for everything. It costs $20 just to sit and look out the window in London.

I managed to make it to a few London pubs with my friend Scott. Scott is from Chicago and I met him while we both alarmingly mind-numbing temp jobs. He is incredibly intelligent, but like so many of my generation the normal path was elusive to him. He came to England to go to grad school, wound up meeting a British girl somewhere or other and now they're married and they live in London. Scott is what I like to call a True Believer. This means that he has a keen intellect combined with a suspect eye for the established norms of our society. It was akin to having my attorney along with me on my UK sojourn. We hoisted a few pints of cask conditioned ale and ruminated about how backwards the world has become under the current regime. Jesus, I hope that that underqualifed zealot doesn't win the upcoming election.

The Brits get news that our media seems to self censure... or at least bury in the back pages under the Macy's ads. Iran was the talk of the day in a local London paper the other day. There was a quote saying something about the US government doing anything to prevent Iran from developing nuclean weapons. Anything. Look where that last sack of lies about such policies got us. Just switch that Q to an N and invade! They're only a scant three letters apart! We must prevent IraQ/N from developing the ability to develop blah blah blah. How about this... we, the American People, must prevent our own trigger happy government from slipping three letters past us and starting another unjustified war. Things could go from Very Bad to Much Worse.

Dubya would have you believe that things will become much worse if we don't start another war. Spend a couple minutes thinking through that twisted logic. 8.28.04


The Other Birmingham

I live close to Birmingham, the other one. Not the one where I am currently sitting. This Birmingham is an industrial city in central England where it is currently cool and cloudy in the so-called heat of summer. The other one is an industrial city in central Alabama where the heat of summer is likely stiflingly hot. England is a place with a long and rich history. Alabama is a place with history. The Alabama Birmingham is surely named after this one. In a sense, this is appropriate given the working class tenor of both cities. The American southeast is full of English, Scot and Irish heritage. Where do you think all the redhead genes originated? 8.26.04



London Towne

Here I am in London. It is the same as it ever was. The weather has been tolerable all things considered. More soon. 8.24.04



More Suggested Reading

Here we go again. One of my personal idols, Kurt Vonnegut, has gone and done it again. He has penned something timely, intuitive, funny, scathing, observant and intelligent. He is an old man, but he is sharper than just about everybody. He will be sorely missed when the human race loses him. We're all better off having him keeping us in check. Read it here. 8.13.04



Test Your Attention Span

None other than Ronald P. Reagan, son of President Ronald W. Reagan, has penned a rather well-written article about another man who happens to be the son of a President. Guess who it might be? Read it here. It is far more coherent than anything his subject could come up with in his most lucid moments.

The Sky is Falling

Hello, all. Set your alarm clocks and get out to see the Perseids meteor shower tonight. The peak viewing time is around 2:am CDT and this year's show could be special. The moon won't be full as it was last year and there is some scientific talk of extra space dust going around the lunch table at NASA. The Perseids are the biggest summer meteor shower, so, unless you like sitting outside in the snow and cold around New Year's this is your big chance to see some of nature's best fireworks. 8.11.04



(I started writing the following passage back in early July. I mistakenly thought I had posted it and discovered that I hadn't completed the entry at the time. I took the liberty of doing so this afternoon and have posted it with today's date. Please forgive my anachronism.)

On The Road Again, Again

Hello, friends. I'm on the road again and I'm very close to home - the place that feels most like home, at least. I am riding the bus on I-94 in Chicago at the tail end of our last bus ride. We spent the last few days in Pittsburgh, did a show there last night and boarded the bus bound for the Central Time Zone. I can say that I will not miss sleeping in my coffin-sized bunk. Once we make it through this traffic and arrive in Milwaukee we will be done with the bus and I'll have the rest of the day off.

It almost feels like a real band bus now that the lighting staff, extra audio guy and half the rest of the tech guys are gone. The Civic Tour proper ended last night. Some of our crew rode the band bus to New York City to shoot on the Letterman show this afternoon. That left myself and three others on this bus and that is why it feels like a real band bus. Some of the bigger bands have situations where band members get their own buses. That is basically incomprehensible to me. I have shared this bus (capacity: twelve) with eleven other people and a driver since early May. Last night there was room to sit and eat and relax and read. Too bad I was too tired for much of anything.

I'm suffering the usual drive day "discomfort" but I should be able to make it to our destination without fouling my pants. I'd feel a little more confident if this cursed Chicago traffic would get itself moving.

The last show of this run is technically a one-off show. Milwaukee's Summerfest is a sizable music festival and we're headlining one of the many stages tomorrow night. Afterwards I will be a civilian again. I can honestly say that, for the last two months, I have had only a vague understanding of what day of the week it might be at any given point. (Passing the Ravinia exit, now.) I still don't have a regular job so it won't be as if I'll have to report anywhere spit shined and polished. My road, crooked though it may be, goes on.

Among the myriad things that Honda brought to the tour was a tent that was erected outside each venue. Inside there were kiosks where concertgoers could register to win a customized Honda Civic, get filled with Honda advertising propaganda, listen to a DJ and, perhaps most importantly, play legitimate arcade versions of either Galaga or Mrs. Pac Man. Tokens for these games could be acquired from the Honda events staff. As a member of the Dashboard crew I was friendly with a number of the Honda people and they would dispense tokens for my gaming pleasure as well. Lately, as the bands that immediately preceded Dashboard were playing, I would amble out to the Honda tent and play a few rounds of Galaga... which takes me back to...

The Summer of 1982

I was twelve. I had a dirt bike and my grandmother lived about a mile and a half away on the other side of a tollway. Grandma had a pool, and since my father did the lion's share of the pool maintenance I had free reign to spend my summer afternoons immersed in cool, chlorinated water or drying in the sun on the red-stained planks of the deck. Dragonflies would swoop low over the water and the sun would arc imperceptibly slowly across the summer sky. When you're twelve summer lasts forever.

Mom would let me ride my dirt bike to grandma's virtually any time I pleased, and it pleased me a lot. Home was always a baby factory. By 1982 she had three little people - other than me, but I wasn't so little - and there was another on the way. Mikey was old enough to pal around with but the six years that separated us seemed like eons at that age. Besides, he was too young to accompany me and my friends on our daily bike rides to grandma's house.

Sometimes I would take the streets and the overpass over the tollway. The shortest route was a busy suburban four lane road with entrance and exit ramps that always had to be carefully navigated. There was a slightly longer route over a different bridge with no highway access. This path took me through corn fields, near old barns and right past my school where I felt I was being held captive most of the year. With summer's reprieve I wanted no part of that low building and it's torturous nuns.

There was another way. A way perfectly suited to twelve year-old boys. The street on which I lived ended in a dirt path that lead through the woods. Years ago, there had been a farm there but it had been abandoned and the barn razed leaving only two cement brick silos and a foundation wrought by cracks filled with trees like weeds in an old parking lot. My friends and I spent countless hours climbing the silos and swinging in the trees of this abandoned quintessential Midwestern landmark. But, on other days, it was just a mile marker on the bike path through the woods.

Past the silos was a jump where I would launch my heavy black dirt bike as far as I could into the air and, landing, continue through the dust. The weeds grew high on either side of the path and when you rode fast in the middle we were always inside our X-Wing fighters in the trench on Star Wars, staying on target to launch our missiles that would destroy the Death Star and save the Rebellion. My friend Scott could do a spot-on Wookie impression. I always envisioned myself as Han Solo. Luke was too much of a pansy and didn't pilot as nearly as cool a ship as the Millennium Falcon.

A right turn lead you parallel to the highway and we would race westbound trucks down a gently meandering path towards the creek. Just before the path split there was the largest jump of the whole path, this being a rather flat part of Illinois, after all. One by one we'd pedal as fast as our skinny, tanned legs would take us and we'd be once more airborne. We'd hit the ground with tires spinning and immediately veer left to the short path down to the creek.

Indian Creek could be dry. Indian Creek also swelled up in the springtime, so much so that after one March rainstorm the school bus had to drive miles out of the way to find a place to cross. Where Indian Creek crossed what was then known as I-5 there were two rectangular cement tunnels. If you were twelve and you had a dirt bike you could just manage to ride all the way across the four lanes and median strip above you if you slunk down in your seat. Sometimes it was bone dry and other times you had to pedal with only small forward cranks as a full revolution would soak your sneakers. I never had a dirt bike with a free wheel so on wet days I would have to get a running go and coast all the way to the other side.

The tunnel ride itself was an adventure. We could always hear the roar of the cars and trucks mere feet above our heads. From time to time we would catch a small fish trying to work its way down the shallow water. I would help it along. Indian Creek was also a prime example of formative hydrodynamic projects. We would commandeer the wagons of the neighborhood and drag rocks from the surrounding fields hundreds of yards to the creek where we had determined we should construct our next dam.

On the other side there was a short path up the steep bank and along the side of the creek until it spit you out on a residential street. From there it was 30 seconds to my best friend Scott's house. He lived right behind a gas station and kitty corner from that was a brand new convenience store where we could get three candy bars and a fountain coke for less than a dollar.

We usually headed to grandma's first to hit the pool. This wasn't the adult style of pool lounging. This was the attack style of several young boys find the the tallest possible thing off which to jump into the crystal blue water. It was the systematic work entailed to make a giant whirlpool worthy of Ahab's demise. It was a contest to see who could stay underwater and hold their breath the longest. It was the smell of your skin as it dried in the sun.

We had masks and swim fins and snorkels and an inflatable Underdog canoe. From time to time my grandfather would slowly walk his hulking mass out of the air conditioned house through the grass and clover, climb up onto the red-stained deck as it creaked under his grownup weight and make a slow motion dive into the middle of the pool. He would surface with his shiny silver hair matted on his head, make a scant couple laps back and forth and climb back out of the water making us laugh with his jokes all the while. He would walk his bad knee back into the house where grandma was no doubt sitting stiff-lipped and watching something on TV. In the backyard on the deck, my friends and I would lie down on the warm, sun faded planks. Facing up we could see maple trees and clouds and eternal blue. Lying still we would dry just like the red deck boards in the sun. The air smelled sweet - the wind would carry the smell of a thousand miles of grass and lilacs and ponds and corn and bees and deliver them to our noses. The humming drone of a small plane would slowly lull us close to sleep.

Being young, we couldn't sleep for long and soon it was us running into the house like a herd of antelope. A quick change out of our trunks in the cool of the basement bathroom was followed by a chorus of "Thanks grandma! Thanks Grandpa! Thanks Mr. and Mrs. Babush!" as we went thundering out the front door. Back on our bikes we'd ride as fast as we could to reach the dirt jump in the undeveloped lot at the top of the hill. Our bikes were our Corvettes and our Kawasakis, our Sopwith Camels and our Phantom IIs, our X-Wings and our Millennium Falcons. We rode them all into the grasses of summer in Illinois.

Up the street, past where I took guitar lessons in the 4th grade, was Top Notch, the local video arcade. Top Notch was in the same small strip mall that held our local independent pizza place, Ach & Lou's, a printing company and a bakery thrift store. In a short few years we would all be going to Ach & Lou's with our dates, but for now we parked our bikes just past the back kitchen door for the delectable-smelling pizza kitchen. From there it was through a steel door and down a hallway that was filled with the captivating smell of ozone and electricity. A cacophony of electronic chirps and beeps moved our feet down the hall like sirens to our seeming peril, except that once inside we would find ourselves surrounded by rows of refrigerator-sized game consoles. Here, the preternatural universe of electronic interactive gaming was just climbing out of the primordial ooze. Top Notch had Donkey Kong. Top Notch had Pac Man. Top Notch had Battlezone, Space Invaders and Tempest and all of them were a couple minutes of joy at $.25 per three "lives." The coins that perpetually piled up on my father's dresser now found a home inside the mechanical innards of Top Notch's business plan. A kid from my gradeschool, Jeff Sherwood, discovered the specific pattern for beating Pac Man. He could stand there all afternoon on one quarter.

When we had all expended our caches of our fathers' pocket change we walked back down the hallway and opened the door to the blinding light on the other side. My bike lock was a small chain encased in clear and orange plastic tubing with a cylindrical combination lock. Sometimes we wouldn't even lock up our bikes. Imagine that. When I was older I could even leave my keys in the ignition of my car in front of my house - windows down and all. Once, I discovered that someone had stolen the rear wheel of my dirt bike as I was inside Top Notch playing Battlezone. It was the first time that anything like that had happened to me. I wound up replacing the wheel with one I'd found in the shed and ended up getting a few fingers caught between the sprocket and the chain, but that's another story altogether.

We unlocked our bikes and retraced our path from hours before... down past Scott's house where he'd veer off into his driveway. Frank and I would continue through the neighborhood towards the tollway where we'd once again ride under all 4 lanes and the median strip. We'd surely hit a little mud or once again have to ride with our feet up and out of the water until we reached the other side. We would then complete the circle of the trail around a set of fallow fields and race the last straightaway because it was flat and paved with small rocks. We'd skid the right angle turn past the silos and emerge on the asphalt right where my street ended and the woods met the houses.

If it was approaching dark we'd climb trees and catch lightning bugs and play games with ghoulish names like Bloody Murder, Freeze Tag or the more innocuously named Hide and Seek. Sooner or later screen doors would slam and baths would be drawn. Bikes were now idle on lawns. Sneakers sat empty next to our beds. Lightning bugs were captive in jars with sticks and grass and nail holes in metal lids on our nightstands. Raccoons silently crept around our sandbox filled with plastic dinosaurs and metal cars. Cool night air spilled onto our faces as we slept. Sometimes, if I close my eyes I can still feel the air carried in through the window on cricket songs... and in my dreams I will always visit the summer of 1982. 8.10.04



e-Perdition

I guess "i-perdition" might be more fitting. I can't get this computer to work on the dialup back at the Armstrong Ranch. I no longer have any of my files from the Armstrong Family Computer on which I used to keep the local version of my site because some help desk person from India walked my mother through wiping her hard drive while I was out of town. I really don't want to talk about it. I have this new laptop here but now that I am disconnected I haven't been able to update anything on www.joearmstrong.com. Funny that I have to drive all the way to Cedar Rapids, Iowa to use the wifi connection in the hotel lobby when I've been basically all the way around the world - again - since I last updated this. I'm off to get dinner at a brewpub while the wedding party proper does the requisite rehearsal and rehearsal dinner protocol. One pint of IPA, please. 8.6.04



Those of Us Who Had Been Up All Night...

...were in no mood for coffee and donuts. Jesus. I just got off my 13+ hour flight from Melbourne, Australia to Los Angeles. Due to the wonders of modern air travel I have a 4-hour layover here and then yet another in Dallas before I will finally arrive at my final destination at 9:30pm CDT tonight - roughly 11 hours from now.

I originally had stellar seating arrangements back in steerage. I was stopped for "reticketing" as I boarded the flight yesterday... or today... technically before I am writing this in International Date Line chronological terms. They pulled me aside to issue the new seat assignment at the gate and my images of my previously ticketed and coveted aisle seat began to supplanted by images of riding in the middle seat for the ensuing 14 hours. There are few things worse than a middle seat on an international flight. They calmed me down and assured me that I would simply have a different aisle seat and I walked the long docking bridge out to the side of the hulking jumbo jet.

The Qantas staff really can't be much more helpful. I located my seat, an aisle seat on the right side of the aircraft with two more seats between the window and me. There was a peculiar seating configuration in the row directly in front of me that provided the ability to fully extend my legs and place them on top of the metal box immediately in front of my seat. There were only 2 seats in that row and my "footrest" was just beside them. Not bad at all. With a little luck the remaining seats in my row would be empty, and that thought provided hope that I just might have a reasonably comfortable flight. At least as comfortable as being confined to a cold, dry, noisy and cramped metal tube for more than half a day can be.

I sat quiet and hopeful in my seat and the air travelers just kept on coming; walking past me towards the rear of the airplane. The numbers dwindled and time ticked on. I was hoping for the door to shut early and the plane to kick into reverse to get moving towards home on the other side of the planet. The sooner the door shut the greater the chances that I'd have the row to myself. Announcements were made. Babies were crying. All manner of noises thumped on the airframe and people in yellow vests scurried about on the ground outside my porthole. And then, nearly imperceptibly at first, the big white jet inched backwards. Could it be? Could I really be as fortunate as to have three seats to myself on both my return flights from Australia in less than 6 months' time?

Victory was mine. In the truest sense it was much less a victory as it was fortune smiling upon me and random chance working out in my favor. You play life for the breaks... just like anything, I guess. I got a break last night. The sad thing is that I couldn't really sleep. Even with the extra real estate. I watched no less than 3 movies and spent a significant portion of the balance of the trip all Ipod-ed up. The Ipod proved its value once again. The last international trip was what convinced me to drop the substantial cash on one of those little white wonders. This trip just provided reasons 247 - 391 as for why I LOVE my Ipod. How did I ever live without this thing?

Sha La La La La

One of the movies I watched on the tiny little screen was Kevin Smith's newest, Jersey Girl. I have been a big fan of Smith's ever since my friend Matty sat me down to watch Clerks years back. I pretty much have blind faith in Kevin Smith... meaning that I will spend money to see one of his films without knowing a thing about it. I've described my blind faith music policies before. Even a bad Kevin Smith film is better than most of Hollywood's drivel. On the way to the southern hemisphere I had noticed that Jersey Girl was playing on the Qantas flights going home from Australia and was looking forward to killing a couple hours of my long flight watching it.

Ben Affleck had roles in several great movies early on in his career, with several Kevin Smith films among them. Since this time he had landed leading roles in several clinkers - perhaps most notably among them what might be one of the worst movies of all time, Gigli. He had also become tabloid fodder as his short lived engagement to Jennifer Lopez ran its natural course. His performance in Jersey Girl was at least good enough to get his name removed from my shit list. Liv Tyler continues to defy her genealogy. George Carlin played himself, which is exactly what I want to see out of him. Most notably, Jennifer Lopez's character makes an thankfully early exit from the onscreen goings on.

Smith's usual brilliant dialogue and pop culture sub references were ably exhibited. This movie is technically Smith's second romantic comedy. Chasing Amy might have eschewed the typical formulaic aspects of the genre but it certainly had enough elements to qualify. Jersey Girl also marks a notable break from Smith's saga of his misanthropic protagonists Jay and Silent Bob. In fact, the pair don't even make a cameo in this flick. They were missed but amazingly not sorely. The setting was typical Smith. He is to New Jersey as Stephen King is to Maine.

I found the most interesting aspect of the story to be the nature of the love story. Romantic comedies nearly all give us a protagonist, his or her love interest, some form of conflict to make it interesting and also to provide a set up the eventual resolution. Cookie cutter. In Jersey Girl Kevin Smith deftly steers clear of the well trodden paths of many a Meg Ryan flick. There is love, all right, it just isn't what you'd expect. Or maybe it is all that and more.

Two thumbs up from me... not to mention the fact that it shares a title with a much-loved Tom Waits song. I'd suggest you watch it and see for yourself.

I also managed to sit through the movie version of Starsky and Hutch and a pseudo teen flick called The Girl Next Door. The former was amusing. Mildly. The latter was surprisingly good, in a Weird Science sort of way.

Tick Tock

I am now sitting in LAX awaiting my flight to Dallas. I have been hanging around in here for about three hours and there is still over an hour to go. I have at least found a spot against a wall that has an electric outlet. Good old 110 volts, too. For the last week I had been charging all my Yankee-voltage devices onstage during the shows using the power transformers procured for our amps and such. It is nice to be able to simply use the power that comes out of the wall. Such luxury.

I will have to exchange foreign currency again. This is mostly an inconvenience that will take me days to get around to doing. I have a pocket full of Australian coinage as well. It is more or less useless. Many other countries tend to favor coins for their single unit of currency, as opposed to the paper singles found in the US. As an American I find this annoying. It is not uncommon to have a whole pocket full of coins weighing down your pants. Then there is the fact that their largest coins are odd denominations, like $0.20. The $1 and $2 coins are smaller in order to more easily facilitate their misplacement.

I can't wait to get home. To simply sit still. To look at trees that aren't streaking past me out the window of a van. To eat food out of a residential refrigerator. To drive instead of being driven. These mundane things are perhaps better enjoyed in contrast to traveling.

It is annoying to me that nearly every flight I make to anywhere winds up being routed through Dallas. I suppose that I don't have anything in particular against the Texans... save for Dubya, I guess. I just wish I could get home without the extra flight. I suppose that I wouldn't have to deal with this nonsense if I lived in a major or even secondary metropolitan market.

My rear hurts from sitting so much. Only 8 more hours to go. Just a blink of an eye in some terms but an eternity for me, here today. I have to pee but I don't want to pack up the little encampment I have set up here next to this outlet on the wall. I have both my laptop and my Ipod plugged in and charging. The primary liability of modern electronic devices is short battery life. My brand new laptop will only hold 2 hours worth of charge. How ridiculous. 7.30.04

Now is the Time in Melbourne When We Dance

Dashboard is playing a club in Melbourne tonight, but by the looks of the place I'd expect to walk outisde somewhere in Berlin. It has a very strong discotheque feel that smacks of Sprockets and schiesse videos. The lighting booth sits on the main dance floor and looks somewhat like the cat head featured on some Radiohead album or other. There are two orb-ish structures with mouth-like opening facing the stage and portholes where one would imagine ears should be and a very flying saucer-like side hatch. I'll try to include a picture on here. Stranger still, perhaps, is the fact that they are both covered in small white tiles. They even remind me a little of the spaceship from the Disney movie The Cat from Outer Space. I'm not sure what to make of them but I'd love to have one in my house.

Other Australian developments include the fact that I have flown on an airplane every singe day this week. We arrived in Sydney on Saturday morning and had a direct connecting flight to Brisbane. Monday morning we flew from Brisbane to Sydney. Tuesday it was Sydney to Melbourne. Wednesday found us returning to Sydney. Today, Thursday, was Sydney to Melbourne and tomorrow morning I board the first of what will be three flights home. I am beginning to have favorite bathroom stalls in various Australian airports.

It is winter down here right now and that means different things for different cities, especially when flying among them every day. Brisbane is subtropical so the weather was fair. I managed to wear sandals and take long, shirtless walks on the beach. Sydney was cool and alternatively rainy and sunny on different days. Melbourne is and has been chilly. There aren't many leaves on the trees and I can see my breath outside today. I can honestly say that this is the first time in my life that I have seen my breath in July. In July I prefer to be home eating popsicles and playing Frisbee. I am happy to be in Australia but it seems to me that it makes much more sense to go to summer when it is currently winter where one is. Maybe you're one of those winter people. If you are you can have it.

It is freezing in this club at 6:01pm local time. (3:01am home time.) The band is onstage doing a soundcheck rehearsal. I am sitting in my guitar tech world trying to stay warm. The place will eventually warm up from the collective body heat of a couple thousand young people. I think that I am ready to go home. If nothing else I'd like to be in one place for more than 20 hours or so. Maybe not. We all wind up with the life we choose even if we don't realize that we are choosing it when we are.

They Say the Neon Lights are Bright...

... On Ebay. I actually won an auction on Ebay for the first time ever. I've bid on accordions time and time again only to be outbid by someone willing to pay more than $200 for one. This time I had my heart set on a new mountain bike. My trusty Trek 930 has done right by me. I purchased it new in 1996, telling myself that I would ride it until either it or I broke. I had no business buying anything as expensive as a mountain bike at the time but I really, really wanted a bike of my own. I guess I feel that one can only deny oneself something for so long. My rationale at the time was that, in the event that I died an untimely death I didn't want to have died having never owned a mountain bike.

I didn't die and I have heretofore outlasted the bike. It still rides but I have reached a point where the total cost of replacement parts would be better spent on a whole new bicycle. The bike shop gurus have informed me that a 7-or highger speed rear sprocket is a special order item. Bike technology has come quite a long way in only 8 years, so, in a sense, the bike is totaled.

When I was in Costa Rica a couple summers back I took a day trip with a local mountain biking company. The company was outfitted with Cannondale F400 bikes and by the end of the day's riding I was sold. Cannondale pioneered the concept of a single shock on front forks which allows the rider to switch the shock off for uphill and street riding. Pumping up a big hill can feel like building a pyramid when a significant portion of your torque is being sucked up by a bouncing shock.

Anyway, I saw a used Cannondale on Ebay a couple weeks back and I began to watch it intently. I had recently lost a bid on a keyboard by a mere $10.00 and was determined not to let the bike slip away. It is pretty common for a last second bidding war to develop and I decided that I had reached just about the amount I felt as if I was willing to pay for the keyboard. I was close but I didn't throw the final ten spot in and I was bested. As the waning minutes of the bike auction arrived I watched it like a hawk... riding out the inevitable run by potential usurpers. 7.29.04



Here I Is

Phew. What a tour. I am very tired. It is Thursday, July 22nd and I'm in a hotel in Los Angeles. Today we tape The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Look for us on the NBC. After the taping we get on a plane bound for Sydney, and then a connecting flight to Brisbane, Australia. That's some frequent flyer miles right there.

I've been writing and resting. I just don't have time to post stuff right now. In fact, I have to be off this very second. More soon. 7.22.04



The Burg of Pitt

Here I am, riding the bus in Central Pennsylvania somewhere between Boston and Pittsburgh. Today is another one of our Civic Tour "days off" that we spend on the bus. We recently counted up that we've had 6 days off in 8 weeks. Some of us have had even less than that. We'll arrive relatively soon so there will be some semblance of a day off. And we have tomorrow off as well. Praise all that is good in the universe. After being beaten down for weeks this last week of the tour has brought an eleventh hour reprieve. We played the last of 5 consecutive shows last night. We now have two days off, a show Wednesday in Pittsburgh, a day off/drive day to Milwaukee and then the last show at Summerfest on Friday. All done. Just like that.

One particular drive day annoyance is the shit curse. It is perhaps the biggest bus faux pas to shit in the bus toilet. This tenet is widely understood throughout the touring industry. You just don't do it. In theory, the toilet is made to accomodate solid waste but life is simply "better" if everyone refrains from doing so.

Back in college my cronies and I would hold court in the rear of the bus. The toilet was always in the back passenger side corner and we would remind everyone of this etiquette protocol quite often. Like every time someone went inside. Nothing but complete diligence will hold the line in this case. We live on this bus. The last thing we need is the smell of shit that has been cooked and fermented by a string of dates through the south in the summer sun.

I only bring it up because I have to shit right now. It is nowhere near critical mass but I certainly hope that we arrive in Pittsburgh in a timely fashion. It is nearly always like this on drive days. My body seems to know that release is not possible. Or maybe it is the constant jittering and swaying from the bumpy highways. The last 1000-mile trip from Mesa, AZ to Austin, TX was like torture.

I can also say that this stretch of Pennsylvania highway just plain sucks. The views are nice but the road is like a cluster bombed runway. The GPS navigator that the driver uses has just announced that we are 14.5 miles away. Just enough time to shut down my laptop and gather my things for a day and a half of civilian life in Pittsburgh. This will include a trip to the bathroom in my hotel room. Hi ho.

Nobody Killed Kenny

Kenny Rogers. A blast from the past. The guy has sold a hell of a lot of records over the course of his decade-spanning career. There was a recent article about him on some news service or paper or something. He is alive and well. He is so alive and well, in fact, that he is 65 years old and is expecting twins with his 5th wife. If that isn't badass then I don't know what is.

Listen Up, Conservatives

The Republican party is nearly synonymous with the Religious Right. More than just right of the center, The Right also feel that they are just that and are dead set on seeing that it is illegal to have a viewpoint other than their narrow minded, tunnel vision view of social issues. The Republicans have aligned themselves with religious conservatism. Our current Vice President, Dick Cheney, recently exhibited some less than Christian behavior.

Last week, on the Senate floor, after being pressed by Senator Patrick Leahy about his involvement in Halliburton's no-bid contracts in Iraq, Cheney told Leahy to "go fuck himself." That's a direct quote. Look it up.

Now, the last time I checked Senate hearings are broadcast on C-Span. Is Mr. Cheney not subject to the same FCC obscenity laws that prompted Howard Stern's strict fines? Is this sort of behavior the likes of which the "moral majority" approves of in a world leader? Furthermore, this is the right-hand man of the guy who thinks that God himself told him to be President. I just want all you people who voted for the guy to know what kind of man he is.

Libertine

Last fall, while mountain biking on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, I ran into a girl. I was tired from having ridden up the side of the mountain and she was tired from walking. We stopped and began a cursory conversation looking down upon the San Francisco Bay which was spread out before us. Given the news of the day the topics soon turned to the war and the current climate of our nation. You know, the usual "Hi, how are you? What's your sign? What do you think of the Patriot Act?" She said that she was uncomfortable staying in the Liberal environs of Marin. I asked if she was a Republican and she said no. What else could she be in this polarized country of ours? She said that she was a Libertarian and I asked her to outline the belief system. As it turns out I had no idea how much I disagreed with the Libertarian point of view. Just add it to the list, I guess. Keep in mind folks, I am not a Democrat but I sure am liberal.

In my worldview, the laws should provide for people to be as conservative as they please but that those of us who do not agree do not have to live by a narrow set of moral standards set by narrow minded people. In my world people should be allowed to go to church ten hours a day every day of the week if that is how they want to spend their time. Church. State. Separate. It's just that simple. 6.29.04



Moore's Law

Michael Moore. On the front page of USA Today. Love him or hate him we need someone to help the slow moving masses see that there is something other than the party line. 6.25.04



'Bout Time

Scaled Composites. Showing NASA how it's done. Yesterday was a momentous day in the history of space exploration. Nobody landed on a distant planet. Life was not discovered on a moon of Saturn. There were no apes or monoliths or xenomorphic aliens. A privately funded spaceship earned its title as such. A person not on the government payroll successful piloted a vehicle to space and back. Granted, it was the edge of space, but that's a hell of a lot farther than anyone else has even attempted.

Burt Rutan has been a lifelong idol of mine. He chased his dreams straight up into the sky and wouldn't let anyone or anything stand in the way of his desire to fly and to build flying machines. He did things his way and look where it got him. He may never be a household name but what he has accomplished has had an effect on me and perhaps someday the world will catch up to him.

Laker Wobegone

The second dynasty of the great Phil Jackson has fallen. The Pistons of Detroit smartly played a team oriented game and slew the giant. I have a great deal of respect for Phil. He has a way with gleaning the best qualities out of what is often times a circus of overpaid athletes with matching attitudes. I suspect that the Los Angeles Lakers of the 2003-04 season will go down in history as the big team that couldn't. I watched as much of the finals series as my schedule allowed and I kept waiting for Phil to twist his magic ring. Somewhere, in the depths of my Bulls fan heart I got the impression that after all that bullshit Phil wasn't going execute the twist of his ring that would bring the Pistons to their bandaged knees. I got the feeling that Phil realized that his coddled group of me-players didn't deserve his wizard's touch and he let them self destruct. Maybe I'm reaching. But maybe, just maybe, he knew that his team had had their day and that they had reached critical mass.

And now, having been forced to cheer for old school Bulls fan's arch nemesis, the cursed bad boys of Detroit, because of the Pacers inability to win when it really mattered, the NBA championship trophy has been finally returned to the Eastern Conference. The number 23 is now perhaps just a number, but it is an important number to me and to all of us who spent June nights on the edge of my couch on Bryn Mawr clutching Oregon IPAs. Jordan was the last man to bring a trophy to the Eastern Conference. Now Detroit has the title and Michael plays golf.

More Moore

Everyone's favorite leftist rabble rouser is back. This time he's taking direct aim at the Bush regime with his new film, Fahrenheit 9/11. Bradbury is pissed and I don't blame him. Moore has usurped the title of Ray's brilliant harbinger of intolerance and pitfalls of technology novel for his partisan attempt to bring down Dubya's junta. That being said I believe that it is essential that this dolt be removed from office. Kerry is just a low carb version of Dubya anyway. For shit's sake, the guy is a proponent of the war. The race is heating up and Nader has chosen his running mate... and I still think that the two party system is broken.

Moore's current point is to illuminate the long running connection between the Bush and Bin Laden families and educate the masses as to what that connection really means. I've been shaking my head for years as for how so many Americans have looked the other way in regard to Dubya's policies on just about everything. Sure, I'll admit that Moore can refract the story to suit his aims. But isn't it about time somebody fought fire with fire and we got the pendulum swinging a little back towards reality?

It opens Friday. I'll catch it as soon as I can and I hope that you will, too.

What?

Avril Lavigne is on Greg Kilbourn right now. 20 million records? I can barely watch her talk. I'll leave it at that. 6.22.04



Out Here in the Fields

It's back again. Actually, it has been back for a while but I have been so busy and so transient that I forgot to look it up until this morning. Enjoy. 6.18.04



West Texas. Again.

This time isn't quite as bad as last time as I am not driving. I also have air conditioning. I drove this very drive last August going in the opposite direction - Austin to California. It was hot. My beloved Honda has air conditioning in the truest sense. I was unwilling to go through the potential fiasco of paying to charge the freon and perhaps discovering that there was a leak and that it would need to be repaired before the rapist mechanics charged me to refill the freon again only to have it go out somewhere in the middle of Texas or Arizona. I also had nightmarish premonitions of having the extra strain on the engine from the A/C causing my car to overheat, leaving me stranded on the side of the 113-degree Interstate in one of the aforementioned states. That's right. You heard me correctly. I exited the I-10 at one point to get gas and the local bank thermometer read 113F. At sundown. It was so hot at one point during the next day when I was passing through Yuma I had to put my reflective sun visor on my left hand side driver's side window between me and the piercing stare of the desert sun. That moment lives large in the annals of my life as THE HOTTEST MOMENT I HAVE EVER EXPERIENCED.

I Should Have Been a Business Major

The illustrious booking agents and management for our tour have thrown us to the proverbial dogs. We just completed a 8-day set of sequential showdates. For those of you who don't work this sort of job 8 days in a row without a day off is rare, and perhaps a little rude on the part of management. Working 8 days in a row is one thing. Working 8 days in a row of 15-hour days in different climates sleeping on a moving bus loading and unloading semi trailers full of heavy gear is entirely another. I feel beat up. I think I'd feel better about it all if I weren't sick. I just can't seem to shake this cold or sinus infection or whatever it is. I've been coughing for over two weeks now and am now in the "horrible sore throat" phase. Every day is a new adventure.

Today is our "day off." As a reward for working 8 days in a row we have to ride 1000 miles on the bus on our "free time." We will arrive in Austin around 6:pm local time with just enough time to get dinner and pass out in our respective hotel rooms. Things like a BED and a PRIVATE SHOWER are luxuries in my current existence and I shall soon have them... if only for a night. Starting tomorrow we have three consecutive Texas shows and another 1000 mile drive from Houston to Tampa on our next "day off."

My friend Chris - along for this tour - did a tour with Blue Man Group where, if they ever had more than 5 showdates in a row, they would receive a cash bonus. Amazing. But I am here of my own volition and despite the beatings it is still better than a real job in many ways. I just have to keep telling myself that sort of thing whether I believe it or not. I could have been a business major. Perhaps I should have been a business major. I could then complain about endless stacks of TPS reports instead of pyramid-building-esque scheduling.

A Diamond in the Rough

We have no less than three opening acts every night on the current Dashboard tour. Two of those three bands share the bill with Dashboard for every show on the 40-date run. The third support act rotates every week to ten days. I have seen all too many bands in my day. Most of them are lame. I have been playing in bands since I was 15 years old. I have been mixing audio for bands since I was about 20. Call me jaded. Call me out with a bad attitude about music. Brand me a cynic. After a lifetime of music and endless torture by amateur bands I have developed an unfortunate policy of "guilty until proven innocent." I realize full well that just because I don't happen to like a particular band it doesn't mean that they are technically bad. It might, however.

In any case I hadn't really enjoyed the style of any of the opening bands on the tour... until the soundcheck for the newest of the revolving door acts in Denver a few weeks back. A sort of aloof baritone stepped to the microphone and his band started into a song inside an empty Fillmore. I was in the throes of a fever from the Des Moines cold/infection I'd picked up along the way and found myself cringing in preparation for the usual aural assault and affront to my musical sensibilities. What I heard turned out to be none of the above. What I heard wasn't bad. It was pleasing, even. Who might this band be?

Val Emmich. That is the namesake of the band and its deadpan singer. Not deadpan bad, like the kind of deadpan that reflects a vapid persona and intellect. It was deadpan good, like the way someone who feels too much holds his cards to their chest to keep from being played by a cynical world.

Val is backed up by three musicians who actually know how to underplay... and underplaying is the hallmark of a mature musician. Anthony plays guitar under a disheveled curly pompadour reminiscent of a prize fighting cock. Jon plays his 1974 P-bass in a manner that belies his regular guy image. He also has blue eyes that shine when he laughs. Eric is a utilitarian drummer - perhaps the best kind. Why the piles of accolades? To paraphrase Willy Wonka, "So shines a good band in a weary tour."

Rock bands aren't quite extinct but they are endangered. Here in the new millennium kids pick up turntables instead of guitars, computers instead of drums and they write software instead of finely crafted songs of youthful broken hearts and rebellion. It was hard enough to talk your buddy into being the bass player back in the days when rock bands ruled the earth. I can't imagine what it must be like now. Leaving no child behind has pulled the rug out from under many music and arts programs in American schools, undoubtedly leaving what few anachronistic high school bands that still exist without a bass player. But I digress.

Val Emmich is an old school singer songwriter who has a rock band. An old-fashioned crash and rattle rock band. Guitars and drums and emotions laid bare. More substance than style. And I like them. They have rotated off the Dashboard tour and they are sorely missed. Their debut album will be released later this year. In meantime, visit Val's website here and try and see them in your town as they crisscross the country with their van, trailer and sack of well-written songs. 6.9.04



Raising Arizona

Mesa, AZ 6.8.04 5:30pm PDT. It is hot here. That is perhaps the understatement of the day. The Dashboard tour just keeps rolling along. I've seen friends along the way. I never get enough sleep. Every single night is a fashion show and I'm still not over my cold/sinus infection. I got sick in Des Moines, Iowa a couple weeks back. I had a fever and drainage and pressure in my head that was compounded by a set of dates that took us over the Rockies and the Cascades. I saw a doctor in Seattle and he prescribed a week's worth of antibiotics. In retrospect I have decided that Seattle might not have been the place to see a doctor given the fact that I wanted a pile of drugs that would make my shit go away and make me feel better. It has now been over a week since the doctor visit, my antibiotics are long gone and I still feel awful. I get about 4% better every day and that just isn't good enough when one works 14 hours a day and sleeps on a bus. It is nearly impossible to heal in a timely manner when one is perpetually traveling. The good news is that we are more than halfway done with this tour. In less than a month's time I'll be sitting in The Hopleaf with my attorney and I am very much looking forward to just that sort of adventure... or perhaps a lack thereof. 6.8.04


Seattle Serenade

About a week ago, during the load out of a show in Des Moines, Iowa, I felt a little tickle in my throat. It was the sort of tickle that usually means that I'm about to have a cold. It doesn't always mean that, but more often than not the next morning brings a torrent of sinus drainage and incessant coughing. We loaded the truck, I showered and boarded the bus for our overnight drive to St. Louis.

The St. Louis alarm clock sounded like a battleship was parked next to our bus. It was yet another thunderstorm - just the latest in a long line of them that had been plaguing the tour since we arrived in the middle west. At one point I was herded into a mall basement to ride out a series of Iowa tornadoes but that's another story altogether.

The thunder from the latest storm rattled us awake in the parking lot behind the venue in St. Louis. This particular load in situation was more complicated than normal so I had some time to get my act together. First things first... a trip to a stationary toilet... and with those matters properly squared away I went for a walk in the emerging sunshine. The Midwest is great after a storm. The air is fresh and the rain has washed away the typical city smell of urine and pollution. I found a used CD store and enjoyed the day, noting that I did indeed have a cold. At this point the situation seems to go one of two ways. A low grade cold gets no worse and that is that. Unfortunately for me, this situation went the other route. By the end of the day I was miserable. I had a fever, aches and pains, an empty skull and general discomfort with being alive.

Another show. Another load out. Another night of tormented sleep on the bus. Kansas City. More of the same. Denver. Repeat. Salt Lake City. Worse still. I was due to ride on a private jet to Boston after the show in Salt Lake City but the band decided that they didn't want to ride in a little tube with a walking petri dish, and I didn't blame them in the least. I wound up riding on the bus to Seattle with the balance of the crew and managed to see a doctor yesterday. I am not what I would call better but I am better than I was. I have a pile of prescription drugs on my hotel room nightstand and tonight I get to sleep in a bed without a diesel engine.

As for the rest of Seattle, it will have to wait until next time. I managed a couple walks down to Pike Place Market. It is about as cool as a market can be. Tomorrow we have a show here in Seattle, followed by more shows in Portland, Oregon, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, etc. I'll check in as soon as I can. 5.31.04



And Still

Yes, I am still here. I got a new laptop and have been spending what free time I have getting it properly configured. It has been an ordeal. I have it working but haven't had time to write. So... more soon. Stories galore. Love, me. 5.23.04



I Am Alive

And kicking. I am currently in Montreal. Yes, that Montreal. Show two of Dashboard's summer tour. Sleeping on the bus. Etc. More soon. 5.14.04



Quickie

I'm here. I have a WiFi card and it is working... for the time being, anyway. Orlando is still Orlando. The Spurs are 2-0 on The Lakers. All is well. More soon. 5.6.04



Around the Country in 80 Days

I am off. It might not be exactly 80 days but it is close enough. This afternoon I head off for everywhere. Between now and July 4th I'll be at least one and a half times around the US in a bus doing tech work for Dashboard Confessional. Feel free to write me and say hello. If you want to see if I'll be in a town near you check Ticketmaster's website and look up the band. I will attempt to update this here journal as often as possible. I have procured a WiFi card for my borrowed laptop but it is anybody's guess as for whether or not I'll be able to get it working. Cheers.

A Natural Selection

Here to Stay is the Bluebird

Above you will find pictures of the bluebird nest in the Armstrong family newspaper mailbox. I first wrote about them a couple days back. They are so very small. During the daytime you can walk up and whistle and they answer back with mouths agape. If you shine a flashlight into the mailbox after dark you can see mama bluebird keeping watch by night. 4.23.04



Huevas Hermanas

I heard the damnedest thing on the TV tonight. I didn't even know that they could do this sort of thing. A young woman who was unable to conceive got an ovary transplant. My first thought was "How in the hell?" The donor happened to be this woman's twin sister and than answered a whole host of questions I'd posed to myself. It still doesn't explain to me how this procedure is even possible. I'll chalk one up for science in the science vs. religion race. And I'll leave it at that.

Tastes Like Burning

Ripping to be exact. My new Ipod entails that I rip any CD I'd like to have on it to an mp3. I did this sort of thing once before, back when I had an Internet job. I had a good percentage of my CD collection burned onto my hard drive at work. When the axe fell on me, and about 45% of the rest of the already-gutted company, there were rumors abound. On Friday night I got a tip from a concerned friend that, come Monday, I would be unemployed. In this case Monday would be Tuesday as it was Memorial Day weekend. I spent my Memorial Day - what would be my last paid holiday to this very day - in the office of my soon to be former employer, deleting proprietary files and getting my things. I had time to download all my Napster-bootlegged live mp3s but not my own collection in mp3 format.

So the past week of my life was spent systematically cycling CDs through two computers at once. I can't imagine how long it would have taken if I'd attempted this project on one computer. I also can't imagine having taken this on if I had a regular job. If I'd had to spend 8+ hours a day at the workplace the process would have taken me a month. It was too much as it is. I now have over 350 albums on my Ipod. I've been going about my business with plugged into the Ipod just to see what sort of full randomness this thing spits out at me. It is so very cool. 4.22.04



It's Easy Being Green

It is now green here in Alabama. The forest was that bright yellow-green when I returned from Chicago last week. The chlorophyll is tempering the world to a deeper green now, and that makes me happy. It has also been breezy, which is a switch for North Alabama. Before long the hot, stagnant air of a southern summer will settle on the red soil and cotton fields like a giant bowl of soup. The sun will feel like a 7-11 hot dog heat lamp. The air will be the flavor of Campbell's Redneck Medley. I am not complaining. I love summer in all its forms. I'll take mosquitoes and ticks over shoveling snow, searing steering wheels over the white noise whine of the furnace, and heinous allergies over hours of darkness. The Winter People cry foul and tout the relative merits of spring and fall. I won't debate them over autumn, but spring can be a nasty, frigid and fickle wench of a season, especially in the Great Lakes Region.

California has it made. If you don't like the weather you drive ten minutes or a couple hours and you're set. I love California weather and I may commit to being part of it at some point, but I'll always long for the humid summer green of the eastern United States - be it north or south. For now, this morning, I'll take Alabama in the springtime. There are butterflies and gold-fuzzed bees. Dogs are sleeping languorously on the porch. The sun peeks through the spaces between puffy white clouds sailing across a bright blue sky. Moths orbit the porch light in the evening and june bugs climb the screen at night. A chorus of frogs and cicadas lulls me to sleep with their timeless chant. Summer is coming. Summer is coming. Summer is coming. 4.21.04



The Mannequin Chronicles

Perhaps you know a Molly. I know a Molly, too. In some ways, Molly is the best girlfriend I've ever had. She isn't demanding, unstable, conflicted, ambivalent, pining for someone else, materialistic or cruel. On the other hand she is also not much of a conversationalist. You see, Molly is a mannequin. I found her on the sidewalk when I lived in the Chicago neighborhood of Andersonville. My associates and I were walking down to the CTA Red Line stop when I noticed a homeless guy fumbling around with what appeared to be a dismembered human lying on the cement roughly a block in front of this. City life teaches one to not be particularly surprised by anything so the thought of a dead human lying on the sidewalk didn't occur to me as anything out of the ordinary.

The homeless guy ambled off before we made it up to where the arms, legs and female torso lay jutted about at impossible angles. It wasn't a human at all, at least not in the truest sense. It was something better than a human. It was a facsimile of a human - a human that would never grow old or leave or forget to pick you up from the airport. Somehow the idea of owning a mannequin had always seemed like a funny idea to me. Here was my big chance. We didn't have time to carry her back to my apartment so I simply looked down and said aloud "Look, it's Molly." And that was that.

We were headed to the Red Line in order to take it to see Son Volt at The Metro. I figured that they wouldn't let Molly into the show. She didn't have a ticket, after all. We did take her to a nearby bar for a pre show pint. I set her up in a chair at our table and bought her a beer. How else would any respectful guy treat a girl on their first date? Fortunately, we met a friend at the bar who offered to put Molly in his car during the show. We agreed to meet in the lot after the show and pick her up. Son Volt was good in that deadpan but well-read way that only Jay Farrar seems to be able to pull off. There may have even been an opening act. I don't recall.

As the last of the lap steel crescendos faded and the ghosts of Uncle Tupelo rattled themselves back out to the sticks and silos we headed to the parking lot where Molly sat, safely buckled in on the other side of the glass. We waited. And waited. I'm pretty sure that my friends were getting annoyed with my insistence on waiting to pick up my new inanimate girlfriend. I considered giving up and donating Molly to our friend, his locked car and his unknown whereabouts. Sometimes The Universe just works that way. I understood that much. Just as we were about to call the waiting on account of forfeiture Molly's inadvertent captor showed up. We collected her and went on our merry way.

I'm pretty sure that we took her to The Hopleaf although I can't be sure. Memory is funny that way. I do recall that when we arrived home at the end of the night I set her on our faux fireplace bookshelf mantle, which is where she lived for years hence. It used to be a real fireplace before the decades of landlords and layers of paint, but that's another story for another day.

Molly has been all over since then. My attorney babysat her while I was in New York. I collected her upon my return to Chicago and we've been together ever since. I once had a female roommate who was disturbed by Molly's comfortable toplessness and she clad her in a Barenaked Ladies t-shirt. She thought she was clever. She does have the usual female penchant for affectation and has acquired an array of headpieces, eyewear and necklaces over the years. Among them have been a Viking Hat from the now-defunct Great Beer Palace, welding glasses, swimming goggles, a cowboy hat, several years' worth of Mardi Gras beads, a cigarette, my Morticia Addams wig and my 2000 Chicago Marathon medal. She has even been to gigs with my band.

Zoom

All manner of other things have been going down and they are all the pinnacle of mundania. I was walking into the local video store and I saw a Corvette parked outside, running with the keys in the ignition. The window was wide open. Unbelieveable.

Cheep Cheep

The bird who built her nest inside my parent's newspaper mailbox now has five little gaping-mouthed baby birds. If you whistle when you walk up to it your call is answered by a chorus of five tiny little fuzzy baby birds. They are quite literally all mouth at this stage.

Help Us Quentin Tarrantino

You're our only hope. I finally got caught up on my movie viewing last Friday night. My brother was sore all over from a car accident and I thought I might distract him with some company, some pale ale and a couple movies. The cinematic menu included an appetizer of The Matrix Revolutions with a main course of the long-awaited Kill Bill, Volume I. Where do I begin?

The first Matrix sounded through Hollywood like a smaller Star Wars. Science Fiction just wasn't the same after Star Wars. It's like being a pre or post-Eddie Van Halen guitar player. Star Wars stripped away the clinical slide rule aspect of space and sci fi and made it a swashbuckling, sometimes filthy place filled with the foibles of humanity. While Star Wars gave us interstellar pirates and Imperialism, The Matrix made technology cool. Very cool. The rise and inherent conflict with technology has been done before. See The Terminator et al.

Modern Science Fiction has very nearly given us a new classic conflict to add to the Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature conflict parameters. It could be argued that Man vs. Technology is really Man vs. Man given the fact that humankind is the progenitor of said technology, but storylines like The Terminator and The Matrix might just be the exact point where Man vs. Man becomes Man vs. Technology.

In any case, The Matrix made Science Fiction into a rave party. Its release was perfectly timed with the Internet's initial inflated salad days. All too many of us Generation Xers had thought we'd finally found a home. Our parents, the Baby Boomers, had left us a hell of a mess in their attempt to give us everything they never had. We were a generation of absentee parents and video games filled that void. Enter the Internet.

The Internet gave my generation something do to, money to earn (however vaporous) and roles to fill. Guys who had spent their undergraduate years playing Quake and doom in their dorm rooms were making $90,000 per year to move information around databases. What did we do with all that money? We bought condos and BMWs and lots of hip clothes. Damn, did we look good playing 9-ball on the pool table in the company Fun Zone. The Matrix nailed it. In The Matrix reality was filled with disenfranchised people just like us. And when they went to work they were dressed to the nines. Throw in some guns, some eye popping visuals and a pile of philosophical claptrap that only the under or unemployed had time to sort through and you've got yourself a blockbuster.

But, once again, I digress. The second Matrix movie was sort of lame. The Wachowskis took away all the things that made the first movie so cool and focused on the grimy, workaday "real" world outside The Matrix. I didn't pay $9.00 to see people in torn sweaters. The car chase was pretty cool and Carrie Anne Moss could make a burlap sack look sexy, but other than that the story just got bogged down. I'd guess that most of the gunplay wound up on the post 9-11 cutting room floor. Vis a vis my ass.

I'd somehow missed Revolutions on the big screen. With the benefit gleaned by last Friday night's hindsight I'm glad I dragged my feet. This movie sucked. Plain and simple. The visual effects were so complicated that half the time I couldn't even tell what the hell was going on. The convolution of the story achieved unparalleled levels. (WARNING - HERE BE SPOILERS - Read on at your own risk.) They killed Trinity, for Christ's sake. They had their chance to make her demise cool in the second movie and they blew it so that every guy's date dragged to see the movie against their will wouldn't feel grossly jilted.

In the end, The Matrix wound up just like Star Wars. I couldn't believe that what I was watching was the result of another franchise gone horribly awry. Save yourself the trouble and rent something else. A DVD of Full House reruns, perhaps?

Or… go rent Kill Bill. If you're one of those types who are not interested in watching decapitations and bloodshed, and you know who you are, then it is best you do not heed my rental advice. If you, like me, feel that Tarrantino's Pulp Fiction was brilliant, then mark my words. Kill Bill made The Matrix Revolutions look like a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of a seat inside the cinderblock movie theater in Moulton, Alabama that has been closed since before I was born.

I won't take up your time with details about Kill Bill suffice to say that it is good to see a Tarrantino movie again. I will also say that Uma befits her name as an original talent.

Ijoe

I have taken another step in joining the 21st Century. I made the investment and bought an Ipod. Music is my life and I am always listening to something. I have also been spending a lot of idle captive time on airplanes and buses and music can be a savior in those situations. There is simply no better way to shut your single serving friend up than to put on headphones. Don't get me wrong. I like meeting people, but there are times when you've been on planes or in airports for 20 or more hours and there are hours yet to go and you just need the Cowboy Junkies. I'd been saving up my Dashboard per deim money and decided that it was time to just do it.

Once you get locked into a serious travel situation every ounce and square inch of shit you drag along gets multiplied. That Discman and CD binder that looked so small in your car is now taking up your precious foot room on a 757. Drop that precarious folding tray that absolutely must be stowed for takeoff and landing into your lap and add a soda and an empty bag of pretzels or two and you're pretty much stuck. Just try fumbling around your carry on or overhead bin for The Trinity Session if you happen to be in a window - or, god forbid - a middle seat.

No more. This Ipod is small. And I mean pack of cigarettes small. It easily fits in my shirt pocket. And that's the kicker. This little thing easily holds my entire CD collection. Go back and reread that again. I have 350+ CDs, not even counting my own music and songs on which I'm always working. It holds all of that stuff, too. I even got a little microphone attachment that allows me to record my song ideas on the Ipod. I can bid a semi-fond farewell to my archaic micro cassette recorder that I have been using to write songs for over a decade. It is simply incomprehensible to me that I can now have instantaneous random access to every song I own. Songs are memories and it's like having every day of your life on random. This morning I had Big Head Todd followed by Sugar followed by Radiohead followed by one of my 587 song seeds followed by Sinatra followed by Hem. Random, indeed.

And it's sexy, too. The packaging is simple and elegant. The unit itself is white with a shiny, mirrored back. I now have something to check how haggard I am in the 11th hour of a red eye flight from Melbourne. The earbud headphones are a little lame but that is easily remedied. I have always had a hard time getting any sort of in ear thingy to fit properly. They always seem like some sort of German torture device. I think I'll go for a drive and see what it is like to be surprised by my own CD collection. See ya. 4.20.04



OK Then

I have borrowed a laptop. This is an entirely new experience for the likes of me. It's sort of like my grandmother and how she can't get used to the idea of a phone that isn't plugged into the wall. The realization that I can sit anywhere and type and write and play solitaire is just now sinking in. I will need to purchase a laptop of my very own at some point but since my job hasn't started doling out the big bucks just yet I shall have to be content with this here second hand unit. The generosity of my friend is unparalleled.

I spent the week in Chicago last week. I will be touring around the country for the entirety of the next two months so I wanted to spend a little quality time with my Great Lakes compatriots. I managed to see nearly all of them. On a sad note, we lost a friend from my college days. Sean Collis was a theater major that I knew fairly well, but close friends of mine were very close friends of his so his untimely passing resonated through my universe. He wasn't a whole lot older than I am now and, as you would imagine, that has all manner of effects upon the world and my place in it. I will miss Sean. My heart goes out to his family and those who knew him well.

Smote By The Bell

The usual Chicago goings on went on while I was in town. We checked into The Hopleaf several times. We started the weekend off properly with a pilgrimage to the Bell's Brewery in Kalamazoo, Michigan. My attorney and my research assistant and I had been planning a pilgrimage ever since Mayor Daley shafted the 2004 Chicago Real Ale Festival out of existence. The RAF organizers staged a pub crawl in lieu of the genuine event but I decided that a pub crawl wasn't worth the 640 mile drive to Chicago. We decided that the only reasonable facsimile was a full on trip to the proverbial fountainhead… the sacred ground on which Two Heated Ale is brewed… none other than the Bell's brewpub.

I'd attempted a trip like of that nature once before. I even placed a call ahead to the brewpub in order to ascertain whether or not they were going to have Two Hearted Ale on tap for our potential sojourn. It is imperative that they have Two Hearted on tap for a trip such as this. Brand me eccentric. Call me a radical. As their bartender said - they have many other fine beers - but there is only one worthy of a trip all the way to Michigan… from Chicago or Alabama. This time our research assistant placed the call. She is a girl and girls have a way of getting males to do things they wouldn't normally do or reveal things not intoned to be revealed. After a lot of bad noise, the manager finally said that no, there weren't going to have Two Hearted Ale on tap for that weekend, but that they would have a firkin of it on a hand pump. Now, any of you who may know me knows that having Two Hearted ale hand drawn within the Bell's brewpub is tantamount to BEER NIRVANA. Upon hearing this good news I was giddy with excitement.

Upon arrival in Kalamazoo - after a drive from Alabama and then on to Kalamazoo with my associates - I discovered that there was no Two Hearted Ale - on tap nor hand drawn. I was chagrined. Distraught. Vexed. Betrayed. Pissed, even. They had lied to us. I'm no pessimist, but I knew that it had been too good to be true. We pleaded our case with the bartender, the manager and eventually our server when we eventually and dejectedly sat down at a table with a pint of pale ale, stout and brown ale, respectively. It just wasn't the same. They kept telling us that they would be happy to sell us a 6-pack from the gift shop so that we could take it home. I know full well that they didn't know that we could purchase Two Hearted Ale at any number of finer liquor stores in our native Chicago, only two and one half hours to the West. We could also have just stayed back in Chicago and had our choice of pubs at which to drink it on tap. We might even have been able to locate a pub back in Chicago with Two Heated Ale back on a hand pump if we looked hard enough. These people surely didn't understand the gravity of the situation. We tried politely asking. We nearly begged. Nothing we could have done remedied the situation. I had the good fortune of overhearing the bartender say that they only had an additional six-pack of Two Heated Ale in bottles. I saw that there were only two in the cooler behind the bar and my associates and I quickly schemed. It was rather lame that we had come all that way to the Promised Land of beer and were about to consume our nectar from the bottle. Unacceptable. Despite the lameness we were not to be denied the consumption of ale on the whole. We offered to purchase all eight remaining bottles of Two Hearted Ale on the premises.

And this is what we did. We finished our alternate beers, started in on our bottled cache of Two Hearted Ale and listened to the band, a geek folk rock band with a bass player that was consistently flat. You can't win 'em all. Sometimes you can't even win for losing. I haven't the slightest idea what that phrase is supposed to mean but my father has been saying it since before I was born. 4.19.04



Tales From The Hopleaf

Not so long ago, my attorney was drinking at the bar at The Hopleaf. Our favorite server tapped him on the shoulder and asked him what my last name was. He and I are in there together on a regular basis - not nearly with the regularity that he is if only because he lives a mere 500 paces from its front door. I have been staying a bit farther away. Like 640 miles farther away. My attorney and I have had many conversations with this particular server. She is very kind, always brings us pitchers of Two Hearted Ale and even joins in our discourse from time to time. She's busy and we understand that. On this particular night she approached my attorney with a puzzled look and, as I said, asked what my last name might be. My attorney replied "Armstrong, why?" She explained that there was a group of people drinking at a table in The Hopleaf that evening because at least one of them is a reader of this very journal. They had read my writings about my beloved Hopleaf on many occasions and decided to see it for themselves. They just happened to get our favorite server and asked if she knew about me. This piqued her interest, she made the connection and decided to ask my attorney about it. He even went so far as to go and speak with them briefly. He called me about it the next day to tell me the amusing story of how all this came to pass. I told him that I was now duty bound to complete the circle by writing about the whole thing. So, whoever you are, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed your outing at The Hopleaf. I certainly hope that you tried the Two Hearted Ale. 3.31.04



Hang Ten

I have had many titles in my day. Some hard won, some unintentional. If you don't like me then you can likely think of a couple yourself. I recently spent a week in Hawaii. I can now add the title of "surfer" to my list. I have always wanted to learn to surf... just like I have always wanted to learn to fly. Surfing was a lot easier and much cheaper to attempt.

I arrived in Honoluly last Monday after the usual torture by airplane. I love hot weather, green plants and humidity so arriving in O'ahu was sort of like coming home. We passed over Waikiki and Diamond Head, circled around and landed over Pearl Harbor. I was on the proper side of the plane to allow an overhead view of the Arizona Monument in the water below me. I always can't help but imagine what it must have looked like on December 7th, 1941. Some Zero pilot saw very much what I saw from a similar angle. We landed without incident and I collected my bags, afterwards catching a shuttle bus to Waikiki.

My flight had originated in Texas and my shuttle bus was replete with retirees, a very young couple dressed as if they were headed to church and one large Texan with a hat, boots, mullet and a faded black concert t-shirt. Let's call him Leroy. Leroy kept asking the Polynesian driver about the weather and making the sorts of statements that make me embarrassed to be an American abroad.

In an attempt to figure out what I might do with myself during my stay I had acquired a couple books about O'ahu before I arrived. I didn't know the actual size of Waikiki as the bus drove around dropping off people at the various hotels. I grew increasingly frustrated with the laps that we seemed to be doing and began to deduce that I was going to be just about the last person off the bus. I chided myself for not having taken a cab. Just as I had thought, I was the second to last to be dropped off - at the Aqua Kuhio Village. It certainly sounds exotic, doesn't it? Later, after I had figured out the layout and small footprint of the place I came to the conclusion that I could have gotten off the bus at virtually any hotel and walked to mine.

Despite the grandiose name, the Aqua Kuhio Village was pretty average. It was a block off the beach, which is great for water activities as well as for getting away from the Vegas/mall feel of the main street along the beach. There was a plastic dome on the floor that turned out to be the ceiling light cover. One of the doors of the bathroom sink cabinet was missing. There were also some long, dark hairs on my bedspread. I tried not to think about exactly how they got to be there. Other than that it was a fine hotel. The amenities most important to me were in place, namely a bed and a shower with warm or hot water.

I found a less commercial surf shop off the beach and secured a genuine Hawaiian - named Ashford - to give me lessons. I had rented a surfboard once before in California. It was November at the time and only a couple Chicagoans would brave the ocean swells. People who live near the ocean are generally of the belief that the ocean is not for swimming. This, of course, does not count the surfers. My friend and I hit the water properly festooned in wetsuits with arbitrarily chosen surfboards. I had a blast but it didn't go well. I drank a lot of the ocean and my friends on the beach said that I did more than just a few somersaults - both the board and myself tumbling end over end.

I know all too well that sometimes the best way to learn is by just doing. I also know that there comes a time when a teacher is indispensable. Ashford was quick and it was obvious that he had gone through the process of teaching a land lover how to stand up on a moving slab of fiberglass in tumbling surf a thousand times or more. With his coaching I was able to stand up on the board within 30 minutes. Just like that. Joe Armstrong learns to surf.

Now, I have no delusions of grandeur. I can surf in the sense that I know the basics of what to do when given a board and some waves. Much more study was needed so I rented a board for the entire next day and I was out there in time to see the sunrise over Diamond Head. I was exhausted by 10am. I was having problems with the first board as it was too small for a greenhorn such as I so I exchanged it when the shop opened at 10:30. I then took advantage of that hot water I had mentioned and got myself warmed up. After lunch I returned and surfed most of the afternoon. Along the way I learned a valuable lesson about the tropical sun. It is possible to get sunburned in the rain. Take it from me.

The locals had informed me that the surf wasn't particularly good that day - and hadn't been because of some unusual rain patterns. This translates to the fact that I did more paddling around than surfing. You paddle out to where the waves appear to be. You paddle some more to follow the breakers. You sit on your board and wait. Then you paddle like hell in an attempt to catch the wave. If you don't succeed you turn around and paddle back. If you manage to get up and ride the wave you either fall off, jump off or gracefully ride it until it peters out at which point you just balance and sink, eventually lying on your stomach back on the board. Oh yeah, you must also attempt to learn to steer on the fly as you dodge the hundreds of other Hoosiers, Corn Huskers and cowboys bobbing up and down in the water as the wave passes over them. Then you paddle all the way back out and do it all again. Paddling creates a lot of friction and I wore holes in my chest, toes and the tops of my feet. I stayed long enough to watch the sunset from my board. By nightfall my feet had what appeared to be some sort of tropical stigmata. It was painful, but the show must go on when you've only got a few days in Waikiki. 3.30.04



Grass Skirts

Once again - off like a prom dress. Keeping up with this will be much easier when I get a laptop. It's on the list. Tomorrow morning I am headed for Hawaii. What a great sentence. I have some great stories about Germany and the Hopleaf and my attorney and other stuff. I'll write all about it in a week's time. For now, it's umbrella drinks, surfing lessons, mountain biking, sun, sand, volcanos and general relaxation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Aloha. 3.21.04



Kolsch

The indigenous beer style of the German city of Cologne is Kolsch, which is where I am headed tomorrow. Just a quick two day jaunt to Europe. I'm working on getting a Midwest show in Kalamazoo, Michigan so I will be in somebody's area soon. My cronies and I have decided to make a pilgrimage to the Bell's Brewery because the sacred Chicago Real Ale Festival didn't actually happen this year. My plan is to go and have my favorite beer ever direct from the fountainhead. I've had it before and it is tantamount to beer nirvana. While I was there I thought I might spread the word and play some music.

Noodle Groove

My friends from the Chicago band 56 Hope Road have completed their 2nd album. Congratulations to my friends Matty, Anne, Dave, Steve, Greg and The Chad. Look for a Chicago CD Release Party in June. I can't be there as I'll be touring with my day job. It is always nice to see people chasing their dreams and catching hold.

We've Thrown a Rod

My suitcase imploded like The Bluesmobile after our last series of dates in Japan and Australia. It lasted well - nearly a decade. It survived Europe and the UK, various roadtrips, several sojourns to NYC, a choir tour trip from when my (now ex) girlfriend borrowed it, a tour with a children's theater group and countless miscellaneous trips around and about. Within 4 minutes of collecting my bag on the ground in Tokyo the little retractable handle broke, thereby forcing me to deal with a semi-functional bag for the entire tour. I had already been putting a nylon band around the entire thing like a Christmas ribbon because of a functionally suspect zipper. One of the little wheels had long since worn out. The long return trip cost me the sole remaining zipper pull and that was that. D-E-D dead. It will now be put out to luggage pasture holding sweaters and such during the summer months.

Glory Day

Word has come through from The Resistance. Word that the upper floor of our beloved Hopleaf is now open. It cannot be confirmed at this time but I will report back when I have seen the truth with my own eyes. For now, it's off to Cologne to sample their beer once again. I'll be back in time for Austin City Limits on Friday night. Until then, cheers. 3.15.04



All Hail Dave

Gay marriage. The zealots have gone too far. Leave those people be. We have wars, an economy residing firmly in the shitter, a staggering and rapidly growing national debt, a domestic health care crisis, a browbeaten enviroment cowering against the next blow in the corner, Michael Jackson is dancing on cars outside of courthouses... and everyone is up in arms about gay marriage. There is even a website dedicated to shaming Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter. (It's true!) All these problems and people still cannot mind their own damn business. I am with David Letterman, who, on a recent Late Night show, stated that "People should be able to marry whomever they chose... they have just as much a right to be miserable as the rest of us." 3.8.04



Big in Japan

That's a joke unto itself. Not much of anything is big in Japan, save for Tokyo, which is the second largest city on the planet. Everything else is small. A prime example is the hotel rooms. I had enough room for myself, a suitcase and not much more. I had never been in a hotel room where the side of the bed was butted up to a wall. I had three in Japan. Three for three - to be exact.

RAF

The Chicago Real Ale Festival was duped by Mayor Daley this year. Last fall the owner of my favorite pub sat with us and described the tawdry state of affairs involving Daley's clandestine campaign against the Chicago tavern community. Apparently, Daley has it in for Chicago's bars. The case and point at hand involves a classic governmental two step that resulted in the lack in the issuance of a permit to the venue where Chicago's Real Ale Festival had grown to fill. He doesn't seem to care about the revenue that over 200 real ales, their divine brewers and we dedicated real ale aficionados brings to and spends in his fair city every year. The festival organizers - bless them - held an alternate event in the form of a pub crawl in lieu of the glorious full blown shindig. Last year I drove nearly 1300 miles round trip in order to attend. This year I didn't see the utility in a similar journey to go on a mere pub crawl. It's sad. It truly is.

To counter this travesty with some good news, the Kalamazoo Brewing Company - a.k.a. Bell's Brewing - has decided to brew my current favorite beer ever all year round instead of seasonally as they have done up to this year. This is no doubt to make up for the major market share of the consumption done by my attorney and myself. We shall have to redouble our efforts. See you at The Hopleaf. 3.6.04



Strom Chaser

Oh yeah, and a big belated Simpson's "Ha ha" to Strom Thurmond, or perhaps more aptly to his bigoted, racist supporters. As it turns out his whole life was a lie. Boo ya. 3.5.04



I Have Come From the Land Down Under

Where women something or other and men chunder. Or something like that. I have returned from my two week sojourn to the other side of the Pacific Rim. Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, Japan as well as Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. I spent a lot of time on airplanes. I took two bullet trains. I saw a "castle" in Osaka. I ate a vanilla Kit Kat bar. I slept in very small hotel rooms. I laughed myself silly attempting to dial a phone after a night of drinking sake. I met a guy with a dreadlock that dates to the Reagan Administration. I confirmed that I love summer in either hemisphere. I didn't see one damn kangaroo. All in all, it was a good time.

Where does one begin to describe the Japanese culture? A good place to start is the recent movie Lost in Translation. A lot of the things about Japan that make you stare blankly and go "huh?" are in that movie. That guy jumping around playing the video game with the drums? I saw them in action. The brightly lit and crammed Pachinko casinos? I saw them, too. My favorite discovery was the robo bar. That's where you sit down and a conveyor belt brings you a virtually never ending supply of sushi. You grab what you want, stack up the plates and pay by the plate on the way out. I opted to let the rolls that looked like spoiled peanut butter roll on past.

The Japanese are organized and efficient in a manner that makes the meticulous part of my nature very relaxed. The bullet trains have numbered doors that line up perfectly with the numbers on the platform at the station. The one thing that I disliked was the pervasiveness of smoking. More than one of my minuscule hotel rooms reeked like Keith Richards' guitar neck. But the place was clean and people were respectful. Imagine that.

And then there is Australia. We had a red eye flight from Osaka to Brisbane and I got to ride on the upper deck of a 747 - something I have always wanted to do - just because. It was all that I thought it might be and more. They even serve sushi on Japan Airlines flights. We arrived just after daybreak and dealt with the international dirge of customs. My seatmate had spilled shaved onions from his sushi into my backpack which had been sitting on the floor between us and the drug dogs kept sniffing me. Another cavity search selection for lucky me. I had three of those in eight flights... and I had two the last time I flew anywhere. I don't even have long hair anymore so I'm not sure why they continually hassle me. But I digress.

We arrived at Brisbane airport and as the band and crew were assembling after customs I stepped outside into the early sunshine of a southern hemisphere summer morning. Again, it was all that I thought it might be and more. The biggest grin that had graced my life in months spread across my face. It was heat. Summer heat. The kind of summer heat that makes the basis of one facet of my three personal religions. The others being good beer and guitar tone. I changed into my shorts and sandals right there at the curb. I couldn't help myself. 3.4.04



Sayonara

Ok then. Off like a prom dress. Bound for parts truly unknown to the likes of me. On the morrow, early I might add, I shall rise and board a plane for Dallas and then Tokyo. Cowboy hats and kimonos. I'll be gone for over two weeks doing guitar tech for Dashboard Confessional. It could be worse. Much worse. I am enjoying one last Bell's Two Hearted Ale before attempting to go to sleep. I don't know about you, but I can never really sleep the night before an early flight. There is just too much at stake. Tomorrow will blend into two days when I cross the International Date Line. Monday will then be Tuesday and I'll be as confused as can be. I will be happy to report on what I find on the other side of the world. For now, take care, raise some pints in the name of your favorite world traveler. Even if it doesn't happen to be me. Cheers. 2.15.04

A genuine Alabama billboard. Somebody paid for this. Huh?

Paterfamilias

My father is helpless... domestically speaking. I have long held the opinion that if anything were to happen to my mother he would wind up like Robert Duvall's character in the movie Slingblade... a confused old man who sits around in a dilapidated house and mutters to himself. Now, I love my father. He sacrificed his life and limb for myself, my siblings and my mother. He has never discouraged me from following my typically atypical path in life. He comes from a generation and culture where the men can build or fix anything. Just don't ask them to maintain or clean it. Maybe it is just a generation in my family or even the geographical region in which they were bred. Have you ever heard the phrase, "Welcome to Alabama, the current temperature is 83 degrees, please set your clocks back 50 years?"

My mother is out of town, visiting her mother in the Great White North. Not Canada, necessarily, but it is Great and White and North of here so it qualifies enough for my purposes. This is a big problem for my domestically inept father. I am the oldest child and I revert to my default setting of cleaning up after everybody when she leaves. This means that I am now the acting mother in the Armstrong household, at least until Monday when I leave for Japan and Australia for two weeks. My father is screwed.

He sent me on a food sortie yesterday. He came home from work last night with a gleam of grilling in his eye. I'm a sucker for grilling - even if it is on my father's infidel propane grill. Normally, I wouldn't touch the thing as I am a lifelong charcoal purist. He sent me to town for grilling items and provisions for his week alone. I was instructed to obtain lots of junk food as he described himself as "a snacker." I returned from the store with Nacho Cheese Doritos, KC Masterpiece BBQ chips, wavy BB chips, cheese on cheese crackers, Chili Cheese Cheese-Nips, Oreo cookies, two cans of beef stew, Choco chip creme pies, prepackaged deli ham, white bread (there was already a large cache of American cheese at home), in addition to the grilling foodstuffs, steak (for him) and chicken and red peppers (for me).

This particular selection of salt and fat or sugar and fat will either tide him over until Mom returns or kill him long before she arrives. The decades long patronage of the Winston Salem Corporation will surely accelerate his untimely demise. I will miss him.

Right now he's in the other room complaining about the quality of the crackers that my mother purchased. By diverting all responsibility for food purchases (with the notable exception of the occasional impulse buy of pork rinds, Mountain Dew or chocolate covered cherries) he can place the blame for the inadequacy of the crackers - or any other food item - upon someone else. It's like laundering money in a culinary sense.

Flash

Does everyone have a sister who doesn't have call waiting? I can completely understand my grandparents not having the feature. Despite the fact that grandma spends more time on the phone than anybody - save my youngest sister during her formative years - she is more than likely befuddled by such modern developments as call waiting. My other grandmother called her microwave her "micro" for years. My sister doesn't have call waiting. This vexes me as there is constantly some sort of child exchange going on between she and my parents involving my nephew... and I get roped into being transport for the loud 7-year old. Again, I love my nephew. He is usually fun to have hanging around. We play with Legos. Last time we constructed a whole fleet of Mars rovers. The problem is that my sister lives nearly 30 miles away. It isn't down the block or even across town. Everyone who has a phone should have call waiting.

I have an aunt who doesn't have call waiting, either. She thinks that it is rude to interrupt a call. I can almost see her point. Almost. Perhaps in a rural Alabama sort of way. There are only about eight or nine other people in the county and there just aren't that many people to call. I am a city mouse. I am also a technophile. From my perspective it is rude to get a busy signal. It is at least annoying. Compared to some folks around here I already live on a space station orbiting Venus or Saturn. I have only had a cell phone for a few years but I have come to not understand or perhaps not remember how anything was coordinated without them. However, I feel for those poor souls who have a digital leash in the guise of a work cell phone. They can't escape. I wonder if anyone has yet been buried with a cell phone.

I have another friend who virtually never answers his cell phone. I have wondered why he has one for ages. He recently had his land line disconnected and the thought that went through my head was "Oh my. How in God's name are we ever going to get a hold of him now?" Things haven't changed. You still can't get through to him.

Prophecy

Something is brewing in our country... and I think that it is a sort of religious civil war. It may not come to blows or blood, but then again, it already has. The "right" struck first with the killing of abortion clinic patrons and employees. The "right" will tell you that the "left" struck first by killing babies at the clinics. Simple fact #1. Abortion is legal. Blowing up clinics, destruction of property and killing people is not. What are you people missing here?

How about all this gay marriage brouhaha? What a pile of monkey shit from the conservatives. I let out an audible "hurray" yesterday when I heard about the mayor of San Francisco's edict to grant marriage licenses to gays and lesbians. I then had a vision of all the conservatives in the remaining 45 non-Pacific Coast states cursing the very existence of the State of California. My vision continued with the idea that maybe California should just secede from the Union. If The South could do it when their free labor boondoggle was called out then California surely has the grounds for an absolution. My vision went on... what would the rest of the country do if the 5th largest economy in the world suddenly operated autonomously? They could charge ten times as much to export all the same shitty movies. Their currency would go through the roof. I just hope I have time to get past Yuma before the border checks go up.

I'm serious about this revolution thing. I used to think that it was about 90-140 years off but I now think that things are accelerating. What is "Christian" about being so exclusionary? If I hear one more zealot say that a particular behavior or viewpoint isn't very "Christian" I'm going to pee on their foot. They can spend the rest of their evening washing their socks and deciding whether or not my actions were Christian.

I have a theory. Imagine that. The conservatives can't handle the idea of a society that genuinely accepts everybody. In a perfect world, The Left being left to make the laws, everyone's viewpoint is at least accepted as valid. Be as conservative as you like on your own time in your own home. You want to pray with your kids? Please. Feel free. Get up eight minutes earlier and have an eight minute prayer with your kids before you drop them off at the public school with the Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Agnostic kids. Just don't expect everyone to adhere to your rigid interpretation of millenia-old dogmas. Leave everyone else to themselves. That's Simple Fact #2. If you don't want your kids to watch the the sex on TV take charge of your parental responsibility and take the time to monitor what they're watching. Better yet. Turn the goddamn thing off and have them read a book... or, God forbid... TALK with them.

To that end, what is the tragedy with a breast on television? Over half the human population of the planet has breasts. That's somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5 billion pairs of breasts doing what breasts do. Do you think there are most breasts than guns? Do you think for a second that there would be as many guns if the people with the breasts were in charge? We can watch adult males beat one another until both of them are bloodied and one of them is unconscious but we can't handle a tit? Is The Superbowl a benchmark for quality, wholesome family entertainment? Do I want to see Janet Jackson's breast on my television or in person? Not particularly. I don't particularly care to see either any part of Janet Jackson or The Superbowl on my television. I was safely insulated from both the offending blob of skin and fatty tissue and the most over-hyped event of the year. My television was off. There's a novel concept.

What is our society's obsession with sex? Why is violence acceptable and sex taboo? Why is it that kids can have BB guns and not condoms that just might save their lives? You. Yes, you. You are here because two people had sex... with the notable exception of those few test tube babies running amok, a good percentage of which are here because of somebody's poor reproductive performance. You are here because of friction and hormones and booze and cold nights. Is the quandary because violence is more profitable than sex? Sex is big business, but it is ash tray change when compared to the defense industry. Fire away.

And then there's Valentine's Day. It's a nice idea if you have someone worthy of buying flowers for, but I don't think it is worth lamenting not having someone. It is perfectly acceptable to be alone. I like it, in fact. I used to be so romantic and gushy. It has been systematically beaten out of me. 99% of the time I am fine with that, which is more than I can say for most things. I have wasted so much time, energy, gasoline, money and pain on relationships and where was the payoff? I like sleeping alone. In fact, I think I'll take myself to bed right now. Plenty of room for elbows and knees. 2.14.04



She's Back

I picked up the new Norah Jones CD, Feels Like Home, yesterday. This CD is perfect. Not perfect in a Sgt. Pepper's sort of way. Perfect in a Norah Jones & Company's second CD sort of way. It shows a little growth in all the right directions... but not too much to alter the perfect stupor that descends upon me when I listen to her and her band make music. It is a good strategy, keeping on doing what she was already doing... which is sucking less than virtually anyone on the planet. She has learned how - and precisely when - to apply the tiniest amount of grit to her voice when a blue note requires it. And the warm, earthy tones are still there - reminding us why most "modern" jazz sounds anemic. The hardcore jazzers can play circles around anybody on the Billboard charts but they do it with what I have come to call the "wet noodle guitar tone." In contrast to Jones' band's warm, tremolo guitar warble the jazzers have always favored a washed out chorus pedal saccharine. And what kind of songwriting cred could possibly trump covering Tom Waits and Townes Van Zandt on the same album? She has more balls than every detuned proto-metal band on MTV.

Will Feels Like Home garner any small percentage of its Grammy-laden predecessor at the register? Who cares? After one has sold 18 million (and counting) copies of their debut album one doesn't really have to be all that concerned about sales numbers. Pearl Jam has been shunning the big time hype since Ten. They're still around, and they will be until they pull their own plug. Norah is a beautiful mid-twenties pseudo jazz singer who split the arrow at the bullseye the first time she picked up a bow. She's just out of the gate and at the top of her game. Let's just enjoy the music and sit back see where she takes herself. 2.12.04



Bad or Worse

Channel A features the 46th Annual Grammy Awards. Channel B features a Bruckheimer abortion in the guise of a major Hollywood blockbuster. Let's see. Would I rather pee on my left foot or my right foot? Would I rather be strapped to a rocket engine and shot up the ass of a rhinoceros or would I rather have the rhino strapped to a rocket engine and shot up my ass? Would I rather be poked in the left or right eye? Would I rather get poison oak on Monday or Wednesday? Would I rather vomit up merlot or shiraz? Would I rather drop my custom made $150.00 earplugs into a storm drain or a sewer? Would I rather fail the first or third sophomore level high school Spanish test? Would I rather have my free 500Mhz computer or my expensive 300Mhz computer crash? Would I rather have my girlfriend leave me and move to Colorado or Maine? Would I rather have my '83 Celica's radiator explode at exit 14 or exit 18 on the way down to college?

The answer? Does it really matter? I flipped back and forth. My nephew was hell bent on watching the edited-for-TV version of Pearl Harbor for the 754th time and I felt my annual professional obligation to watch the Grammy Awards. If I heard them right Alison Krauss has 18 Grammy Awards. I don't get Outkast at all. Granted, I'm a white guy. I still don't get it. At least Coldplay got an award. Three cheers for melody and songcraft. Not much can be said for the rest of the abominable evening of gaudy outfits and ludicrous sets. Get out those torches and pitchforks, friends, we're marching on LA to kill the monster.

DC

And while we're on the topic of LA... I spent the better part of last week out there doing rehearsals and a House of Blues show with Dashboard Confessional. I have many observations. Not the least among them is the fact that flying turns me into a human piece of jerky. I lost my voice on the way out and it still hasn't come back. It is exceedingly dry in those airborne tubular torture chambers. After two flights and an arrival in the desert clime of Los Angeles my throat felt like the hood of a '74 Nova in Death Valley.

My connecting flight was in Dallas. As I boarded the plane and made my way to the narrow steerage seats in the back we were all forced to walk through first class - if only to remind us that we were either dealt or played a bad hand in life. There, staring at me from behind large, shiny black sunglasses was a familiar face. Not the face of someone I've known... but a face I know, nonetheless. Shiny black hair. Chocolate frosting skin. Impossibly bright white teeth glaring with far too much wattage for a Boeing Super 80. Who could it be now? "That couldn't be Little Richard," though I? Why yes. It was none other than Little Richard... flying from Dallas to LA on Superbowl Sunday. The compatriot I met in LA said that Samuel L. Jackson was sitting next to him at the cab stand, awaiting his ride from LAX. One gets that sort of thing flying to or from Los Angeles. The same cannot be said for rural Alabama. I'll leave it at that.

I made it a point to enjoy the temperate February LA weather at every available opportunity. I got up to run nearly every day - each day setting out in a different direction from my downtown Hollywood hotel - the Roosevelt Hotel and Hollywood and Orange. For the uninitiated, Hollywood and Orange is the veritable epicenter of Hollywood tourist annoyance. All those gold stars just lie in patient wait to be trod upon my snow-thawed shoes of Nebraska retirees. My Mizunos carried my far faster than a Midwestern housewife has moved in a decade or more, skittering over the stars and the immortal names emblazoned upon them. I I am generally not a starstruck individual, but one cannot help but read the names of the rich, semi-talented and famous as they pass beneath your feet. Over a mile from the Roosevelt hotel, nearly to the 101, I saw a homeless man splayed out on the sidewalk in the early morning sunshine. His crutches lay beside him as he determinedly polished an unnamed star. My thought was that this wasn't the first time that he had done so. As I approached I wondered what celebrity could inspire such devotion from a downtrodden soul. The answer made some sort of sense. It was the star of Nat King Cole. "I could see that," I said to myself under my winded breath. The only really strange thing that occurred to me was that I had seen what I was certain was Nat King Cole's star somewhere in the last mile between the hotel and this hardcore devotee. I turned around, passed the disciple once more and tried to find Cole's star. Sure enough. Nat King Cole has more than one star. I could see that, too.

The House of Blues show was an opening slot for none other than Elvis Costello. I knew that Elvis was a badass going into the gig, but I was wholly unprepared for the extent to which Elvis was going to prove it. I don't know what to say except that, upon my next visit to The Hopleaf with my attorney I plan on bringing a motion to the floor to elevate Elvis to the lauded status of Badass of the Highest Order. 2.8.04



La La

Back to LA tomorrow. I have tech rehearsals with Dashboard Confessional and then a couple gigs with them next week. My response to the first gig was similar to what most people have said, which is "Ellen DeGeneres has a show?" We're also doing a show at House of Blues with Elvis Costello. How much cooler could that possibly be? We may or may be on Jimmy Kimmel's show on Thursday. Show biz rules dictate that we won't find out about that until Tuesday. Logically. Then it's home again home again lickety split - to prepare for the Pacific Rim dates in Japan and Australia. Have a good week. Try and stay warm. I'll say hello to the sun for you. 1.31.04



Fed rejEx

My low grade conflict with Federal Express has intensified. I placed another call to "customer service" this evening to attempt to discover exactly where in the hell my package is... and moreover exactly why the driver has been driving around with it for two days instead of delivering it to me. They asked me for some contact information - which one would suppose they already had considering the fact that they can track my package to its exact location and can readily read where it is going on the front - and said that they would call me back in the morning. I offered to give them my mobile phone number saying that they would not be able to reach me at my home contact number. They declined the mobile number and I was assured that it wouldn't be a problem. So guess who called me at home while I was away at dinner?

They left a message on the answering machine saying that they had a package for Jessica Armstrong and that the driver thought that the address was in another town entirely. Don't they think I know where I live? They also asked for directions. For the love of God. I don't contest the fact that my current home address is in hip de doo, miles past the middle of nowhere, but I can attest to the fact that you can easily pull it up on Mapquest. I went so far as to put a sign both on the mailbox and on my car to facilitate the location of my address. Somehow, Butch and Kenny - the Armstrong dogs - managed to get the sign off my car and eat half of it.

I called Fed Ex a third time just a few minutes ago. Apologies abound. I don't want an apology. I want them to deliver my package. It is all very simple. I paid them to ship a package to me. I just want them to do what I asked them to do.

All in the Family

I have an uncle. We'll call him Uncle Bob. When I was younger he was one of my favorite uncles - as he was in the Air Force at one point and he and I share an affinity for all things airborne. I have what can only be called an extended extended family and I have scores of uncles. His father, my grandfather, was quite the consumate conservative. It seems that Uncle Bob has picked up the torch and, as it turns out, the pen in furthering his cause. Imagine that. It runs in the family. Sometimes it just runs in the other direction.

Uncle Bob has a penchant for penning Letters to the Editor in his local suburban Chicago newspaper. In fact, he has composed and submitted so many that an article was written about him and his prolific musings in that very periodical. I seriously doubt that he has any inkling that I hold the polarity position to his point of view. In bringing up this point I also run the risk of being noticed by this particular uncle as one of the members of my immense family peruses my journal. Here's to you, Uncle Bob. Keep fighting the good fight. I certainly will.

The Hardest Part

I am agitated. It is a facet of modern life, repeated in the alleged modernity of every age. This particular agitation is directed at the Federal Express Corporation. "The World On Time" is their slogan and I have been waiting for them to deliver something far smaller than a planetary body at any time of the day for the past two days. The wonders of technology now allow me to track the progess of my package via the Internet. Because of this technology I know that my package has been on the delivery truck since 2:54am yesterday. Was the package delivered yesterday? I'll give you three hundred guesses.

At some point during the day yesterday the website's little box that said "Expected Delivery Date" switch from yesterday to today. So today I waited. And waited. And waited. I'm afraid to shower because if I miss the delivery person God only knows how long they might wait to come back out here to attempt to deliver it again. One would think that they'd try again on the following day. Then again, one would've thought that they wouldn't have driven around with my package all goddamn day yesterday without dropping it off.

Circumstances beyond my control have conspired to make the timely arrival of this package imperative. Read: I need this package now. This isn't Fed Ex's fault. I am aware of this. What is their fault is that it isn't here yet. "Yet" meaning well within the window of arrival as determined by them. It is now three minutes before 5:pm - the widely accepted quitting time for most humans in our country so I don't think they're coming. I even called them. A human told me what the Internet already had. The package is on the truck. And that can be added to a long list of ailments of our dying culture. Customer service is dead.

The buck stops nowhere because you can't find anything remotely helpful on a goddamn phone prompt. I have taken to saying the word "human" when accosted with an automated phone prompt. Some comapies' systems hang up on you if you try such things. Others just keep saying "I'm sorry" over and over again cycling into infinity and beyond. I don't want an apology. I want an answer.

I went through something similar last fall as I was trying to get a phone system installed for a business. I had dealt with SBC before on the open field of conusmer battle. I knew the strength and location of my enemy. I knew that they had a veritable monopoly on providing semi-reliable phone service so there was no way to avoid dealing with them. I ordered service well in advance and spent hours upon hours on the phone with my project manager recieving every assurance in response to my oft repeated chant of "something will go wrong."

I lined up all the ducks. I lined up our ducks and their ducks. I took pictures of the ducks for evidence. I lined up other people's ducks just to be safe. What do you think happened? The morning of the move arrived and the system didn't work. Professional technicians working at Union rates who had kept me there all day for several days in a row waiting for their arrival couldn't seem to get it right. This is what these people do for a living. These are the professionals - the people you call when you want something done right.

Is it any wonder that Mars probes have glitches? I think what NASA does is beyond amazing. We have profesional telephone technicians in Chicago who can't even make technology whose basic parameters were set over 100 ago function. NASA can get an object all the way to Mars and land it softly enough to prevent it from smashing into tiny bits. Most of the time, at least. That doesn't even count the deep space probes that have left the solar system completely.

So here I sit. Freezing in my anger because it is cold inside just as it is outside. I have no package at 5:19pm. Maybe now it's safe to shower.

He's Our Man

Ok, here I go again. I have lifted this passage directly from another website. This time I culled something from Michael Moore's website, and as per my usual disclaimer I can only hope that the grave nature of the content will implore the author to disregard my little page's blatant copy and paste.

This is in regards to Dubya's illustrious military record.

...here we have a Commander in Chief - who just took off while in uniform to go work for some Republican friend of his dad's - now sending our kids over to Iraq to die while billions are promised to Halliburton and the oil companies. Twenty percent of them are National Guard and Reserves (and that number is expected to double during the year). They have been kept in Iraq much longer than promised, and they have not been given the proper protection. They are sitting ducks. What if any of them chose to do what Bush did back in the early 70s - just not show up? I've seen Republican defenders of Bush this week say, “Yeah, but he made up the time later.” So, can today's National Guardsmen do the same thing - just say, when called up to go to Iraq, "Um, I'm not going to show up, I'll make up the time later!"? Can you imagine what would happen? Of course, none of them are the son of a Congressman, like young Lt. Bush was back in 1972. Today, MoveOn.org has put together its response to this issue, and I would love to reprint it here. It lays out all the facts about Bush and the remaining unanswered questions about where he went for many, many months: Here are what appear to be the known facts, laid out recently in considerable detail and documentation by retired pilot and Air National Guard First Lt. Robert A. Rogers, and in a 2003 book, “The Lies of George W. Bush,” by David Corn. 1. George W. Bush graduated from Yale in 1968 when the war in Vietnam was at its most deadly and the military draft was in effect. Like many of his social class and age, he sought to enter the National Guard, which made Vietnam service unlikely, and fulfill his military obligation. Competition for slots was intense; there was a long waiting list. Bush took the Air Force officer and pilot qualification tests on Jan. 17, 1968, and scored the lowest allowed passing grade on the pilot aptitude portion. 2. He, nevertheless, was sworn in on May 27, 1968, for a six-year commitment. After a few weeks of basic training, Bush received an appointment as a second lieutenant – a rank usually reserved for those completing four years of ROTC or 18 months active duty service. Bush then went to flight school and trained on the F-102 interceptor fighter jet. Fighter pilots were in great demand in Vietnam at the time, but Bush wound up serving as a “weekend warrior” in Houston, where his father’s congressional district was centered. A Houston Chronicle story published in 1994, quoted in Corn’s book, has Bush saying: “I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes.” 3. Sometime after May 1971, young Lt. Bush stopped participating regularly in Guard activities. According to Texas Air National Guard records, he had fewer than the required flight duty days and was short of the minimum service owed the Guard. Records indicate that Bush never flew after May 1972, despite his expensive training and even though he still owed the National Guard two more years. 4. On May 24, 1972, Bush asked to be transferred to an inactive reserve unit in Alabama, where he also would be working on a Republican senate candidate’s campaign. The request was denied. For months, Bush apparently put in no time at all in Guard service. In August 1972, Bush was grounded - suspended from flying duties - for failing to submit to an annual physical exam. (Why wouldn't he take this exam from a doctor?) 5. During his 2000 presidential campaign, Bush’s staff said he recalled doing duty in Alabama and then returning to Houston for still more duty. But the commander of the Montgomery, AL, unit where Bush said he served told the Boston Globe that he had no recollection of Bush – son of a congressman – ever reporting, nor are there records, as there should be, supporting Bush’s claim. Asked at a press conference in Alabama on June 23, 2000 what duties he had performed as a Guardsman in that state, Bush said he could not recall, “but I was there.” 6. In May, June and July, 1973, Bush suddenly started participating in Guard activities back in Houston again – pulling 36 days at Ellington Air Base in that short period. On Oct. 1, 1973, eight months short of his six-year service obligation and scheduled discharge, Bush apparently was discharged with honors from the Texas Air National Guard (eight months short of his six-year commitment). He then went to Harvard Business School. Documents supporting these reports, released under Freedom of Information Act requests, appear along with Rogers’ article on the web at http://democrats.com/display.cfm?id=154. In the absence of full disclosure by the President or his supporters, only the President and perhaps a few family or other close associates know the whole truth. And they’re not talking. Bush was apparently absent without official leave from his assigned military service for as little as seven months (New York Times) or as much as 17 months (Boston Globe) during a time when 500,000 American troops were fighting the Vietnam War. The Army defines a “deserter” - also known as a DFR, for “dropped from rolls” – as one who is AWOL 31 days or more: www-ari.army.mil/pdf/s51.pdf. Well, there you have it. Someone got some special treatment. And now that special someone believes he has the right to conduct a war - using other not-so-special people's lives. My friends, I always call it like I see it. I don't pussyfoot around. Sometimes the truth is hard to take. The media conglomerates are too afraid to take this on. I understand. But I'm not. That's my job. And I'll continue to do it. And when I'm wrong, like the thing about Bush pooping his pants, I'll say so. Yours, Michael Moore mmflint@aol.com www.michaelmoore.com

Now, the guy is in office and there isn't a whole lot we can do about that. But I still take issue with his right to a preemptive doctrine of getting people killed. Not to mention the fact that we're killing Iraqi civlilians with bullets and bombs bought with my tax dollars.

Here we are, not even a year after we went to war in order to smoke out Saddam's reputed Weapons of Mass Destruction and I'm seeing headlines like "Bush defends war despite no WMDs." Don't you people remember that he stood in front of a live camera in the White House and told us all that we'd be going to war over Weapons of Mass Destruction? 1.29.04



DeGnOnis MiPller

My attorney gave me an old Dennis Miller tape around Christmastime. It wasn't a Christmas present proper so much as him cleaning out boxes in his computer room as he constructed his new Frankenstein computer. "Merry Christmas" he said as he handed me the analog tape. He would have said the exact same thing handing me the tape in July.

I could call myself a fan of Dennis Miller. He maintains a steadfast bastion in defending America against the dumbing down that seems to be so pervasive in our modern society. I was even a fan when he was on Monday Night Football. True football heads may have taken issue with his tendency to slip esoteric historical references into commentary about 3rd and long attempts but I have always been of the belief that people who engage in and/or watch full contact sports could use a little schooling up. But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

I was enjoying Dennis' mid-90's rantings on my "new" tape, laughing out loud and nodding in agreement when he worked his way up to a particularly observant or salient point. I somehow missed the fact that, over the last couple years, Dennis has strayed from his formerly self-proclaimed policy to point out the inconsistencies within both political parties. In fact, he now lists to the right like the hangover of the Titanic's iceberg watchman after a particularly bad night in the crow's nest.

I am no Democrat, but I do have a deep-seated aversion for the typical Republican point of view. I fully respect Miller's right to lean to the right. As Voltaire said, "I may not believe in what you say but I will defend to my death your right to say it," however, I now must regretfully place him on my shit list. I'll continue to laugh - as he is still wickedly funny - but I now consider him to be part of the problem.

Antique Roadshow

My parents are addicted to this show. You'll find it on PBS - who are purveyors of great television insomuch as such a thing exists. Maybe it's me but it seems like it is on every night of the week. I don't know if it my perception of Darryl and Mary's collective delusion that the heaps of shit in their barn might be appraised at some ludicrous amount of money if they ever dragged it to auction. In case you are not familiar with the show it goes something like this... every program is set in an auction hall in a different American city. A steady stream of people are brought onscreen - seated on the left - and they describe what they think the object they have brought - placed in the middle on a table - might actually be to an expert seated on the right. It's like a treasure hunt for middle aged Americans whose barns, garages and basements are piled up with their children's former college apartment furniture and dead relatives' recliners.

More often than not, the owner of the object in question hasn't the slightest idea either what it might be or might be worth. I'll admit that some pretty cool old stuff shows up from night to night but the show just drives me crazy. Maybe it is the looks of incredulity on a doughy Nebraska housewife's face when a New York curator informs her that her grandfather's marble collection might be worth $1,500.00. Maybe it is the endless swarms of people dragging junk around behind the folks onscreen. Maybe it is the perpetually stunned responses from my very own parents when the estimated auction price is revealed.

And there, perhaps, is the rub. It is the idea that the amount suggested by the expert isn't what is being offered by anybody. It is their best guess as for what a double-ended brass trumpet circa 1897 might fetch if - that's if they tried to sell it. I just don't get it and that's fine. If it makes you happy... 1.28.04

Call Me Ishmael

Moby-Dick. There's a hyphen in there. Really. Look it up. Herman Melville's classic was not on any of my MUST READ books in high school or college and I somehow made it through a Bachelor's Degree without having read it. Was I a child left behind? The good news is that I can still read. So, while visiting a friend out west last autumn I began cycling through her book collection and reading things that piqued my interest. As Fast Food Nation and Siddhartha were both consumed I perused the sideways titles of the shelved books. And there sat Moby-Dick. It was thick, but this has never really been a problem for me. Anyone who has read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged back to back isn't easily intimidated by the couch-balancing properties of a thick book.

I had been operating under the lifetime-long impression that Moby-Dick was going to be some sort of archaic, moldy and thick-reading sea epic. I love to read and I don't mind tackling a book written to read like walking through tall weeds from time to time, but I have been on a big nonfiction kick and working my way through some heady stuff as of late. It is admittedly slow going. Those who only read fiction don't fully appreciate that nonfiction is like school without the grades. You're learning something, or in the least being exposed to something that isn't romantic or swashbuckling or filled with political intrigue.

I opened the book and began reading. There was a sizable introduction penned by the latest editor to take a crack at Melville. Then there was a section called Etymology followed by a quotation-riddled section called Extracts. I had been through this once before while reading Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I had always been entranced by Disney's silver screen version - not to mention the ride at Disney World - and read the book completely of my own volition. Verne also wasn't on any high school or college reading list. 20,000 LUTS, as it turns out, was written during a period of great advances in undersea scientific knowledge and in places the book reads like a graduate school marine biology textbook. Lots of places.

I expected a similar vapid and humorless 700-page descrpition of 19th century whaling out of Moby-Dick. I am pleased to say that it didn't meet my expectations. This book is filled with humor and wit. Like Candide, it has shown me that sardonic humor is timeless and that there have likely been groups of guys sitting around in a pub lambasting society, government, the diffuculty of relationships and the nature of humankind since time immemorial. They talk about it and then they write it down. The good ones write it in a story that resonates through the ages. Now, I haven't completed Moby-Dick yet so don't ruin it for me and blow the ending. 1.27.04



A Disturbance in the Force

A great weight has been lifted. A pestilence has been thwarted. An unknown menace bested. Without going into the gory details as for why I can now saw that my beloved Hopleaf is now reopened. There was something about a fine levied by the City of Chicago and a former employee that resulted in The Hopleaf's scheduled temporary closing. The world has passed out of shadow and The Nothing has receded. We're still up to our earlobes in winter but that is part of a normal, if horrific cyclical process of all things. I was aware of the closing and had prepared for my soul's passage through the wilderness. Now that we have reached the safety of the lee of the storm and the Hopleaf is once again open for business I feel as if I can safely speak of the tragedy. Sometimes things slip out of your control and you just have to ride them out. Please, I implore you, drop by Clark and Foster and order yourself a pint of delicious beer. It cures what ails you.

And speaking of riding things out - I am still covered in poison oak. My life is like a broken record. Look back a year and see what I was writing about this time last year. Even with the Cortisone shot and the oral medication I am covered in little itchy red bumps. Whey you happen to be as lucky as I you get a systemic infection and the bumps just pop up anywhere and everywhere. 1.20.04



Back in NAMM

So, here I am in Los Angeles again. I came out for the NAMM show - also known as the National Association of Music Merchants. It is a trade show for anybody who makes any product even remotely related to the music industry. Think of it as the world's largest music store, and all that that implies. Booth after booth of guitars, amps, picks, strings, horns, stands, speakers, software, cases, basses, keyboards. A cacophony of guitar shredders and drum thrashers all trying to outdo the shredder or thrasher in the next booth over. A several hundred foot long line of people waiting to get Paul Stanley's autograph. George Clinton and his entourage wandering around amidst the sales reps from Iowa. A 14-year old mandolin prodigy named Josh Pinkham being presented an unnervingly expensive mandolin by the Gibson Corporation. I was there to pick up some gear for my upcoming tour with Dashboard Confessional. I also came to California because it is freezing everywhere else in the States right now. A free pass to the NAMM show was just the catalyst I needed to come out to the left coast and soak up some sunshine. Fate, as per usual, had it in for me and this trip.

It all started last weekend when I helped my father clear some land on the Armstrong Compound. He has roughly 20 acres in rural Alabama and he has spent the past decade cleaning up the property. At one point he cut a bunch of trees and pulled them into a pile and that pile had since grown up with vines, briars and weeds. If your father is anything like mine one day or another he will just wake up and decide to finally take care of something like that assuming that you - his son - will drop everything and help him. My particular father lives in a distant decade in the last century when this sort of behavior was more commonplace. He also expects people to read his mind as for when he might potentially decide to tackle a big task like clearing land even though me may not know himself.

Last Saturday my own resident Homer decided that the time was neigh to get to work on that giant tree and brush pile. By the time I awoke, read his mind and got dressed in my work gear he already had a giant pile of dead wood and brush on fire in a huge stack. All we would have needed was a heretic worthy of our pyre. I set to work, very carefully avoiding the large number of poison oak vines that had grown up all over the area and dodging the flaming embers filling the air. Do you think you might be able to guess where this might be going?

Pretty much one year ago I helped the males of the Armstrong Clan cut, haul and stack a season's worth of firewood for the grandparents - and in the process contracted a heinous infection of poison oak. A stop by last year's journal pages tells a macabre story of sleepless, Caladryl covered January nights.

This year I knew to be extremely careful and to be covered by clothing head to toe. I was both careful and covered. At the end of the first day I went into the house and put my clothes directly into the washer and got myself into the shower. I was determined not to get poison oak again. As I tried to sleep that night I had torturous visions of the creepy fuzzy vines of poison oak in every frame of my imagination.

Sunday's workday was harder and it included the coming of age ritual of dad letting me use the chainsaw for the first time ever. You'd think I was 14 or something. I managed to not cut off my leg or any of my fingers and I once again put my work clothes directly into the washer at the end of the day. I felt as if I had dodged a bullet train because I wasn't itching and had no indications of the telltale welts of poison oak on my person. I was concerned about the smoke I'd been working in and around all weekend. The experts warn that humans are to avoid inhaling the smoke from burning poison oak, ivy and sumac as the urushiol oil can infect you via your lungs. Not a pretty picture. I thought I was in the clear. My Sunday night dreams were once again overgrown with tendrils of furry vines that turned the dreams to nightmares.

A mid-Monday sigh of relief was stopped short by my father's arrival home after a self-imposed half day at "the office" so he could finish up the work across the road. I donned the clothes again and resigned myself to a third straight day working in the hot zone. I didn't work nearly as hard on Monday as the only areas left weren't nearly as overgrown. At sunset we all retired to the house and I ate some rice left by my nephew when he lost interest in dinner. Sitting there, at what I took to be minimum safe distance from an entire weekend of working among a known biohazard I breathed an uneasy and belated sigh. And then I noticed some stomach discomfort.

Just a little twinge. It started in low, and then it started to grow. Within the hour I had a fever and was well on my way to what felt like a magnificent flu. I spent the entire night awake in bed, alternately freezing and radiating heat like a reactor core. The vomiting started somewhere in the middle of the night. I'll spare you of the rest of the gory details - suffice to say that it was a near perfect redux to the flu of the prior year's New Year's Eve debacle.

Then it occurred to me. Last year there was a work day in the woods and a horrific flu episode which was followed by a brutal outbreak of poison oak. This year there was three days in the woods, another horrific flu episode and... yup, you guessed it, yet another brutal outbreak of poison oak. Here I sit in California, completely covered in little red splotches and bumps that itch enough to make me want to crawl out of my skin. I managed to get to an Urgent Care Center to get a Cortisone injection on Friday... along with a prescription for more steroids for the poison oak. After last year's month-long rigmarole of applying Caladryl every few hours I decided to suck it up and spend the money the uninsured have to spend at the doctor's office to see if the injection helps those afflicted with poison oak.

The verdict? It helps. Some. That $40.00 per ounce Zanfel stuff I picked up last spring when I got poison oak again sort of helps as well. A little. For $40 an ounce I expected it to help a whole lot more than it does. Bio War 2003 has evolved into Bio War 2004 and it looks as if it might wind up as some sort of Hundred Years War or something on yours truly. I itch. A lot. I barely sleep. I like awake. I itch. I get up. I itch. I shower. I itch. I wandered around through the entire NAMM show itching. I'm itching as I write this. I guess that I am perhaps destined to be a city mouse.

It's a Purple Vase

I flew out of Birmingham, Alabama the other morning. I had planned on gate-checking my guitar in order to keep it out of the violent hands of those people who throw your baggage around for as long as possible. I made it through checking in without too much of a problem. They x-rayed all my stuff without a hitch and I was then "selected" for the special screening that everyone has heard about. I was culled from the herd of early morning air travelers and made to sit apart from everyone.

Next to me on the bench was a normal-looking guy who appeared to be in his mid 40s. We made small talk and joked about having been part of the lucky few selected to remove our shoes for the cavity search. I was as helpful as could be and the staff of mouth breathers with sloping foreheads began to rifle through all my things. I removed my shoes and had the little magnetic wand waved all over, under and around my person. As I was unlocking my guitar case I heard that nicely dressed guy from the bench behind me say "It's a plastic vase."

An airport screener was intent on unwrapping every single layer of the bubble wrap around what was obviously a bong in the guy's luggage. I chuckled to myself wondering if the screener would have any clue as for what it really was. It looked very much like a plastic vase. A small, purple plastic vase with a knurled handgrip and black rim around the top. The possession of a new, unused bong seems to be a gray area in the current United States Canon of Law. Dubya and Ashcroft are hell bent on preventing the populace from coming to their own conclusions as far as the same "mistakes" in their lives that Dubya himself made in his formative years.

Dubya was a cokehead. Have you ever known a cokehead? They are assuredly much more frightening and dangerous than any garden variety pothead. Potheads aren't going to get up off the couch except to find the hitter that rolled under the couch or perhaps let the pizza delivery man in. I don't know about you, but I'm for more concerned that a (perhaps reformed) former cokehead is running the free world than I am about the guy with the bong.

But I digress. The screeners had all manner of things from inside my guitar case set out on the table waiting for the supervisor to come over. They confiscated the minuscule wire clippers I have used to cut my guitar strings since my freshman year of high school. I balked and complained - as my guitar would be riding in the unpressurized baggage compartment under the floor of the cabin. Even if I could feasibly tear through the carpet and flooring of the passenger cabin, find my guitar, retrieve my string cutters, and return to the cabin without being noticed by my fellow passengers or the flight staff I seriously doubt if I could have the time to do all this AND commandeer the plane by the time we reached Chicago. I realized full well that I had no recourse but I felt that it was important to let them know that my civil liberties and my status of of that of a semiprofessional musician were both being compromised in the name of a world class sham of a security check. Does anybody really think that we are any safer now that thousands upon thousands of pairs of tweezers that have been confiscated. They still allow knitting needles for Christ's sake. It's all a sham.

There is simply no way to stop someone who is willing to give their own life for a cause. And there is where we ought to focus our energies. Is it such a radical idea to attempt to find out WHY someone might harbor enough animosity to kill themselves and a couple hundred other humans in a blaze of overzealous glory? As Thoreau said, "For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root." America seems intent on the leaves. 1.19.04



Into That Good Night

I saw a dead person tonight. It has been quite a while for me. I guess that means that I'm due to experience a windfall of passings. This particular dead person was a friend of the family - no one I personally knew particularly well but he meant a lot to those who mean a lot to me.

Loss is hard. You can listen to all the death-is-inevitable wisdom ever offered but it doesn't make the situation any easier to swallow. Another friend recently lost a family friend and his wife in an automobile accident. I guess it is going around.

It goes around a lot more frequently in places of civil unrest. The American death toll from the invasion of Iraq currently stands at around 500. This lofty total doesn't include the deaths of other "coalition" member countries, Iraqi civilian or military deaths or the staggering 9000 +/- Americans wounded to date. We're averaging 1-4 deaths of American soldiers per day. I just don't understand.

In my daily musings I came across one of the Great Truths last week. It goes something like this: "It takes much more time and resources to create than it does to destroy." A 60 year-old tree that grows so slowly as to be imperceptible can be cut in seconds and subsequently rendered into chips within a minute's time. A house that takes a month to construct can be razed in a morning shift by one man and a bulldozer. A human life, perhaps one of the precious things in known existence, can be silenced in an instant. The moral? Be mindful of your actions. You can destroy something so very precious so very simply.

We need more guns? We need to go to war to save lives? War. The very definition of hell on earth. Our government supposes to be justified in having started a war. Not in my name. I didn't like it last year and I don't like it now. Just so we're clear. 1.8.04



Paradise By the Dashboard Light

Hey all. Welcome to 2004. It was turning out to be a quite pleasant year until the cold front barreled through yesterday. I had been wearing shorts and sandals all weekend. Now my feet and much of the rest of me is cold.

Despite this affliction I am grinning ear to ear because I have some great news from the Realm of Joe. I will soon be joining the up and coming band Dashboard Confessional on their upcoming tour. They are in need of a guitar tech and I just happen to be one of those guys who has been tinkering with guitars since I was 14 years old. A guitar tech is the guy who babysits a performer’s guitars before, during and after a show. He’s that skinny guy in the spandex shorts with the fanny pack who walks out to check the guitar setup right before the show is about to start – thereby pissing off the drunk and anticipatory audience because they think he’s the band coming out. He tunes and tweaks and makes rock stars look superfuckingcool by handing a fully loaded guitar to him or her and taking the prior one offstage.

It is a classic case of who you know – the importance of which cannot be understated. In this case, I happen to know their monitor engineer, my good friend Brian Bavido. Brian is the owner of Full Range Recording studio in St. Joseph, Michigan where I recorded much of Sidewalk Chalk Manifesto. Because of who and what I know… in about a month’s time I’ll be heading to my former hometown, New York City, for rehearsals and tour preparations. After that I’ll be heading around the world – quite literally. It’s New York to Japan, Japan to Australia, Australia to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to the UK, the UK to Europe and then home again.

I consulted my crystal ball – in the shape of a pint glass, of course – and I see sushi in Tokyo in my future. I also see some Southern Hemisphere summer weather. I wonder if they have lightning bugs in Australia. I doubt it but I aim to find out. I will also finally take a picture of a toilet flushing in the opposite direction. One of my best friends was down under for his honeymoon and I pressed him to get a picture of the event. He was apparently too busy doing whatever couples do on their honeymoons to do so. No harm done.

This very well may put a headstone on top of my shitstorm. It started sometime in 2001 and had been wreaking havoc on my life until halfway through last year. I love to travel. I love music. Getting paid to travel and work in music is like a truck full of free pale ale, except it’s much smaller and easier to store. I’m going to do my best to update this here journal during my travels in order to keep my devoted readers up to date on what it feels like to drink a beer on the other side of the world. I’ll take some pictures, too. I still have a copious amount of pictures from my big wandering tour from last summer and fall. Perhaps I’ll hit up the server people for enough space for a Walkabout Picture Gallery.

I am beside myself in many ways. You play life for the breaks. Sometimes you are the windshield and sometimes you’re the bug. This gig will take me many places – literally and figuratively. Matthew Sweet was once Lloyd Cole’s guitar tech. 1.6.04



ATL

I had to watch a replayed tape of the ball dropping in Atlanta again this year. Northern Alabama doesn't have anything remotely comparable. The TV hosts in Atlanta kept referring to their town as "The A.T.L." How lame. At least I wasn't vomiting up things from 3rd grade as I had been last New Year's Eve. And that was sans even a drop of booze. Happy 2004, everybody. 1.1.04

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