super happy fun land, maybe...

Oh, touring. I knew I should have been skeptical when the first show drew a good crowd and paid well of a tour with two acts nobody has ever heard of. I'm experienced enough; I've been around the block once or twice. But like any good salesman, the first one's always free.

Tuesday the 12th was the low point(The band knows about this blog, they're reading it, and I feel safe saying this, and would willingly put a lot of money on everyone agreeing to this assessment). We played the Parlor, a punk-rock pizza joint on the north side of Austin that for some reason decided not to put tables in the front of the restaurant so that bands could play for their sparing clientele. And I think the employees get off on being jerks to the musicians. We did get two medium 14” pies with two toppings each and two Lone Stars each. The difficulty of six people trying to pick four pizza toppings tasks my belief in democracy. Lone Star has also performed the difficult task of making a beer that taste worse than PBR. The local opening band showed up late, and then left as soon as they were done. Before we went on, I was given a pep talk by an unnamed bandmate about how they were through playing music. After the show a different unnamed bandmate went and hung out by himself in an alley for maybe half an hour. Kyle's sister and brother-in-law were there and they left a few bucks in the tip jar.

Wednesday the 13^th was actually a pretty decent show at the Hole in the Wall, a fixture of the Austin music scene where Doug Sham used to play. My Austin friends showed up and we played well. We made a little bit in the tip jar and the next day Kyle was able to finagle $50 out of the percentage of the bar sales the club promised us, then said they couldn't give us that night.

We had four days in Austin in total, which we all had been looking forward to, but it turned out to be a hard time for everyone. I got to spend some quality time with two old friends of mine whom I hadn't seen in four years, not since their wedding. One of them is in grad school at UT and the other one just landed a great internship at a progressive magazine in Texas and has already had some of her writing published . They had just finished two years with the Peace-Core in Malawi and then biked through South America. While I wouldn't have given up seeing them for the world, being recently dumped (can I just say divorced? I need a word in between) and feeling completely lost with what I'm doing with my life—no job, no room, no nothin'—it definitely brought on the “life pangs”. It's a combination of inspiring and embittering to see couples who are making it work, and living life to the fullest. It's important to have role models, it can just be hard when you're feeling utterly alone.

Though I am known among many friends as a teller of jokes, I have thought up very few on my own. One of the few I've penned goes as follows, Q:What's the only good thing about L.A.? A: It's not Houston. Thursday the 14^th was the final stop on the tour. We played Super Happy Fun Land in Houston, though I'm not sure if the person who named the venue intended the deep sarcasm that I'm reading into it. Super Happy Fun Land is a gigantic D.I.Y. space the size of an industrial block in Houston, covered in graffiti of cartoon-ish indie-punk kids eating their own legs and the like. We walk in and the purveyor of the establishment, Louie, is getting his head buzzed. He must be in his late 40's or early 50's, a jolly avant-guarde type with a big beard wearing a white T-shirt of some noise band you've never heard of but has opened for Sonic Youth. If he wasn't wearing pink sweatpants he may have well of been, and seemed to be on a permanent acid trip, even if he somehow now achieves this mental state through a combination of Yoga and alcohol alone. Louie was extremely gregarious and scatterbrained. There were two other less eccentric dudes of the same ilk, and maybe three young gutter-ish punk kids, one of whom sat behind the concessions counter learning ukulele songs off her laptop while sniffing glue. We soon ended up trapped in a conversation with another one of youngins, who while sloshed to the point of being nearly incoherent, tried to convince us that if we went to Mexico gangs would cut our faces off and sew them onto soccer balls. Eventually the audience showed up, i.e. the other band, who were a poor man's Lucero, and they did the worst cover of “Folsom Prison” I've ever heard. They seemed like good people though, and I think a few of them felt even more out of place then we did.

I may have been exaggerating about the dismal turnout. A few of the local band's girlfriends did show up. There were also two middle aged stragglers, one who looked just like Raymond Caver, and another guy who looked just like Don Was. It turned out they were a noise band I had never heard of named Rusted Shut that had opened repeatedly for Sonic Youth. After everyone had left or was outside smoking, they decided to play at set. Don Was had some sort of sampler with two mics running into it set up behind a speaker on the side of the stage, while Raymond Carver stood on the empty stage in front of the empty room and asked repeatedly “are you my mommy?” in a baby voice while Don manipulated the mic signal. Raymond Carver made a joke to us about how we'd never come back to Houston, and I have to admit, I was a bit charmed.

We had the offer to sleep on the stage or the concrete floor of Super Happy Fun Land, but Kyle had been fighting a sickness and opted to get a hotel room to save himself from a sleepless night of listening to wasted punks waxing conspiracy theories. He offered to take another person or two to the room since he was going to pay for it anyway. Once I noticed the cat walking around and overheard the kids at the space talk about projecting a movie I decided to take Kyle up on his offer. It may have been one of the best decision I've ever made, but not because of missing out on a fun filled night at Super Happy Fun Land.

We had found a Motel 6 online six miles across town. Two blocks into our drive we passed the Scott Inn. It looked desolate enough to be cheap. I hid in the car while Kyle walked in and asked for a room for one. The first price offered was for ten dollars more then the Motel 6, so Kyle started to walk out. The man behind the counter stopped him and said “what's the problem?”. Kyle explained, and the man lowered the price so it was only three bucks more than the Motel 6, but added “this is a nice room, much nicer than Motel 6.” For this statement I hereby nominate this motel clerk the most modest man in Texas. Upon first glance, the room was nice, but nothing so special. The one bed could have comfortably slept four, there was a pull-out couch, a flat screen TV, mini-fridge, and wall size mirrors on two sides of the bed. But then we noticed a black light above the bed. We turned off all the other lights then flicked on the black light switch and hidden murals of the cosmos, of psychedelic hearts, and a mystical beach with palm trees and three moons appeared on our walls. We had discovered a magical portal to the real super happy fun land right around the corner hidden in the Scott Inn. At times I feel as if no new experience is going to expand my horizons. While I still very much enjoy life, it often seems as if my days of having my mind blown open by something new are over. Thank you Scott Inn for introducing me to the world of hidden black-light hotel room mural painting. My world will never be the same.

Friday the 15th kind of sucked. I had drunk texted my ex at the Whole in the Wall show in Austin two nights prior; the jukebox played “Mama Tried” which had been her ring tone and I just had to let her know she had forever ruined that song for me. The next morning I emailed her to apologize, and to make sure she didn't want to get back together before I went to Mexico with this bunch of yahoos. Mistake numero uno. Waking up in the Scott Inn, there was response in my inbox informing me that things were over for good, which was necessary and therefore good for me to hear, and a line about how she hoped we could be friends, even though she knows I'm terrible at that, which is true. There was also a line about how she had more to say, but couldn't say it now, which I chalked up to just more details about how she cared for me but thought that we weren't meant for each other.

While it was a hard email to read, I knew it was coming, and in a way it was a weight off my back. The day kind of sucked for sure, but we were driving from Houston back to Austin to store the musical equipment at Kyle's sister's house, and then onto Harlingen, Texas seven hours south on the border, all through torrential rain and terrible Texas rush hour traffic. As far as shitty days to think about starting a new life, being single, moving on, the future, etc. go, it was actually pretty good. The day was being wasted in a car; it was a perfect day for getting lost in my own mind and working through the clusterfuck that is my mind and life. Being raised in this consumerist culture, a part of me can't help but always think there's a better relationship out there waiting for me, the perfect fit, “the one”, all that b.s., and here was my golden ticket out of rainy, wussy, passive-aggressive suburban Portland, OR. Another chance to grab la vida by los huevos and give it another whirl. It's morning again, Lou Thomas, and manana you'll be en Mexico.

We had found a Priceline Super 8 in Harlingen. Word to the wise, for the first time in history, a band got caught sneaking six people into a room for two. Four went and got another hotel room just to not give the Super 8 jerk more of our money. Perhaps the only good thing about Houston is that it's not Harlingen.

If Friday the 15^th had kind of sucked, Saturday the 16^th, on the other hand, has really really sucked. It has sucked the biggest bag of dicks in the history of bags of dicks. Before I explain why Saturday the 16^th has blown so much so far, and it's only 5:30pm as I write this, I must first explain some things about the Brazilian people and their culture. This factoid I am about to present about cultural norms is most likely true for many cultures other than our own, but it was told to me by a Brazilian friend, so I can only safely attribute it to the entirety of his people. It is the principle of “don't ask, don't tell” applied to the bedroom, not the battlefield. Monogamy is still a worthy goal, but in any long relationship there are inevitably going to be indiscretions by both parties, and if you're both still committed to the relationship sometimes it's best not to mention anything. Sometime people just have to get things out of their system to remember how good they've got it. I've tried to convince the former women of my life that this is a good idea, though none have ever agreed, and because I try to be an honest and respectful man, the one and a half times I have been unfaithful, I have always ponied up immediately as was discussed and decided as the plan of action, with the inevitable disastrous results. I can not say the same for those who have demanded such honesty from me.

But this only tangentially relates to the utter shittiness that I found in my inbox this morning. One would think that a partner such as myself who didn't want to know about indiscretions during a relationship certainly wouldn't want to know about who you were sleeping with after wards. But some people feel like they got to tell people everything. So I woke up in Harlingen, TX with an email from my ex of only two months (together for a year and half and living together for the last three months) that she was sleeping with a friend of mine and they were talking about “taking it to the next level”. Thank you, but TMI. I'm sorry that they feel guilty, but how does putting me in a terrible head space, upsetting my stomach, making my brain run in circles with graphic images of them together, on the first day of my Mexican vacation none-the-less, how on god's green earth does that help the matter? Yes, I'd be upset when I found out later, but then I'd have had that much more time to be over the relationship. I might actually be, or at least had been, sleeping with someone else myself to make me feel better about the whole thing. But noooooo, we should tell Lou, he should know about this, it's the right thing to do—I can hear them tell each other over pillow talk. Funk dat. Ignorance is bliss. Before I went back to Portland, alright, let me know, but not at the beginning of my fucking vacation. Thank the lord above I decided to go to Mexico, and not stay in Portland for the winter.