It's 4 am in the morning. I'm still awake.  I just stepped outside to check out the night sky.  The massive thunder storm has passed and the sky is crystal clear.  There is a insanely bright star in the east. It is so bright, I think initially thought it was a sattelight or perhaps the space station, but it isn't moving.  It looks like it has a tail, but I can't tell for sure without a telescope or binoculars.  Just when I was staring intensly at the bright thing in the sky, a falling star dashed through my line of sight.  Wow. Sometimes nature can be amazing.  I'm going to google to see if there is a comet or something scheduled for tonight.  Then, off to sleep.

It has been a long while since I've written anything political in my blog.  However, today is a special day.  It seems Obama has won the nomination. Thank goodness. He was my first choice. I've been following him for a while, watching his speeches on Youtube and CNN.  The guy is smart, a good talker, and he seems like he hasn't been assimilated by the system yet--the exact opposite of what we have now.  One speech in particularly made me smile.  In it, he promised not to use religion as a wedge in the upcoming campaign.  I really hope he can do that.  He's maintained the high road so far. Lets hope he can keep the high road with McCain.

I'm just so completely and utterly fed up with the hypocrisies and lies spewed by Bush and his minions.  It seems that he can get away with any lie.  Clinton lies about a b-j and almost gets impeached.  Bush lies about the war, American-sponsored kidnapping and torture, his personal war record, his handling of New Orleans, wire tapping, and the list goes on.  Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people around the world have died due to his policies and nothing happened to him.  Oh, he has low approval ratings.  But honestly, his ratings could be negative and I doubt the average American would feel inspired to do anything above griping about it on blogs, like I'm doing now.  Colbert did a sketch about how activists today say more than ever, thanks to the Internet, but accomplish less than ever, thanks our overall complacency and laziness.  It was both funny and sad.  But it was definitely accurate.

I really hope Obama will live up to his motto of "change."  I hope it works out.  The dude is inspiring.  Lets hope he can make a dent in the system. 

I've just spent 30 days in a van touring the nation with some of the coolest / foulest smelling people I know :-) It was a trip, both literally and figuratively. I could rattle off a few cliches about long trips. Stuff like "I learned a lot about myself" and "I learned not to take things for granted from now on." That's all very true, by the way. I did and I won't.

I had a lot of goals for this trip. First and foremost, I wanted to quench my wanderlust, at least temporarily. I wanted to be able to tell my future-kids that their nerdy father once toured the nation with a punk rock band. Take that future kids--eat your damned spinach! I wanted to explore as much of the Nation as possible just to figure out what America is all about. I wanted to see stuff with my own eyes. You can learn a lot about a people by studying their environment. We, and by "we" I mean "Zach", drove through deserts, plains, coastlines, fog, rain, mountains, valleys, and wind--my god, the wind! Note to self: make sure the suspension and alignment are in tip-top shape before heading out across the great plains in a van. Driving in the wind was like sitting inside a play-toy for the gods, being tossed in the wind like so much paper. You shouldn't need to hold the steering wheel at a 45 degree angle just to counteract the wind and continue driving in a straight line!

Here is a brief montage of Zach driving across the country.

Above all, however, I NEEDED to get away for a month so I could take a look at my entire life from the ground up with fresh eyes. Athens is a cool place, but it has a way of distorting your perception of reality if you let it. Athens feels a lot smaller, but it also feels twice as comfortable as it did before the trip. Still, I could see myself living on the west coast someplace. San Diego, Oakland, Portland, Seattle: I liked all those cities. I found Duluth, Minnesota oddly gorgeous even though it was so cold, I could see my breath during the day in the middle of May.

Least favorite place: Appleton, Wisconsin. By no means was it a horrible place. It simply felt like an uber-cliquish high school. I suppose, that happens everywhere in the U.S., obviously. But it felt more pronounced in Appleton. All the punks, for instance, wore essentially the exact same uniform. The other guys in the band didn't notice it, but it bugged me. Heck, Everyplace else we played, the punks wore all sorts of clothes and the clothes didn't matter as much. In Appleton, EVERY punk had on the same exact outfit with minor variations. Black pants, spiked belt, black shirt saying something witty, black spiked arm guard, black hair with odd color highlight, et cetera. People looked at me strange for wearing a green button-down flannel shirt. Heck, the only people not wearing all black were in the bands. The guys in Holy Shit didn't have any black on whatsoever. And people loved them. I told one guy I could go out to the van and put on a black shirt if it would make him more comfortable. While walking down the street, some "Swedes" (a local term for jocks) called me a fagot. Nice! Maybe I just caught Appleton on a bad day? Anyhow, it was not my favorite stop of the tour, which is a shame because we played pretty well that night.

Our best performance was in Oakland with Green Day's side project, FOXBORO HOT TUBS. Curtis booked the show months ago, then the Green Day folks wanted to play, so we got booted. Thanks to my old bass player Jeremy Foltz and the Green Day guys themselves, the original touring bands stayed on the bill and the locals got booted. We got to play in front of a nearly packed house at the Stork Room. We were the only band to initiate a mosh pit and crowd surfing the entire night. I wish I could have moved around more, but I would have taken off the heads of some high school girls in the front row with the headstock of my bass--it was that packed. For days beforehand, one of us would blur out "We're playing with Green Day!" while riding in the van. Everyone in the band stepped it up a notch that performance. Minor drum issues disappeared. I don't think I made any bass errors. Curtis stayed clean for the entire drive up to Oakland for the show. Zach, like I said, inspired people to get up and move. Jeremy acted as our manager and managed to get us $300 for the performance! $100 came from the venue. Then, the guys in Green Day / Foxboro Hot Tubs gave our "manager" Jeremy $200 as a tip for We March. That was real cool of everyone involved.

The funnest show, for me, was Tuscon. We expected nothing but ended up having a great time. I like Portland and Long Beach too. There was no way any of us could have ever planned how things went. I think, however, that most of the other guys in the band liked the house party at Milwaukee the best. It was a pretty good show. I could hear myself on bass. People got into it. Duluth was also a lot of fun. Minot was a fun town but the drive to and from Minot sucks. I generally got tired of touring soon after Milwaukee. Chicago was kind of a let down, though I enjoyed hanging out with my sister and Todd.

I learned that house parties are often better / cooler than playing venues. The house and basement parties we played were better than 80% of the venues we played. The crowds at house parties are way more into the music. The beer is BYOB, and hence cheaper than a bar. And if your band has merch, they'll buy it. Which reminds me, I learned that investing in desirable merch can save your butt on the road. I also learned that any money invested in merch will not be recovered, but the merch money prevents you from going further into debt. Let me explain what I mean with this hypothetical situation: lets say you spend $100 on 10 T-Shirts. You sell the shirts for $20 and you sell them all. You now have $200. $100 is profit. The other $100 should go into the bank to pay for the T-Shirts. Unfortunately, unless you have super-human self control, you are going to spend that $200 cash someplace. It could be at a bar, it could be spent on gas, or at a strip club for that matter. So essentially, you spent $100 on merch initially, but got to spend another $100 without having to use your credit card. It's like a mini-loan to yourself that you know you are going to default on, but it doesn't matter because you are the bank as well as the borrower.

I learned that I can sleep anywhere. I learned that earplugs help you to sleep anywhere. I learned that train whistles are my sworn enemy. I was awoken in nearly every city we played by a train whistle. The whistle at Denton, TX was the worst. Three of us were sleeping in the van when a train blew its whistle for at least a solid minute without a break. It woke all of us up. Curtis proclaimed, "shut the fuck up!" but the train whistle didn't not listen. Stupid train whistles.

I learned that it is possible to lose weight on tour by eating nothing but salads at fast food restaurant chains and Jack Link's brand beef jerky. You can't Slim Jim. It has too much fat. Jack Link's brand is actually low fat. Still, it has nitrates. McDonald's, believe it or not, has the best salads of all the fast food chains we tried. I hardly drank any soda. I drank mostly water and light beer. I ended up loosing five pounds, but for all I know, a lot of that could have been muscle since I was sitting in a van for four to eight hours a day. Then again, I sit at home for eight hours a day working. Now that I think of it, there is a good chance I was more active while on the road. Hmm, I'm going to lift some weights right after finishing this post.

I learned that Taco John's is even better out west. The serving sizes are larger, and they have salsa bars.

I learned that my original book idea about a struggling musician blows chunks. I have a new book in my head now along with tons of notes, tons of photos, and video to use as research. I've got a pretty good plot in mind for a dramatic fiction. They say everyone gets at least one novel in their life. Perhaps this is it?

I learned that playing music makes you a better musician. Well duh, right? I played bass nearly every day for 30 days and it made me a better bassist and a better guitarist. When we got back to Athens, I performed with Red Dahlia and only made one mistake on a "new" song. I learned that, at least in my brain, all that musical knowledge is stored in the same location. Keeping it in constant use improves your musical abilities in general.

Most importantly, I learned to "let go." It took a trivial thing like riding as a passenger in a van to help me do it. You know how when your a child, you can sit in the car and let your parents drive without feeling like your life is in danger. Your dad could be the world's worst driver, and still you'd sit there completely calm without a care in the world. Then you grow up and start driving your own car. That goes on for a few years and suddenly you find yourself in the shotgun seat trying to step on the invisible break pedal when the driver goes around a corner a little too fast. What happened? Is it a control issue? Is it a trust issue? Is it a sense of mortality now that you're no longer a little kid?

For the first three days, I couldn't rest in the van. No offense to Zach's driving. He's actually pretty darned good. After a while I decided that rest was more important than being afraid. I sat their, closed my eyes, and forced myself not to react whenever we went around a sharp corner or whenever Zach applied the breaks a little harder than normal. It took a couple of days to train myself not to spaz out. I thought to myself, "if you are going to die in a car accident, there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent it, so just relax and accept your fate." It worked. It was quite a liberating experience. By the time we hit the winds of the great plains, I was prepared for the worst. The wind blew our van around on the road like it was made of cardboard. Zach did all he could to keep the van going in a straight line as the wind shifted us from the left, to right, to left again. Some spots on highway 8 had signs warning of extreme winds. I few signs had wind socks, like the ones found at airports, to alert drivers if the wind was gusting. One wind sock in Arizona was fully inflated as we drove across a bridge with low railings. I didn't even flinch.

So, now that the tour is over. Athens seems kind of weird to me. It will take a few days to adjust to home living again. It feels good to be home though.

If money and time were not an issue, I would have liked to have do more sight seeing at each of the cities we played. We only got to see a few tourist attractions. Most of what I saw was through the window of a moving van. I took a lot of non-band related shots with my camera. I particularly like flowers for some reason.

Here are some of my favorite shots.