greeted as liberators (.pdf)

I had a brilliant idea for a project to work on during the ten weeks of my Fall 2004 spoken word tour. I was going to write a book called Greeted As Liberators: Notes on America During the Waning Days of the Bush Administration. A collection of essays about the cultural climate of America in the build up to the election, written from ground-level. I was traveling the country anyway, seeing it from gas stations and truck stops and Waffle Houses. And I was so sure I had this place figured out. Writing this book would be a victory march.

Greeted as liberators.

Fast-forward two and a half months. Cue me. I have extensive notes taken for the book – seventy-some pages of thoughts, observations, and conclusions I’ve drawn based on what I’ve seen and who I’ve met.

On November 3, 2004 all of those thoughts, observations, and conclusions were revealed to be wrong.

That wasn’t the great tragedy of that day, of course. I lost a couple months worth of work. You – if you’re an American – lost the respect of the rest of the world, what’s left of the New Deal, and a lot of the value of your house and bank account. Sliding scales of tragedy, not a great loss.

I stuck the notes in a drawer. I had bigger problems anyway, the same ones you did. I had to figure out how I was going to be able to look at myself as an American when the majority of the people who cop that title were willing to look at a picture of a brown fella with a black bag over his head and electrodes attached to his nuts and say we’re the american people and we approve this message. I had to figure out what my role was in this place that suddenly felt very, very uncomfortable. Same as you. Same as everybody except the half the country who watched election results come in and breathed a sigh of relief.

Do you remember that moment? Maybe it was midnight or so on November 2 and you were at the election night party or the bar or just sitting on the couch watching CNN – flipping around the channels, but staying mostly on CNN at that point because they were the very last to call most of the states and you wanted to maintain at least the illusion of hope – maybe it was midnight on November 2 or maybe it was when you saw Kerry give his speech on November 3, but do you remember that moment when you watched and listened and couldn’t believe what you were seeing, what was happening, what was about to happen, what it meant that this semi-literate retard was going to be running things for another four years – do you remember that moment when, while you saw it and couldn’t believe it and didn’t know what to do, you realized that half the country was happy about it?

I wasn’t too worried about the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to write my little book. I was trying to decide if Montreal would be warmer than Vancouver. I was remembering history classes I took in school, where they would talk about how Hitler rose to power in Germany and we all kept wondering how it was possible that nobody did anything about it.

Same as you, probably.

It’s 2008 now, and America is gearing up for another campaign. As I write this, John McCain is fully expected to become the Republican nominee, while Barack Obama approaches inevitability in his primary battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. It’s taken me several years to figure out what to do with the work I did on Greeted as Liberators, and I was pretty sure my solution would be to leave it in that drawer indefinitely. But there are true things in this book, even though there are also a lot of things that seem wildly naive in hindsight, and as we’re about to go through this again, I think it’s a good time to look at where we were the last time we did this.

I spend a lot of time in Greeted as Liberators talking about how, if Bush wins, I have to leave the country. I live in London, England now, but one thing I hadn’t considered at the time is that getting out of America makes you more American, not less. As an expatriate, you have to have a damn good idea of what being an American means to you, because everyone you meet has an idea of what it means to them. If you’re not going to pretend to be Canadian, you have to know why you’re still willing to be identified as a part of the country that gave the world George Bush. Anything less is a tacit endorsement of George Bush’s idea of what it means to be an American.

Burlap sacks, electrodes, and all.

And I’ve realized that the two americas that John Edwards talked about so charismatically with those dimples and that sculpted hair and that fiery populist rhetoric – that exists, yeah, but A), it’s not just the rich and the poor and B), there are more than two Americas. And living abroad, being aware that I am not a part of the America that was so eager to send homeboy back to Washington, and trying to make sense of that –

Well, I still have all these notes that told me that there was a time when I had seen with my own eyes that there was another America out there.

I was wrong about the election. In this book, you’ll see me get cocky a few times. I wanted to edit those, but fuck it. I thought the observations I made meant that certain conclusions would be true. That’s my mistake. But the things I saw are still true things. And if, as an American, you have any hope toward building a greater country, the first step toward figuring out what role to play is figuring out what role everyone else is playing. I have notes on the subject.

This book is the things I saw in America as I went to every part of it during the only time in my life when every man, woman, and child you met in this country was actively political. It represents three months of my life. It knows things you don’t, and you know things it doesn’t. Whatever we’re supposed to do next, we’ll have to learn from each other.

–d
London, England
26 March 2008

 

(for Matt Fuller)

 

08 30 04. 14:38.

Brooklyn NY.

 

What follows is a true rock and roll account of grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory, and vice-versa.

I have many new things to tell you.

This is the first chance I’ve had to write or think outside of the car since Ft. Worth. Ft. Worth was on Wednesday, they tell me. Has it really been less than a week since this tour began? These have been interesting times.

The chronology of events is we played Ft. Worth on Wednesday night and went back to my brother’s apartment in Denton to sleep. Leaving Denton at two o’clock the following afternoon, we made off toward Monroe LA for the show that night. We got to Monroe at eight o’clock on Thursday night. Waited for the promoter, who showed up at nine and then left again before the show started at ten. Did the show to a tiny, but polite audience, and then got back in the car at midnight to get to Asheville NC by six o’clock the next day to play at a record store.

We slept for two hours at a rest stop on the Mississippi / Alabama border and we ate breakfast at a Waffle House using money we didn’t really have. Other than that, Monroe to Asheville was done without stopping for such mundane concerns as food and sleep. We pulled into Asheville at four o’clock in the afternoon. Checked in at the record store and then spent the last of our money at a copy shop to make flyers to promote the show in the two hours before it started.

Necessity breeds new skills; I learned how to talk to people about what I’m doing very easily because if I did not then no one would watch us play and we would make no money. In a coffee shop, I gave a flyer to a young woman named Jennifer. We exchanged about ten minutes worth of conversation before I left to pass out the rest of the stack in what turned out to be a futile attempt to drum up interest in a free spoken word and experimental electric folk show at the local record shop.

Only Jennifer showed up. So we did the show for her and the owner of the store. After the show, we started talking. Forty-five minutes later, we were still talking.

She turned out to be the coolest person I’ve met in months, and I knew that she liked me. I looked like shit — I had not bathed or slept except in spurts in a car since Ft. Worth two days before, my eyes were wild with hunger, and still she liked me. And she was awesome. An instant connection. I gave her all of the paltry merchandise I had because I wanted her to read it. She offered me a stack of her own poems. She lived in a treehouse, she said, without electricity. She had moved there two weeks prior in an attempt to strip away all that was unnecessary from her life. Her plans for touring the country included going to cities and doing a series of sketches of each town, writing poetry, and publishing them in handmade books. She had big plans; so did I. and tonight?

And Tony’s voice was reality, reminding me that tonight was a second show in Sylva NC, forty-five minutes away, far beyond the reach of her treehouse. We exchanged goodbye and really great to meet you and then it was time to go do the Sylva show. She handed me a pair of handmade blank books and we left.

The Sylva show was cool but my heart was in a treehouse. You know I’ll never talk to her again. She hasn’t even got electricity. I read the poems she gave me in the car and of course they were great.

Sylva was at a restaurant that served amazing food, made all the more amazing by the stark fucking hunger of not eating since the ill-affordable Waffle House in Alabama sixteen hours prior. The food was free because Heather, who managed the restaurant and booked the show, was awesome. We then did the third show since sleeping in Ft. Worth two days earlier. After hanging out for a few more hours we finally got to sleep.

The next day, Saturday, was to be Philadelphia, but it was not meant to be. A late start in North Carolina coupled with weather and traffic and we reached Washington DC at the exact time we were supposed to take the stage in Philly. More futility and we eventually threw in the towel as we were passing through Baltimore. Baltimore was the site of Sunday’s show so we saw no point in arriving in Philadelphia late, doubling back, and then stopping in Baltimore. However, we knew no one in Baltimore, and had spent all of the staggering twelve dollars we made from both North Carolina shows combined on gas, so we tried to think creatively.

We ended up at a coffee shop because coffee shops are a safe haven for us and any port in a storm, right? In the coffee shop a don’t mess with texas sticker was noticed by two girls who were passing through. Necessity bred a social streak in me that had lay dormant and we managed to befriend the pair, recent transplants in Baltimore from Houston. I had played a show in June with a band that they’re good friends with called Scattered Pages. They offered to let us sleep at their house.

The rest of the night was spent hanging out with them and their roommate, walking Baltimore streets with new friends as they dropped dollars in empty guitar cases for a song — in Little Italy a boy played guitar and sang “All Tomorrow’s Parties” while a girl accompanied him on the violin. Their house was massive and their kitchen was stocked. Defeat from the jaws of victory? Not this time.

We picked up an additional Baltimore show for the following day at the coffee shop at which we met the girls. It went all right for an impromptu gig, a good warm-up for the show at the Mojo Room and Lounge later in the evening.

The second Baltimore show turned out to be the best show of the tour thus far by miles; an amazingly receptive, packed crowd who re-filled our coffers and had nothing but kind words. Every single performer on the bill was great. We made friends. The next time I’m in Baltimore I’ve been offered a chance to collaborate onstage with The Wire Orchestra, who were my favorite of the locals. Too fucking cool.

We met a band from San Francisco called Shelshag who we hit it off with very well, as well. They have a show here in New York on Wednesday. We were talking about the protests and about how Pier 57 has been converted into a giant holding pen for those arrested.

we should set up on pier 56 and do a show that afternoon.

And we should, and maybe we will.¹ It is very good to meet people who share your impulses, who want to rob the bank with you the second they meet you.

We pulled out of Baltimore energized again after a few demoralizing days of abject poverty with a full tank of gas, some money in reserve, and a place to stay in Philadelphia.

This morning we woke up and drove through New Jersey. We drove through Manhattan and then decided to leave the car in Brooklyn, a few blocks from the Lucky Cat. This has been the first chance I’ve had to write since before we left Texas. The next stop is Madison Square Garden. Things are about to get a whole lot weirder.

23:31. New York, NY. No action today. Just walking. We left the car in Brooklyn, walked to Queens, took the train to Times Square, and walked around Manhattan until we landed in the East Village. We are staying with all-around badass and www.dansolomon.com webmaster Will Mofo’s apartment. Calm before the storm?

Tomorrow is the direct action day. I’m nervous, but mostly excited. We spent a few hours in Union Square Park tonight, meeting people who have big plans but mostly just watching. This city has been good for my creativity already. I wrote most of the first track for the new record in that park.

This city is as incredible as I hoped. It’s an amazing feeling, to get these streets beneath my feet. We have three more days here. A day off tomorrow and then we get to figure out how we’re going to get out of jail in time for the show at SUNY-Stonybrook on Wednesday. Rock ‘n roll!

 

09 01 04. 01:22.

New York NY.

 

Hi, dad. I’m calling you from jail. Say hi to mom from jail. I like it here.

I lie. I am not in jail. All three times, I managed to avoid arrest.

Things I did today that could have gotten me arrested including crossing the street when the police told me to and standing on the sidewalk to observe other people getting arrested. But I am far too clever and agile to be taken in by such simple tactics.

This afternoon was walking around, taking in the sights and feeling this amazing city more. By three o’clock, it was time to get to work.

We walked down to Ground Zero. It was a long walk to an intense place — there are numerous booths set up along the street and inside the tour facilities where people are selling memorabilia, magazines with tragedy emblazoned across the front, tacky hologram portraits of the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers. There was to be a vigil followed by a march to Madison Square Garden, site of the Republican Convention.

Organizers told us that they expected two hundred and fifty people to show up. There were two hundred and fifty cops — closer to seven hundred demonstrators there to march.

We had no permit but negotiated with the cops — we would walk two-by-two and observe all traffic signals and they would not stop us.

The first three hundred people who went followed the police instructions to cross the street to the park across from Ground Zero. As soon as they did so — flash! The barricades went up and everyone was arrested. In the park they were told to go to, you see, there was not enough room for everyone to remain lined up two-by-two. Clever.

If I had been forty spaces ahead in line I would have been arrested. I wasn’t, so I didn’t, so I marched.

We were told to maintain our two-by-twos under penalty of arrest. Passers-by who kept up with our gait were immediately a risk to our safety.

you fool! you’ll have us all arrested if you don’t pick up the pace!

Long and boring walk to follow. We were yelled at by sixteen year old anarchist boys in punk rock t-shirts for ‘buying into the bullshit’ since we were two-by-two and not, I dunno, beating the cops who outnumbered us down. Apparently if we had been truly hardcore we’d have gone across the street to yell at people. I’d have taken them a lot more seriously if they had been doing anything on their own. One brick through a Starbucks window and I’d have bought it, boys, but that Subhumans t-shirt isn’t enough to convince me that you’re the real independent thinker on the street.

When we were four blocks shy of Madison Square Garden they stopped the march — no further, they said, and so a ‘die-in’ was planned. What a ‘die-in’ is is everybody lies down where they are as though they’ve been killed. Exciting stuff, I’m sure, but a little bit silly if you ask me. I watched as everyone lay there and a guy dressed as the Tin Woodsman from The Wizard of Oz lay flowers at the feet of the ‘dead’ folks².

The police threatened the Tinman with arrest and he backed off to the side. They threatened everyone with arrest who was on the sidewalk. We were told to disperse or face arrest. We were lucky; most people were not offered such warnings in other parts of the city. We moved up, block by block, to continue to watch police action. A line of cops in riot gear blocked the exits from the North, East, and West. You know what that means.

I started watching the block South of where we were and noticed a riot cop poking his head around the corner. Shit. Time to go. We walked up the block and against the wall was a whole line of riot cops. A minute later they got the signal and started being very particular about who they let in and out. Well. Time to split.

We made for Union Square, which has been a very active part of the demonstrations, mostly as a meeting/resting place. We decided to walk down Broadway.

On Broadway and Sixteenth we watched a group of about a hundred protesters march single-file down the sidewalk. Peaceful and unobtrusive, right?

Well, sure, but not so peaceful and unobtrusive as to, y’know, keep them from being arrested.

Police met them as they turned the corner onto Sixteenth Street. As the last in the line turned, police blocked their exit. Boom! All arrested! Don’t even think about it, killer, or you’re next! what?

They handcuffed the poor bastards as we watched it go down from across the street. There were six of us. A cop who had just received his good cop/bad cop handbook approached.

y’know, i don’t like george bush either, but you can’t stand here right now. if the boss comes down and sees you here, he’s going to make me arrest you.

Arrest us for standing, unorganized, on the sidewalk? We could be waiting for a bus, a store to open, the next Star Wars picture to come out–

it’s a nice night, just take a walk downtown so you don’t have to worry about where you’ll be spending it. i don’t want to arrest anyone.

We had done nothing but that simple fact did little to help the unfortunate souls across the street. Part of me wanted to challenge him. do it, you bastard, throw your little plastic cuffs around my wrists and we’ll see who laughs last!

I’d be acquitted eventually, I’m sure, but I’d also spend two days in jail for accomplishing nothing except wasting some time and money, missing shows, and making no statement whatsoever except that, um, the people! united! can often be defeated! –

So I split and made my way down to Union Square, as per the plan.

Union Square was a different story. It was full, hundreds of people playing songs and talking, making friends and watching what was going down. It was fun.

Because police hate fun and they hate to see people having it, they shut down the north two-thirds of the park.

park’s closed early tonight, they said as though they had the authority to do that. This just meant that everyone had to congregate in the smaller area, which meant more people, which meant more fun.

So a barricade got knocked down and a kid got arrested. Everyone lost their shit. Riot cops swarmed the area. All of this happened out of nowhere. One moment it’s fun, the next there were riot cops and people screaming at the cops.

My favorite chant was strike! strike! strike!³

Somehow the situation cooled down. A group of demonstrators, led by two kids who couldn’t have been more than teenagers, started singing, dancing, clapping, and chanting hip-hop inspired slogans.

My new favorite chant was move, bush, get out the way, get out the way, get out the way, bush, get out the way!

Riot cops moved on the perimeter. The whole thing got tense, but as the kids chanted nypd, back the fuck up the NYPD did, in fact, back the fuck up.

The cops hovered around the park on and off until near closing. No arrests. Did they not have the numbers? Were we a low priority? Were they moved to back the fuck up when asked to?

No answers, just observations. It happened. So did a whole lot more.

Tomorrow’s the show on Long Island. It’s on the SUNY-Stony Brook campus at the University Cafe. I hope some folks come out — I have all sorts of new dark shit to talk about. And the show isn’t until tomorrow night — who knows what will happen in the afternoon? I may have new stories by the dozens.

 

09 04 2004. 17:55.

Syracuse NY.

 

Don’t remember the last time I wrote in the journal. Probably only a few days ago, think it was before the Long Island show, after the two-day break from touring for full-time RNC demonstrations. Four days ago, then? There were Long Island, Brooklyn, and New Paltz. This is how time is measured. Last week it was measured in miles.

Long Island. The crowd was small and noisy, kind of disrespectful. They had Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom playing on the television against the wall opposite the stage. Between the loud crowd, the movie, and the fact that I was trying fifteen minutes of previously unperformed material, I lost my train of thought too many times to give a coherent performance. This was confirmed when, after my set, the sound guy handed me a CD he recorded of my set. For a moment I thought perhaps I would have something I could add to the merchandise table. Listened to it in the car. No. Not something I can add to the merchandise table.⁴ Definitely my weakest set of the tour. It was Tony’s best, tho, so I guess it all balances out.

Stony Brook and the SUNY campus are nice, too. Very green. It got cold at night. I’d forgotten about cold weather, this endless summer having run for as long as my addled memory can recall. But that’s Texas for you.

We slept at Sam Cook’s house that night. He cooked us dinner and breakfast. It’s funny how much things like that mean when you’re on the road and never have much money for anything except for gas. The house we stayed in in New Paltz last night, one of the people who lives there works in a bakery. We left this morning with loaves of bread in the back seat.

From Long Island to Brooklyn, hardly a drive which meant we had time to see more of the city, more of what was happening in the city. It was the last day of the RNC.

We spent the afternoon in Manhattan, near Union Square. The park was full, like it’d been all week. The atmosphere was still festive. I didn’t feel strange about the fact that I fell in love every five minutes. Fell in love every time I turned my head. A group had built a paper-mache statue of George W. Bush, signed a declaration of independence that addressed their own specific grievances, and toppled the statue. It’s not the first time in New York a statue of a ruler named George was toppled by people who wanted a better world.

Police presence was minimal and so we just enjoyed the park and the atmosphere, making new friends frequently. There were vendors set up all throughout the park, which I found a little bit offensive. One sign read FREE Speech T-Shirts - $10. I’m presuming the visual pun was lost on them.

My problem with that whole way of thinking is that it exploits a person’s discontent by trying to sell it back to them. don’t like george bush? prove it with this t-shirt! If you stand for anything, give the shirt away.

On this tour we’re putting our money where our mouth is. All of the merchandise on the table, at every show, is free. Otherwise we’re no different than the people selling lick bush buttons for three bucks a pop. And what good does that do anyone?

Last summer I wrote and drew a comicbook called Hard Volume. It was about a lot of things, but mostly it was about a punk rock band in an Ashcrofted America and the way that dissent is commercialized, then stifled. The way you can hear Black Flag at Urban Outfitters now, and it’s not Black Flag’s fault and it’s not the fault of the employee who wants to listen to her favorite band at work, it’s not anyone’s fault but when you do it then it all loses its meaning, it all becomes a symbol of the things it was meant to destroy.

Because it was meant to destroy. You get that, right? It was never just supposed to be singing about destruction and riots. It was about destroying and rioting. Every brick thrown through a Starbucks window by an angry teenager is about something bigger than broken glass. That’s why Hard Volume said free on the cover.

That’s why everything we have on this tour is free.

And that’s why it all seemed suspect, the booths on the perimeter of Union Square. Ten dollars for a t-shirt with a two-tone picture of the President with a line through his face. And if someone else turned up next to them with the same design, selling the shirt for five, you can bet they’d sue.

My pal Karl wants to make clay pigeons for skeet shooting with pictures of Michael Moore on them. He wants to donate the profits to MoveOn.org. It’s a good gag. But how many people were trying to turn the legitimately angry demonstrators in the park into the punchline? You can trick people into thinking they’re doing their part by buying a t-shirt.

We left the park and I was glad to have been there but it didn’t escape my notice that not everyone shares the same brand of idealism.

We left the park and went to Brooklyn. The show was small again, but I felt a lot more comfortable on stage. It was an interim set, evolving from the way it had been for the first week, before New York, into what it is now. I felt good about it. People seemed to like it. We sold free merchandise.

We split Brooklyn to get back to Manhattan, to get to Madison Square Garden, to see what’s happening — The President is speaking. We want to be there. We walk as fast as we can.

On the way we meet people. A motley crue, truly, was assembled. Tony and I, your stalwart American boys, accompanied by a first-grade teacher, a young woman in a star-spangled bikini, a former touring member of the Mickey Hart Band, and Tenzen, a Tibetan monk. It was like The Muppet Movie.

Tenzen was the angriest of all of us. He would shout at delegates as they left the convention site after Bush’s speech– shame on you! shame on you! no bush! no bombs!

Tenzen was angry, but we were all pissed. Everyone was pissed. The cops were pissed. And not just at us. The way it worked, the cops gave us time to yell at the delegates, then told us we had to move or get arrested. The three-way dynamic was interesting. It was very easy to avoid arrest on Thursday night. So we did.

We found Will’s apartment in Brooklyn like a lighthouse. Passed out. Woke up the next morning for the drive to New Paltz.

I was a little bit sad to be leaving the city. I might have to go back. Maybe for a lot longer.

New Paltz is a cool town, tho. Small, with a short downtown section to check out and walk around and a lot of undeveloped area. I liked it. The show was in a basement, soaked by the bad weather of the previous week, smelling vaguely like a gym sock. The ceiling was no more than seven feet high. Punk rock! The set I did felt good to me. Said what I had to say. Left out the things that I’m tired of talking about. People responded well. We made enough money to cover an oil change and gas to the next two shows. Which means we might start to have a little bit in reserve. Let’s not talk crazy just yet, but it sure seems possible.

But tonight it’s time to think about Syracuse. This city reminds me of Indianapolis, where my parents live. New Jersey reminded me of the parts of Indiana I grew up in. The Midwest stretches for a thousand miles, in all directions, these days in America. I’m not sure yet what that means.

 

09 08 04. 14:33.

Burlington VT.

 

It’s raining in Burlington. This coffee shop has been playing Herbie Hancock for fucking hours. The two don’t seem congruous. I love Herbie Hancock, but not today. Instead I’m listening to Charlie Daniels Death Wish on my headphones to remind me that despite what the Vermont hippies say, it’s not all sweetness and light.

Not that I need a reminder. We listened to Death Wish in the car on the way into Burlington from Ithaca yesterday. “Mercenary Song Pt. 2″ — when your voice breaks in an empty room did it even happen — and it was singing the song of the previous evening.

I guess Ithaca was the roughest but I know I said the same about them all. In Ithaca no one had heard of us — not just no one who may attend the show, but no one at the venue, no one who was supposed to be promoting the show, no one at all knew who we were or that we were coming. When we finally tracked down the promoter for the show’s cell phone number, we discovered that the reason for it was that, uh, the computer must have crashed or something and she forgot to put it back in or put our posters up or tell anyone we’d be playing, but it’s cool, she’ll call the venue and tell them that we’re allowed to play, hope it goes well, she’s on her way to Syracuse.

allowed to play? Motherfucker, we drove from Texas because you said you wanted us there.

So the employees of the venue are pissed because they have to turn off the Phish record to listen to us and our hopes of getting paid or finding a place to sleep or getting something to eat or drink are dwindling by the second. We run to a copy shop and make a stack of fliers to pass out in the Ithaca commons to promote the show, hoping that perhaps we will have some success.

Four hours of promotion nets us one audience member — a seventeen year old girl who has nothing else to do. A friend of mine shows up a few minutes later. Great. Two people? I am determined to give them the best show they have ever fucking seen. I do my set to the blank stares of the employees and the polite applause of the seventeen year old and my friend, trying not to worry too much about having nowhere to sleep.

Tony does his set and we load out, full of hate at Ithaca, Ithacans, baristas, and promoters in general. My friend advises us that we may have some luck sleeping in the Ithaca College dorms as school just started and we could sneak in and crash on the couches. Sounds great! Punk rock!

At this point, the seventeen year old opens her mouth — my dad’s asleep, she says, just keep quiet and you can sleep at my house. Sounds great, we figure. So we do. We pass out around ten o’clock at night and wake up very, very early the next morning, leaving the house with great stealth, terrified all night of Pops waking up and taking a shotgun to the two twenty-something dudes from Texas in his house. But we survive because we are survivors, blazing our way out of Ithaca like two men escaping from prison.

The day before that, in Buffalo, was a little bit better. The crowd responded well to my set, Tony played one of the best versions of “Winter” he’s done so far, and one of the locals we played with, a male/female duo called Team Chocolate, was great. We made some money and had a place to sleep. We had expected things to go up from there. As it happens, it was the last good thing there was.

Buffalo is a depressing city. Rust belt, Midwestern towns in the Northeast, closed by five o’clock on weekdays and never opening at all on Sunday. Women walk quickly to the bus stop, muttering meaningfully to themselves and staring at their shoes, trying desperately to avoid the afternoon drunks screaming at them from car windows. The man behind the wheel waits impatiently for the Bills game to start and will beat his children if Bledsoe throws too many interceptions, even in the pre-season. Wander those streets and see the students waiting for the semester to start, holding keg parties and fucking in the bushes not out of any desire but simply out of boredom, hoping that maybe by the time they’re done someone will have re-opened the run-down movie theater so they can find some form of entertainment, something that isn’t beer and cheap, sweaty encounters with people they’d rather have avoided anyway until graduation hits and they can go off and become their parents.

Am I a cynic? The twenty-odd people who came to my show in Buffalo, they were cool. It was everyone else, you understand.

We walked down the main strip in Buffalo that afternoon before the venue opened, looking for a place to kill some time. The bookstores were closed, the record stores hadn’t been open in months. We had no money so a restaurant was out of the picture. We had ramen noodles and macaroni and cheese in the car and confidence that we would find a place with a kitchen to sleep that night so we could cook.

Everything was closed and we wandered into the only open shop, a gaming store owned by a lonely fifty-five year old virgin who loved Dungeons and Dragons and twenty-sided dice and hated George Bush. We didn’t even bring George Bush up — he did, as we did a brief lap around his shop before deciding that the streets of Buffalo would offer more amusement.

The man who owned the shop was angry. Fifty-five and a small business owner in a rust belt town and he was talking coup d’etat to strangers, not even knowing their political persuasion. We called him chief and told him we were on his side. He wanted to hear stories of the Republican National Convention and we told them. He laughed cynically at the reports that Osama bin-Laden was nearly caught. some timing, huh? he asked. We agreed. Some timing.

We will be on the West Coast in October when the Bush administration pulls out their final surprise. It won’t be enough, but we will see it happen from California, where Schwarzenegger reigns as philosopher-king for life. The people of California will boo me when I speak of the protests at the RNC and hate my poetry, but if Tony plays a version of “Winter” that sounds anything like the one he did in Buffalo we will still have a place to sleep every night, our coffers filled and with food in our bellies.

I will single people out in California, pointing at them directly, blaming them for electing the unbeatable star of Jingle All The Way to the highest office in their land, and they will laugh at me and relish the role that they played in his ascension. California will be ugly.

But Vermont has been all right, minus the weather and the jamming on every stereo. Vermont has given us a restaurant will all-you-can-eat buffalo wings — ostensibly because there are only a dozen meat-eaters in the city, and so they can eat as much as they wish — that even on our paltry budget we were able to afford. Last night’s show at the coffee shop I currently inhabit was a mixed-bag but people saw our poster in the window earlier in the week and made a special point to check it out, a rare occurence. A beautiful young woman named Katya offered me extensive praise and I countered with a phone number; if she calls then Vermont will automatically catapult to tour highlight status.

And tonight we revisit the Willard House, a venue I played in June on the tour with the Malcontent Party. We are opening for touring lame street punk icons The Virus and Clit 45 — my parents should be very proud of me, yes — and I expect that we will be greeted as liberators by the good people of Burlington in a scant four hours.

I will refrain from writing about the attic show we played in Syracuse, but it was glorious and Tony declared that the next three shows can suck because of the success we were met with that night. To some degree, they did, but my spirits remain high. Tomorrow is the third night of the three-day stand in Burlington VT. The next day is Montreal, my first time performing in outside the United States. The day after that was alleged to have been Toronto but as our ability to procure a venue has been compromised, we may merely wander the streets of that Northern town until we go down to Michigan. Either way, I don’t expect things to get bad until we hit California and the legion of newly-minted Republicans turn on me savagely during my set. There’s no stopping this train.

 

09 13 04. 14:04.

Ann Arbor MI.

 

We spent September 11 driving through Canada, passing from Montreal through Toronto. The Canadians had just made it into the finals in the hockey world cup; the entire country was jubilant. The mood was different from what I’ve come to expect of America on that day of the year.

That morning I ate a vegetarian omelette with mushrooms, green peppers, and onions in the sparse kitchen of a French-Canadian, talking about America. Her mother was French and her father was Egyptian; she had only been to the States once and it terrified her. She said that in Montreal she could walk home, two miles, stone drunk, by herself, at three in the morning. When she was in America during the summer, she was frightened to walk to the corner store by herself.

canadians, I scoffed to myself.

Montreal is a beautiful city, one of the most compelling I’ve been to. In another context I could have spent much more time there, the city underneath my feet for more than just a few afternoon hours, testing my high school knowledge of French against the signs in every window, against the conversations that bounced off every wall. I was in a different country, and I knew it. I could have stayed much longer in those parks, on those streets. I may yet.

The show that night, however, was not beautiful. In fact, it was without much doubt in my mind the worst one of the tour. A dive bar on Boulevard St. Laurent and the hockey game had started early that night so the locals had been drinking since the early evening. By the time I took the stage near midnight they were in no mood to hear me.

I spoke anyway because I thrive on their hatred and refuse to let a gang of drunken French-Canadian hockey fans shake me from the task I have undertaken. But it was painful. Constant interruptions, a noisy buzz from the back of the room louder than my microphone, the abject hatred of a bunch of Montrealers who wanted nothing more than for me to stop talking about America. I kept going. No one had a good time that night.

well, I figured, at least we can call it a draw.

The nights before in Burlington were better by comparison. Three days is too long to be in a city the size of Burlington VT. As much as I like it there. It is too long, especially in the rain, especially when your days are spent in a coffee shop and you have twenty-two hours a day to fill with things that aren’t the show. But the shows were better than Montreal.

On the second night in Burlington we opened for touring hairpunk bands. Clit 45 and The Virus. Diabolical stuff. The way those bands operate is they write songs that sound like early American punk rock and then, to round out the set, they cover more than a handful of songs by actual early American punk rock bands. A band that sounds like the Circle Jerks covering Black Flag, the Ramones, and the Circle Jerks all within a twenty-five minute set? Gosh. Way to keep it real, son. It was our first experience on this tour playing with cover bands.

But the kids liked them, though the kids also liked me. I was asked if I would speak in front of a high school the next time I’m in Burlington. I said yes, of course I would. The next time I am in Burlington I will do three shows in one day. The high school, the university, and the punk rock house. It is much more interesting than doing three shows in three days.

Everyone told us to be wary crossing the border into Canada. they will search your car and ask many questions, they told us. do not tell them that you are on tour. they will want to tax you on the merchandise you sell. I told them that we did not sell merchandise, that we were foolhardy American socialists who gave our merchandise away. don’t be ridiculous, we were told, they will never believe that. tell them that you are going to canada to record and cover your merchandise carefully so they do not see it.

And so we spent the drive into Canada rehearsing our cover story, adding layers to it and creating an ever-expanding narrative that no paltry border guard would be able to penetrate. And then we were asked four questions and waved across the border without so much as a glance into the backseat of the car.

If only the show that night had been so agreeable.

But before the show, and after. I slept in a park in Montreal, awakened by a group of teenagers playing hackeysack and speaking French. When I woke I looked for a restaurant so I could spend the few Canadian dollars I had in my wallet, stopping when I found one that had pictures of the food items on the menu so I could point to what I wanted. I didn’t ask any questions about the language for fear of appearing the Ugly American. Montreal was a lonely city to walk, and I liked it. The loneliness of walking through a city bigger than Dallas where the primary language was not my own, where I knew no one, where I felt comfortable sleeping in the park — it filled me up. In a good way. The loneliness made everything feel very real. When I met back up with Tony I was ready for the show, but I could have shivered in that park as the sun went down for hours.

I also think I fell in love, just a little, with the guitarist for the last band of the night, and she offered to let me sleep at her apartment after the show⁵ because I needed a place to stay and she was very nice. It would infuriate George Bush. An all-American boy like Dan Solomon — Man of Action! falling for a woman of French and Middle-Eastern descent on September 11 in Canada? The PATRIOT Act was designed to bring people like me to justice. I feared for crossing back over the border in Michigan.

do not let him across, they would say at the checkpoint, he awoke this morning in the home of a sand gook. My position would be argued passionately, valiantly, and ultimately futilely. No, I realized, when I tried to cross back into America they would pull out Karl Rove’s loyalty oath and make me declare my undying fealty to the Republican Party and Donald Rumsfeld’s goal of destroying all the brown people in the Middle East. It would be trouble, and I would not betray the place she occupied in my heart. Visions of a re-education camp in Guantanomo Bay danced through my head. Trying to cross back into America just before midnight on September 11 after performing a set rife with anti-Republican sentiment in a French city in Canada two weeks after being photographed a hundred times in four days in New York during the RNC? son, it’s for your own good. her terrorist charms have crashed into the towers of your heart like a commercial jetliner full of civilians.

We opted instead to sleep for the night in a McDonald’s parking lot outside of Toronto. We would awaken on September 12 and cross the border into Detroit early in the morning with the answer to where were you in canada amended to include a mcdonald’s parking lot, sir, because we love mcdonald’s and our bold, courageous leaders.

The morning of the 11^th we exchanged mailing addresses and said our goodbyes after a morning that bled into afternoon, still ending too soon. She asked me to write her. I told her I would. Our trip from Montreal to the McDonald’s parking lot proceeded without incident and the Canadian landscape looked like the Midwest as we neared Toronto. Wal-Marts and AMC megaplexes, an Outback Steakhouse and Exxon stations. Montreal is very different from America, and the rest of Canada is very different from Montreal.

everyone else in the world wants to vote in the us presidential election in november, she said, why is it that half of you don’t even do that? I didn’t have a good answer, not really, but maybe if she lived in suburban Toronto I could have shown her. Maybe if she lived in suburban Toronto she’d not have asked.

The morning of September 12 we crossed into Detroit without incident. The cursory examination we received was less severe than the Falfurrias Checkpoint⁶ that one must pass through when leaving deep South Texas on the way to the rest of the state. are you american citizens? do you have any illegal immigrants or automatic weapons in the back seat? And we were across. They never suspected me.

We spent the day sleeping, mostly. Restful as McDonald’s parking lots are as places to spend a night, we went to the home of a friend of mine in Ann Arbor who sheltered and fed us before the show last night in Ypsilanti.

The show ended up being exactly what I needed after the horrible ordeal with the drunk French-Canadian hockey fans in Montreal. I felt relaxed during my performance and tried out new material that I liked. The crowd was small but I liked them all and they seemed to like what I did. Tonight is Ann Arbor, the hippie/college town ten minutes away. We are playing a house show that begins at midnight with ten bands, running all night long. It is advertised as a pajama party.

From here we move on to Chicago tomorrow night. I can’t wait for that. Strangely, after spending a week in the parts of New York that look like the Midwest, now that I’m here it’s really where I want to spend the next week of shows. Michigan and Illinois and Wisconsin and Iowa and Kansas. A chance to look at another part of this country in the waning days of the Bush administration.⁷

09 18 04. 19:06.

Iowa City IA.

 

I wanted to paint the town we played in last night with words, but I don’t know enough shades of grey.

Lansing IL is not much of a town to speak of. Businesses that used to be open on the main street, a Walgreens and maybe a restaurant or two. We were at a cafe that no one goes to. I have a lot of things I could say about Lansing IL. I grew up about ten minutes east of there.

But why dwell on that? We are in Iowa now. Iowa City, home of the world-famous writers workshop. Every time I pass someone on the street in a sportscoat and beret I wonder if he has been accepted into the illustrious institution, if his fiction will be crowding the shelves at the local bookstore. Iowa. These are the people who gave us John Kerry. Never forget that. He’s from Massachusetts, but these are the ones who wanted him, the ones who were so frightened of an enthusiastic yodel from the mouth of a short, strange doctor from Vermont that they picked that strange half-dead creature that lumbered in from the east coast. They pinned the hopes of the part of the country that did not want to be ruled by an illiterate frathound drunkard from Connecticut-by-way-of-Texas on the pompadoured freak of nature that right-thinking people in this country are forced to begrudgingly support. Iowa did this.

The flyers that were printed for our show tonight say tony presley (texas) / dan solomon (texas) / frankenixon (ames) / d.a.w.n. (iowa city) / (fuck george bush). The sportscoat-wearing pedestrians we pass them to dismiss us but chuckle at the last line. We did not make these fliers. I talk enough about George Bush as it is. I have seen many faces of this country in the final days of his rule. It is how I am so confident. I have seen lawyers and nuns and gap-toothed, corn-fed farmers in baseball caps driving pick-up trucks through rural gas stations express their discontent at the state of this country. I have been approached by middle-aged small business owners who caught part of the show and who wanted to discuss these things, the politics that everyone keeps buried under the surface. If I accomplish anything on stage, if my message of the bridge between the political and the personal means anything, hopefully it means that we can talk about these things.

I don’t know who will be President next year, but I know who will win the election.⁸

I know many things. I know how grey it is in Illinois, the parts that aren’t Chicago. How the Midwest is like kudzu, devouring more and more of the country, a sad place where everyone likes to talk about the people who came from there and got away. Everyone wants to get away from it. I know. It is where I come from.

I went to Texas, but I like the mythology of the place. The ones who choose to stay in the Midwest without resorting to six-year sabbaticals in the greatest state in the union go to the more interesting parts of the region, the pockets that remain vital. But if you venture twenty minutes away from even Chicago or Milwaukee, you’re back in Lansing IL.

And so Chicago and Milwaukee is where we spent much of the past week. In Chicago we played at a coffeeshop next to Wrigley Field the day of a Cubs game. Attendance was sparse but we were in Chicago and so my spirits were high. I felt good about my set that night, the ten people in the room signed the mailing list. We will be in Chicago twice more before we return to Austin.

Milwaukee was a much better city than I expected. It smells like beer and people smoke everywhere, but I did not mind. The company was good and the show was fantastic. The one that happened, anyway.

The first Milwaukee show was on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus. I didn’t know what to expect; what I got was about fifty people, all of whom responded very well and took much merchandise. I am almost out of merchandise now. It’s a good thing.

The second Milwaukee show was to be a house show and so we went to the house that we were to be playing an hour and a half before it was to start. Knocked. No answer. We continued knocking for an hour and fifteen minutes before the door was answered. The promoter apologized profusely for not contacting us, or answering the door, to let us know that he totally couldn’t get around to it, sorry. But next time, he said.

There have been flaky experiences on this tour. There always are. Santa Fe and Phoenix have both been pulled from under us. We still have giant holes in Northerrn California at the end of the month. But we are professionals, or becoming more professional by the day, and we soldier on. We have learned nothing if not a knack for last-minute surprises and I am confident that we will endure.

We blaze our way out of the Midwest after tomorrow. After bouncing around Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin for a week, we arrive like Hurricane ivan in Iowa tonight and Lawrence KS tomorrow before we land in Colorado. If we make some money over the next few nights then we should be able to weather the storms that may come if we find ourselves lost in the desert in New Mexico and Arizona and El Paso, and I fear nothing these days. Not a Bush re-election, not a broke, broken night in a Midwestern dive bar, not the sneers of disdain from a sportscoat-wearing aspiring novelist who labors under Joyce Carol Oates and rolls his own cigarettes. Motherfuckers, I’m from Texas.

 

09 20 04. 18:18.

Denver CO.

 

I am delirious from cold medicine. My throat is raw and I don’t know how I’m going to get through the set tonight without sneezing, let alone without losing my train of thought a dozen times.

Sorry, Denver. You’re not getting me at my best.

They got me at my best, or at least close to it, last night in Kansas. The attendance was sparse at best, about twelve people for the best-attended portion of my set, but I gave them everything I had anyway because I wanted twelve new people to see me trying. Some of them left early, some of them stayed. what the hell? I figured. I was in Kansas. They say if you build it they will come, but they weren’t in Kansas when they said it.

They were in Iowa, though, and we built it and they came. I was not looking forward to the show before I went on — a keg party in the basement of a number of Iowa State students’ house. I thought they were going to hate my ass.

But no, they loved my ass. They cheered and hooted and hollered and when I walked off the stage at the end of the set, they demanded one more piece. The Iowans loved the stories of the RNC and they devoured our merchandise. We became fabulously wealthy that night and have been living the high life ever since. Tomorrow Tony is buying a new tire for the car and readjusting the alignment. If we find nowhere to sleep tonight in Denver, perhaps we will check into a hotel. One good night in Iowa and suddenly we are in Metallica.

We didn’t have to check into a hotel last night, though I expected we might have beforehand. A young man of infinite talent on the electric guitar who accompanied Tony during “Mourning Elephants” and “Menlo Park” by the name of Bucky opened his home to us. Bucky wants to graduate from college and move to Austin, playing with the Austin country and folk musicians, before moving to Nashville and becoming a session player.

more focused direction than i got, I figured. by a long shot.

But the rough estimate of a focused direction that I have is one that leads me east. Yes. The Alamo marks my arm and I think I knew when I put it there that Texas and I were at a breaking point. I think that’s why I put it there. A visual cue that six years has been enough, and it’ll be seven by the time I actually make my break from the state.

And so there will be a nine-month long going away party. Much of the state will be thrown into an overwhelming depression in August when I board the train out of town, and children will approach me in the street with tears in their eyes, not understanding why I must go, and I will not be able to explain it to them properly. But I must go. That much is clear.

And where? That much is not clear. But part of the answer will depend on what happens on November 2. Because I have been talking about America for a month now, every night talking about it and why I love it and fear telling people I come from this place at the same time. And I do not want to ever have to tell people that I live in the same place, that I am one of the same people, who chose to put George Bush in office twice. That saw Guantonamo Bay and Abu-Ghriab and Pier 57 and his cowardly fear of his own constituents and said yes, that is what i want. My confidence is that people are much smarter than that. They were in Kansas, the half-dozen who stayed. They were in Iowa, despite backwards baseball caps and a floated keg. And so I think that when my lease ends you will find me in Brooklyn. But it’s possible that I will be brushing up on my French, living above a tattoo parlour in Montreal and paying 300$ Canadian a month in rent. I will learn to like the taste of mushrooms and prepare breakfast tacos the way they make ‘em in the Rio Grande Valley for my new countrymen in my kitchen. If they let me down, I may have to do it.

I needn’t dwell on that, however, since it’s hardly an eventuality. Montreal and Brooklyn both have their peculiar charms.

And so does Denver, though I’d be more equipped to appreciate them if I did not have a head full of cold medicine. My tolerance is famously low for such things but I am a professional and will hunt down coherent thoughts and bring them to the malcontented youth of Colorado as clearly as I am able.

At any rate, I am trusting my immune system to shake this strange 24-hour sickness that hit me while I slept on Bucky’s couch by morning. We have no show tomorrow night due to flaky Santa Fe promoters and in good health, with a clear head, I will experience Denver tomorrow properly. We will not be rich very much longer, unless that same malcontented Colorado youth just got their allowance and loves semi-coherent spoken word, but we have every intention of riding this train out to the last stop. El Paso and Phoenix are still up in the air, and as we re-route things because of those questions that remain unanswered we may find ourselves in Los Angeles, but if that’s the price of glory then what the hell? Sometimes you gotta fight the bear.

 

09 25 04. 20:00.

Riverside CA.

 

Oh, I have many new stories for you.

But they aren’t coming just yet. Not from Riverside, California, not right now. But when you wonder, when you look at all your Southern California stereotypes, your horror stories about Los Angeles, when you hear them all and you wonder if they could possibly be true, if they can’t just be slightly exaggerated –

I am here to tell you that they are true. That this is a place that was designed to be lived in by cars and dinosaurs, not real people who do things like walk where they want to go, who want to breathe air made of oxygen, who want to see something other than palm trees for fucking miles. This is a place for cars and dinosaurs and Arnold Schwarzenegger and if the cars and dinosaurs could vote they would have elected him Philosopher-King For Life and not just Governor. There is no humanity here. These creatures that surround me are not people.

What are they? I will find that out later, when it is time to do the show. Perhaps they will be actors. Or models. I am certain they will drive Humvees. Tomorrow, as we drive to San Francisco, I hope dearly that the Big One will follow us in our wake. We will drive up the freeway and as we make our way up north the pavement will crack and fall away. We will outrun it in our desperate little Saturn, pushing further than ever and powered by the music coming from the radio — Cat Stevens, terrorist threat, singing of being followed by a moonshadow, or an NSA shadow — and we will watch from the back window as this place falls into the ocean and the cars sink to the bottom and the dinosaurs evolve into something even more horrific, something that even Schwarzenegger would fear.

But that is tomorrow. Tonight I will meet many of the denizens of Riverside and I will likely enjoy the company of many of them despite my misgivings. But, oh sister, those misgivings are there.

They were there last night, too, though they more or less remained. The people who came to the show were nice enough, if largely disinterested in not just Tony and I but also the headlining bands, Austin-natives Those Peabodys and The Only Children, made up of members of former emo vanguarders The Anniversary. In Phoenix last night, they did not care much about us boys from Texas — or anywhere else — at all. Aside from a few very nice people who made it to the venue specifically for our sweaty, unshaven asses, Phoenix’s enthusiasm was among the lowest of the tour.

Phoenix itself is not much of a city to speak of. It reminds me of the things I like least about South Texas and Central Florida, smooshed together like an accordion, and then expanded to nearly two million people. Sprawl and palm trees, always palm trees, and streets that were made for driving even in the arts district. An arts district full of mediocre, over-priced work and a general feeling that this is enough, that just having an arts district at all, just having a venue that will host touring bands and poets, that just having any of these things is enough and that they bother to properly support them. That is Phoenix. It is no surprise that those are the people that have given us John McCain.

He’s been in the news lately, too, McCain has. He fills an interesting role in American politics and the Republican Party, almost the same role that Phoenix seems to have taken on for itself in its cultural aspects — that just being there is enough. McCain positions himself as a free-thinker, the most respectable of the sad, cowed Republicans, when he himself embraces their platform whole-heartedly. It’s a good trick, and an important role. When McCain makes news for criticizing the President, he affirms his role as the loose cannon of the party, and when he recants, satisfied, a week later, deciding that the President is the right man for the job, his words carry extra weight. Of course he comes from Arizona.

Many, many other people come from Arizona, like the girl at the show last night too drunk to stand who stumbled onto the Only Children’s tourbus in a t-shirt with a diamond-shaped hole cut out of the chest, her skirt so short that even before she climbed over the short wall to get to the club I couldn’t help but know what color her underwear was. Many people come from Arizona. Sad-eyed emo boys, the kind they stopped making in 1999, who stare blankly as their favorite band plays to them, boredom echoing in their eyes. It’s Arizona. What do you expect?

But it’s a pretty place, if you like the desert. I like the desert, and I like to see a cactus every dozen feet or so. I could live happily without revisiting Phoenix, and someday the rest of the evening and the bit of autobiography that makes up the rest of the story will be told — I could live happily without Phoenix, but Arizona has some charm I’ve yet to fully explore. Maybe another time.

And maybe another time for further updates. The Riverside Public Library closes early and I am about to be homeless until the show starts.

 

09 27 04. 00:31.

San Luis Obispo CA.

 

A day off. Let me tell you what a day off means. It means driving, sometimes, or it means trying to fill hours in towns where you were cool the night before, when there was a show. It’s staying too late at a party, when everyone you wanted to talk to has already gone home and you’re just hanging around because you don’t know exactly how to leave. It’s a lame-duck day, and we’ve got another one tomorrow.

But the one tomorrow will be in San Francisco, and if half of what I’ve heard about that city is true then there aren’t many places I’d rather have a day off. It’s Christmas morning right now. Excitement for what’s to come tomorrow abounds. Even if tonight we’re dragging our feet up the coast, trying to work our way up toward the bay. I’ve never been to San Francisco.

I have been to many other places since I last had time to write about them. Albuquerque, for one. Denver, for another. The West Texas town of El Paso.

In Denver our show was canceled without notice. We were set to play a community arts space but when we arrived no one was there and the door was locked. Hours passed and no one ever showed up. Our poster was not on the door. It started raining. Tony and I both had the flu. A foul day. We gave in, traded our punk rock credibility for a warm, dry place to sleep off the flu and checked into a hotel for the first time, defeated. Along the way we stopped at a Chinese restaurant.

Tony is a vegetarian and I am a picky eater. We had no luck at the restaurant twenty minutes before closing. Storming out of the place moments after entering, two dudes in cheap t-shirts with five o’clock shadows just outside the door spoke to us.

no dice? one of them said.

nah.

where did you guys play tonight? People on tour can smell their own. Literally. Unshaven dudes in dirty clothes who haven’t bathed nearly often enough to be a part of regular society but don’t have the edgy look of a truly homeless person in their eye. We told them of our show being canceled. Their tour was about to start in Kansas City the next night. They asked where we were playing next.

albuquerque, we said.

i’m from albuquerque, our new best friend told us. do you have a place to stay?

no.

you should stay with my mom. He gave us her phone number, his phone number, and the best wishes of himself and the other members of his pop-punk band. We returned the wishes and our gratitude. The next day, en route to Albuquerque, we called the number.

Jonathan was his name. He plays in a band called Roper. I’ve never heard them but he ended up turning one of the rougher patches of tour that we had around completely that day. His mom’s house was the nicest place we’ve stayed all tour, maybe ever. The morning after we got in we woke to the smell of breakfast cooking and a very kind fifty year old woman’s insistence that we go for a swim in the indoor pool before we explored the city. We took her up on the offer.

The show that night was full of people who exhibited a similar brand of kindness. We made money that we didn’t expect to from a crowd that seemed unenthusiastic at first. After the show, Jonathan’s mom insisted we return to stay the night at the house again before heading down to El Paso.

you have a place in albuquerque, she told us before we left. the next time you’re here. i never lock the door.

A fifty year old unmarried woman in 2004 America with two children who doesn’t lock the door, who opens her home to strangers, boys from Texas who met her son outside a Chinese restaurant in Denver for two minutes? This is not the country they tell you it is.

This is not the country full of people who secretly kind of like Lyndie England for torturing the sand gooks. This is not the country that you see in campaign commercials from either side, cynical and angry and believing in lies told to them from people whose own agenda is questionable. This is not the country full of scared people desperate to elect monsters in order to protect them from invisible threats. I have seen it, and it is not that place.

And there are other stories I could tell you, of bathrooms in Milwaukee gas stations that the attendant only let me use because I was white and my hair is short. I could tell you about sixteen year old punk rock kids at art galleries in Phoenix who slip the word nigger into their speech casually. I could tell you about these things, but what would that prove? There are always these places too. You know that. But they do not run the country. They are not the majority.

The majority came to see us in El Paso the night after we played in Albuquerque. The majority of twenty-something kids, anyway, looking for an excuse to come to a party on a Thursday night. Nice kids and returning to Texas, even if only for a night, was like a warm embrace. The majority, and they listened to the stories I told them and I realized that if this is what I do right now, go into people’s living rooms and talk to them about the things I have seen, if this is my life, I am accomplishing something.

And even Riverside last night, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, even Riverside was a good night. Even there I was impressed with the people I met, with the music I heard and the fact that we all seemed to get it.

So where do these people come from? I have been searching for them. Who elected Arnold Schwarzenegger? If the people who open their homes to strangers are not afraid, who are the commercials that try to cow everyone into submission with fear trying to reach?

I have no answers. But I have a day off tomorrow to look for them. If I can find them on the beach.

 

10 03 04. 02:45.

Ashland OR.

 

We survived California, but just barely. I lost my left eye somewhere around the Bay Bridge; Tony only has three fingers on his left hand after Davis. It’s a rough place, boy. You better watch yourself.

I exaggerate, but only slightly. California was definitely the roughest patch of this tour. We weathered the storm as best we could, though, and are now beginning our slow crawl across the state of Oregon. Two shows tomorrow. We’re going to need them. Nowhere to sleep tonight. Perhaps tomorrow we will eat.

This is the thing with touring on this level. This isn’t Metallica. This isn’t even a Warped Tour emo band with a van that is guaranteed to be gassed up every night, with a built-in audience, with craft services providing refreshments. This is alienation. You can’t get into it for the love of money, obviously, but you can’t even get into it for the love of performing to an audience. You can’t get into it for the love of performing every night because shows fall through. You can’t get into it to entertain people because people don’t always want to be entertained. You can’t get into it to spend time with your friends on the road because you will find yourself turning on even your closest friends when it gets rough, when you’re both hungry and tired and you aren’t going to have a chance to play and make more money for another two days because you just got an email from the promoter saying that the venue has just been shut down by the fire marshal, when there’s nothing to look forward to except the possibility that maybe the people at the next show will be there to hear you, that the posters you sent the promoter six goddamn weeks ago will be in the window, that they’ll want your merchandise and drop a few fucking dollars in a hat. You can’t get into it to meet people because you can meet them and then when you’ve got nowhere to go you can call them and find yourself playing the part of a conman, taking advantage of their hospitality for another day even though you know you’re not wanted anymore but you also know that whoever it is is too polite to tell you that you have to go somewhere else and there’s not even a Wal-Mart parking lot around for you to sleep in otherwise and San Francisco gets cold at night in September. You can’t do it for any reason other than when it’s right, when it’s good, when it happens, when everything comes alive on stage on those nights when it happens, it makes all the bad ones worth it. That you would pay the price of a dozen bad nights for one good one because you get the satisfaction of knowing that you’re doing something absolutely vital, that no one else can touch, and that any price is fine because what do those Warped Tour emo bands know anyway? The satisfaction that you’re doing something that means life or death to you and that when it works is fucking magic, can knock down goddamn buildings, is the only reason to get into it. Anything else will leave you wandering the beach in Santa Cruz, huddled under the boardwalk foraging for spare change and rubbing your hands together for warmth under your sweatshirt, insisting that once you had something to say.

Until that happens you will not know whether or not you’re in it for the love of what you are creating every night you perform or if you’re seeking something different. You may think you know, but you don’t. Not until it’s the only thing you have. Not until all of the other things are gone and you just want to go home.

That is not the trip I’m on. I read Get In The Van at way too young an age for hunger and bad shows and having nowhere to go to stop me.

California was a monster but it’s over now. I did five shows in nine days. A day off in San Luis Obispo. A day off in San Francisco. A day off in Oakland, and today, ending across the state line in Oregon with nowhere to go.

The first show was good, and it’s a little funny that the best show was just outside of Los Angeles, given the stereotypes. The second show was in Davis CA. I had booked it about a week earlier from the lobby of a Mexican restaurant in El Paso TX so I didn’t expect much pre-promotion, just a mic and some floorspace and whoever happened to be there. Instead I got a double-booked venue and a very, very angry and unhelpful stand-up comedian who did not want to share his beloved comedy night with a poet and a musician from Texas.

We can work this out, I said.

sure, he said, how about your friend does fifteen minutes of mood music before the night starts to get everyone ready for the comedy, and then maybe you can have five minutes during the open mic.

Which wouldn’t fly at all, of course, since the show was booked in advance and we were going to do full sets. Tony opted not to play and I dropped the motherfucker, i’m from texas point on the guy and finally the booker intervened, apologized for his mistake, and told the comedian that he’d have to start late and we could open the show. fine, he said, nothing we can do about it now.

Of course an hour later the guy was kissing my ass, phony as shit, pretending to give a fuck about what I was going to do. I figured I might as well play nice at that point and I did my set. Of course homeboy dropped an October Surprise and cut me off after twenty minutes. Davis is not my kind of town. No money, nowhere to stay, nowhere near a full set. We retreated to Oakland, called someone we had met in the city the day before, and crashed at her apartment. helpful strangers and the exploitation of the kindness thereof, page 167.

The next night was a show in Oakland. A good night, all things considered. We made some money and the people responded well to my set. The crowd was small but that wasn’t the point; they were all listening and that was all I really wanted at that point. We went back to the same apartment in Oakland, exploiting the same kindness, for another night before it was time to drift down to the beach with Led Zeppelin blaring as we wound our way through the boardwalk in Santa Cruz.

The show in Santa Cruz was as foul as the one two days prior in Davis. Sharing the bill with someone who doesn’t want you there, playing to a crowd who doesn’t want a performance at all, trying to work our way through another shitty night. After the first five minutes I stopped trying to accomplish anything except making the woman in the front put her hands over her ears when I got loud. Six times, fuckers. I’m not an entertainer.

Still, it wasn’t the worst night anyone had on Thursday. That honor had to go to George W. Bush on television in his debate with John Kerry. Now that was a shitty performance, folks, and it made me feel like a million bucks by comparison. Watching that semi-literate retard stammer and sweat and fumble around for words like the uneducated halfwit he is was worth the price of admission. My feelings about John Kerry, the gawky, half-dead monstrosity, have not changed much even after his righteous performance in the debate, but it was exciting to finally hear someone say to George Bush that Saddam Hussein didn’t attack us, and it may reflect my own cynicism with the process that I was amazed that the first person to actually say it to him was the other guy I can vote for. I don’t think John Kerry will make a particularly memorable President of the United States of America, but ‘m glad that he’s out there, that he’s not Al Gore. For months half the country was still under the vague impression that George Bush was running against Michael Moore in November.

We spent Friday bouncing between Oakland and San Francisco, another night off, broke and broken and wandering around Haight-Ashbury and Golden Gate Park and the Mission District and East Oakland like unwanted orphans.

San Francisco is a strange city, one that I don’t have a feel for yet despite several days there. There is something glorious about reading books in the basement of City Lights until midnight, but the glory fades around Haight-Ashbury.

Haight-Ashbury is a disgusting place, full of Sixties sentimentality and burnt-out old hippies chasing the dream, waiting around every corner to see if Jerry’s going to come back, if Janis somehow survived that night when she was so tired of never feeling beautiful that she let the depression take her, if somehow the past glory would come back. It won’t. There’s a Gap on the corner of Haight and Ashbury now. But they continue to chase down the dream and lure in kids, college students and teenagers, people my age, with the promise of what it was. No one tells the kids that Haight-Ashbury is a myth, that the Sixties were a myth, that aside from Muhammad Ali and The Stooges the pop culture that it’s all been converted into at this point isn’t worth a goddamn thing. Abbie Hoffman himself would throw bricks through the window of every vintage store on Haight Street, independently owned or not, and he’d be doing the right goddamn thing. No one tells the kids that whatever Haight-Ashbury was once, now it’s just an overpriced street and when you buy into it you’re buying into someone else’s nostalgia. No one tells the kids that if there was ever a lesson to apply to their own lives about what the Sixties were, it’s that you can’t find it by looking backwards. Move away and start your own street, take over 10th and Hackberry in McAllen TX and turn it into the new thing, go to Truth Or Consequences NM and start something there where the rent is seventy-five dollars a month for a room in a house and you can live free and hopeful and not choke to death on some sentimentality that doesn’t even belong to you to begin with.

And all the stores that sell that sentimentality at a huge markup have signs in their windows for John Kerry because they’re choking on it all and if they want to remake the whole thing in full color like Gus Van Sant redoing Psycho then they have to cast Bush as Nixon and Kerry as Kennedy but none of the metaphors fit. Kerry’s not Kennedy and Bush is worse than Nixon ever was. The sad truth of the matter is that if they thawed Nixon out and struck his horrifying corpse with lightning and ran it for President he’d be a candidate that could woo the support of the Haight-Ashbury ‘04 crowd with some light rhetoric.

No one escapes unscathed. Stay away from these places and all the nostalgia and build your own. San Francisco holds a lot of appeal to me but walking around Haight-Ashbury offered little gratification. Except maybe the fact that there are many beautiful girls walking that street to shop at the vintage clothing stores. It has been too long since I have fallen in love on this tour and I miss it.

I miss many things, like actually having a show every night, and eating, but those things can wait. At least until tomorrow. In three days time we will be in Portland and all reports mark it as my generation’s attempt at building a place to be. Whether or not that appeals to me remains to be seen, but it’s the best shot we’ve had in a while, since before the never-ending promise poured out of Austin and it stopped being a mythical place and became just a city that could break your heart like any other.

We passed the halfway point on this tour one night in Oakland. Everything accelerates and will eventually crash, but in the meantime I expect that my attitudes toward being on the road will change a half-dozen more times again. If John Kerry can overtake Bush in the Newsweek poll on a Saturday in October then we can certainly have a decent fucking show sometime before we hit Portland.

 

10 07 04. 16:09.

Portland OR.

 

The other trick is that when you’re touring on this level, all it takes is one good show to turn it all around.

One night where you feel comfortable on stage, where you win over an audience who is willing to give you the benefit of the doubt but not much more than that, where a few people are there to see you perform and the mission you have at the end of the night is to make damn sure that everyone else in the room walks out remembering your name, one night like that and then you’re back in. Full force. You’re reaching people again.

Last night was the second of two Portland shows. The first one was rough — an ailing rock club in its last days in an unspectacular part of town on a Tuesday. There were six people there and they were polite but we made zero dollars and no one was all that interested. They have lottery machines in Oregon. In bars, they have touch-screen lottery machines. Put in a dollar and play keno and maybe you can win a few bucks. They put them in bars. They put them in ailing rock clubs.

Portland is a strange town. Young. Younger than Austin, and not based around a college like most of the towns that it reminds me of. It’s not Burlington VT or Ann Arbor. Everywhere we’ve been since the tour started, we’ve met people who talk about Portland as though it’s a holy place. They’re always moving here, getting ready to move here, just hosted a band from here — it’s the place to be right now if you’re young, hip, and artistically inclined. The city caters to you. Vegan food is found in abundance; every business in town seems to have a bike rack.

And the others? The sixty year old men in the ailing rock club on a Tuesday playing video-lottery, trying to score an extra twenty bucks with whatever spare cash they have? They’re cool with it. They don’t mind the young man reading poetry on stage. They don’t mind the feedback, delay, and distortion-laden guitar. I get why Portland was picked as a destination.

It’s a good place. I’m glad to be here. It’s not San Francisco in Sixty-Six but we all know that secretly, that’s a good thing. It’s just a place but it’s a good one. Alive and vibrant today and maybe in a few years rent will start to skyrocket and all the cool, young, hip, artistically inclined, bike-riding vegans will have to go somewhere else because that’s the way it always goes. Maybe the part of town west of the river will be taken over and that ailing rock club will someday end up referred to as a cultural landmark when its gone, the way that hindsight gives everything glory. you know dan solomon and tony presley played there once? they’ll say as they walk past the building that’s now a Buffalo Exchange⁹ and Ben and Jerry’s and the reality will be glossed over, the old men gambling on state-sponsored keno. Nothing remains cool forever but right now, at this point in America’s history, right now I get why Portland is the cool place to be. I get why everyone everywhere wants to be here.

I want to be here, but I am here, and tomorrow I’ll be in Astoria. My mom called me a man without a country before this whole tour started and I laughed before I realized how right she was.

Last night’s show was much better than the one at the ailing rock club. It was the first time I felt like I really connected with the audience on stage in many weeks, if not since Iowa City than certainly since Riverside CA. I talked about the Republican National Convention and Purple Rain and before I left the stage someone handed me a note to read that explained that all of the people who were arrested at Ground Zero on August 31 while good fortune kept us on the safe side of the street had the charges against them thrown out because the police gave them misleading orders. After I got off the stage our gracious host in Portland, Rich Mackin, informed me that one of the people sitting at his table had been an extra in Purple Rain. Little connections, but they were genuine. If Black Flag or Sonic Youth never had shows like last night then they wouldn’t have endured the abuse either. The good ones make the bad ones worthwhile.

I wonder if that’s the same mantra George Bush is repeating to himself, over and over, as he looks himself in the mirror and tries to convince himself that tomorrow’s debate with John Kerry isn’t going to be as humiliating as last week’s. That huge war-chest that his campaign has been saving has been going toward damage control since then — it does give you a bit of faith in the people of this country. They see the President expose overwhelming ignorance on television and even the ones who were thinking about voting for him decide that maybe he is not the man they want to represent them to the rest of the world. And make no mistake — that is the point of this election. Me, I’m still trying to figure out how a state like Oregon, the place I’ve been visiting and meeting people in for the past several days, is even a swing-state. Even the rude fucks at the show in Eugene wore their anti-establishment fashion statements. Even the old men playing keno cheered when I talked about politics. Where do the other people live? Where do the ones who don’t mind that even Paul Bremer thinks we never had enough troops to do the job properly, the ones who are okay with Donald Rumsfeld admitting that there was never a connection between Iraq and al-Queda, the ones who secretly knew all along that we’d never find any weapons of mass destruction, where do they live¹⁰? It’s not anywhere I’ve been, and I’ve been all over this damn country the past half-dozen weeks. Where do they live?

More and more I’m confident that the answer is not very many places. America can break your heart and it’ll certainly wear you out, but the more of it I see the more convinced I am that the people here have some decent ideas after all. Catch me in a good mood and I am a fountain of light and joy. Children run to me, arms wide, seeking candy and warm smiles and I am all too pleased to oblige them. Why wouldn’t I? We’re all on the same side here. Especially in Portland.

 

10 12 04. 17:35.

Walla Walla WA.

 

There is much to say. Portland is over. We have conquered Astoria, Seattle, and Bellingham. The second Presidential debate happened and no one was particularly moved. George Bush lashed out against the moderator and his opponent like a frightened, cornered housecat with dull claws left homeless and in the rain for too long and everyone seemed to think that this was some sort of victory because he was not struck by lightning. Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.

That is where the other side sneaks in. That is how these dishonest criminals continue to be elected — people do not vote for them because they see them as men of vision but because men of vision are not expected. That is why this race is a contest between John Kerry and George Bush. Because we all know that we have been marketed an idea of a President as someone who speaks with authority, offers nothing resembling actual representation, and who will lie to us but that’s cool cuz they all do it. It is an image, and it’s true too, so it’s all pretty sewn up. We’ll get John Kerry because he looks like The President in a classic sense, like a stage production, and people are bored with the idea of The President being short and petulant.

Low expectations. maybe i should move to montreal, I told my pal John Vechey in Seattle, even if the other guy wins. maybe i’ll appreciate it all a little more if i’m removed from it. He insisted on Vancouver; it’s still in the Pacific Northwest, and the weather is amazing and the attitudes are very agreeable. Remember, I was nearly beheaded by a gang of drunken French-Canadian hockey fans onstage in Montreal. The closest I came to violence in the Pacific Northwest was in Bellingham when an angry anarchist and drug dealer on a cocktail that included whiskey, crystal meth, and cocaine yelled at me during my set that I wasn’t doing enough to effect change in the world as he sat on his barstool.

I hopped off the stage when he told me that I was a fool for protesting the Republican National Convention in New York City because we’ve been living in a fascist state for thirty years, man! His history seemed spotty to me — before Johnson these problems never existed? I walked over to his table with the microphone still in my hand to discuss his pressing concern. He seemed to lose interest in dialogue once the opportunity to exchange ideas was offered. lead us in the revolution, I told him, get off the bar stool and we will meet down by the docks and begin planning. He glared at me after that but the interruptions ceased for the next ten minutes. I resumed my place on the stage and continued. He began shouting again as I was closing with “Howling” and the bartender removed him from the club.

I didn’t want to see the man removed and I didn’t mind the interruptions. Low expectations? Mostly I was just interested. I get very interested these days in the ideas of people who are full of revolutionary zeal but no interest in participating in any actual revolution. The ones who read Tim Leary and saw tune in, turn on, drop out and didn’t realize that he was talking about an ongoing, cyclical process. That after dropping out you had to tune back in.

The drug dealer railed at me from his barstool. That week in New York, during the convention, angry teenagers in punk rock t-shirts harassed us during the march to Madison Square Garden for obeying the cops orders while our comrades are in jail! Where were they? They were on the other side of the street with their headphones around their shoulders.

These people are why I am voting for John Kerry. Because I do not want to be one of them. I do not want to be a person whose revolutionary impulses lead to paralysis. A vote for John Kerry effects very little actual change; instead of a frightened, illiterate chimpanzee without even the basic decency to pick ticks off the fur of the other animals running the country we will have a lumbering Frankenstein’s Monster whose idea of progressive politics is promising to kill the terrorists three times in his ninety second closing remarks. We will not be represented, but you knew that already.

But I’d rather have the Frankenstein’s Monster than the chimpanzee, and casting a vote for David Cobb or Ralph Nader is about as effective as casting a vote for Superman and we all know that Christopher Reeve died two days ago and never did get to walk again after all.

But don’t get so depressed. It’s not as defeatist as all of that. Defeatism is railing against everything, shouting epithets from barstools at your own feelings of inadequacy, attacking others because you see them as manifestations of your own powerlessness. The anger is directed at people who feel that voting for the less vile candidate is somehow fulfilling one’s civic duty.

The Zapatistas vote for the less vile candidate in droves; they also make every moment of their lives political actions. The first part allows the second. That’s how to combat defeatism and low expectations. Participating only so far as casting a vote every four years demands low expectations from yourself; even the drug dealer on the barstool knows that’s not enough. Voting for John Kerry angers a lot of people who want true change, but it only really angers the ones who aren’t willing to work for it¹¹.

There is a lot of work to do and John Kerry isn’t going to make much of it any easier, except that he isn’t George Bush and so we will not have to go to sleep every night with the image of Dick Cheney jerking off into the American flag burned into our collective unconscious. Work is much easier when we are not being taxed in that way.

There will be many, many things to consider when I am back in Texas. The first step, though, is figuring out if America is the place to consider them. All of this is moot if those low expectations mean that more than half of the country’s voters decide that they like the idea of John Ashcroft spilling his black semen onto the Bill of Rights from behind those doors in the Justice Department, if all they ever really wanted was a chance to see some brown people’s houses explode on television. I’ve been seeing a lot of America and I haven’t met many of those people, but if they’re huddling out there and rooting for the underdog then maybe you’ll find me in Montreal yet.

But not today. Today I’m in Walla Walla and for the next week or so I’ll be wandering Montana and the Dakotas. They have bald eagles up here, but not at this time of year. They’ve got militias, too, but probably not the fun kind I want to hang out with. If I make it through Aberdeen SD without great harassment from audience members and city and state officials alike then my optimism will hold out. If not I’m going to start hedging my bets.

 

10 17 04. 20:13.

Minot ND.

 

There’s a girl in Spokane who looks just like an ex-girlfriend of mine. I don’t think of her much at all, especially not these days. My attention span has been fragmented beyond repair after two months of different cities and different people every night. I miss a girl in the Midwest more than I miss a girl I thought I loved down in Texas; I spend more time wanting to hear from a girl who lives in a van with three guys, playing music every night, than I do wanting to track down the past. All I miss about Texas is the ready availability of chips and white queso.

This is healthy. Why dwell on the negative? Why dwell on Montana, the north side of I-90, with the bald, clearcut mountains littered with the remains and stumps of trees that make it look like Mordor when you can look out the passenger side to the south and see the glory of nature? Why dwell on that show in Spokane when you could focus on the one the night before in Missoula? I’ve seen the sun rise over the badlands of North Dakota with Elliott Smith on the radio. It can’t be that bad.

We played in Minot ND last night. We had spent the previous day driving through the edge of eastern Washington, the Idaho panhandle, the entire goddamn state of Montana, and most of North Dakota, stopping a few times during the seventeen hour shift. We stopped in Butte MT to try to make some money. Rumor had it there was an amateur boxing club in town — fifty dollars to the loser, a hundred and twenty-five to the winner. Our plan was to pretend not to know each other so Tony and I could fight and make the guaranteed one seventy-five. It wouldn’t have worked; I’m a welterweight and he’s a featherweight. It didn’t matter anyway, though. We were a day late and didn’t get to fight anyone. We loaded up on bread and figured that would be enough to carry us through the miles. We stopped again at the North Dakota border around midnight to sleep in a truck stop parking lot. It was cold — we are but two simple boys from Texas, after all, and sleeping in a cold car in a truck stop in Montana is out of our realm of expertise, but we still managed to score five hours or so. The attendant let me take a shower in the back despite the fact that I was not a truck driver and it set a tone of kindness that lasted through North Dakota.

We stopped for gas the next morning in Washburn ND. Population seven hundred. It’s always strange to pass through these small towns, looking as we do. you ain’t from around here, are you, boy? Well, no. If a child had been found murdered a few days earlier in Washburn and we passed through that morning I could picture the phone calls made from the gas station to the police — we have found them. one of them has long hair and the other has a beard. they are clearly satanists. We would insist on our innocence and it would be for nothing — the Neurosis CDs in the car alone would guarantee our imprisonment. Activist indie rock and punk bands would organize benefit shows in our honor, trying to free the Washburn 2, but their efforts would be as doomed to fail as Henry Rollins’ attempt to assist the legal battles of the three poor kids locked up in West Memphis were. The bands we befriended on tour would testify in our defense but in Washburn none of it would make a difference. It’s just that sort of a place. The video store is in the gas station and they have five copies of The Faith Of George W Bush for the one copy of Fahrenheit 911.

But, hell, they do have a copy of Fahrenheit 911, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. If there’s one thing that spending the past two months out in America have taught me, it’s that you can’t really predict people anywhere. I find that I like pretty much everyone I meet, even if I get angry at them when I read about them in the news. I like a truck stop attendant in Montana in person. It’s only when we stop interacting as individuals that I get frustrated with people. It’s the eternal contradiction of America, the one that breaks my heart. How can this country full of all of these people who have such kindness in them still find itself represented by liars and criminals¹²?

Questions without answers. I met a candidate for the North Dakota state congress last night. A tall, smart, goofy eighteen year old named John McClure. He talked about Dungeons and Dragons and building windmills to create clean sources of energy; his dream was of a North Dakota whose primary export was wind energy instead of agriculture. I doubt he’ll win his race¹³. Too nice, too awkward, too young, too sincere, but it’s interesting to see people who try to provide an alternative to the question that isn’t i dunno.

I met him and about sixty other people at the show in Minot last night. We played at an art gallery. A wide cross-section of the town turned out. There isn’t much to do in Minot, seventy miles off the interstate in the north end of North Dakota, a sixth of the population of the entire city the students who attend Minot State University. They pronounce it My-Knot here. In towns like this you never know what sort of turnout to expect. It worked out very well for us last night.

We hadn’t had high expectations, either. We had arrived early in the day and went downtown. There is no downtown in Minot anymore — just the art gallery we played, an old used bookstore, the post office, a law office, and some empty storefronts. It’s nothing new, the same story you’ll find downtown in any small city with a Wal-Mart and a shopping mall on the outskirts. In a town like this you don’t need to preach to them the evils of sprawl because it’s just life here. Every fifteen year old who wishes he could order the patty melt from Ryan’s Family Dining knows that the reason he’ll never get to have it again is because a Subway moved in down the block. You don’t need to tell them that their town is becoming the same as every other town because they know.

And they’re powerless to stop it because it’s not like anyone here has any money, so when the option is to eat cheaper, buy cheaper things, get everything on discount at the mall, they take it. We had arrived in Minot early in the day and we went downtown and we saw the nothing that was left and so we decided to go to the mall to kill time, maybe sneak into a movie.

I never really noticed the strange ritual that is the shopping mall experience until I was so completely removed from that sort of reality. The concept of people spending money at places that sell things other than gas and the cheapest of cheap food has become foreign to me. We haven’t had any money for anything else since about a week after the tour began. To suddenly walk around a building where people drop a hundred dollars in a video game or beauty supply store without a second thought seems so strange. Do they really want these things? Do they notice that they don’t have them?

But it’s the life that’s been sold to them and it’s the only way to kill some time on a Saturday in Minot. They can’t go downtown anymore and if you’re in the mall what are you going to do except shop? If your name is Dan Solomon or Tony Presley you might wander around and resent everyone because you expect that if this is what they’re into then there’s no way that they’ll come to your show that night.

And you’d be wrong, so don’t get cocky. Sixty people showed out and we were greeted as liberators. We made more money than any other night of the tour — all of it in donations — and the audience response was amazing. I did a longer set than usual and when it was time to get off it still felt too soon. I sat by the table with our free merchandise afterward and missed being up there, missed the connection I had formed with the audience. It was a good night.

The show before that, two days prior, was not quite so good. We played in Spokane WA, a thousand miles west of Minot, and were met by ten vaguely polite adults and a dozen children under the age of thirteen. Do you have any idea how boring I am to an eleven year old?

well, I thought, at least this is one tour story that i’ve got that i’m damn sure never happened to black flag.

I cut all of the bad words from my set and went through it anyway. I don’t think anyone there especially liked it except maybe the girl who looked like that ex-girlfriend but she offered to let us sleep at her house so it wasn’t a total loss. The kids grabbed all of the merchandise that we had in the bag as though it was Christmas despite not listening to a word of my set.

But that’s not to be dwelled on. Minot was great and Missoula MT was another highlight. The performers we shared the stage with that night were excellent and everyone we hung out with after the show was great to be around. Nights like that remind me why I do this, why this lifestyle holds such appeal. You can wake up in Washington without a single friend in that town and find yourself in an artspace in Montana hours later with people who you connect with immediately, performing and sharing songs and stories. You can sleep on a floor belonging to a new friend and maybe if the show was especially good the night before you can all eat lunch before it’s off to the next city to do it all again. On those nights, why would you want another life?

We spent a day off in Minot today, hanging out with the new friends we made last night at the show. We snuck into a terrible movie called Team America at the mall and ate grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup with chips that were liberated from the Frito Lay plant at the edge of town. Tomorrow we go to Aberdeen SD where Tony will be pelted with small stones during his set and I will be locked up for twenty-five years for sedition under the PATRIOT Act after mine. America wants to break your heart, you know, but even in towns like this it can’t always succeed.

 

10 23 04. 12:59.

Madison WI.

 

It has been nearly a week since I sent my last burning missive out into the ether of the Internet; my rabid fanbase has been scouring the streets all throughout America, looking for some sign of me. is he under that rock? they ask themselves. do not be foolish, their friends say, his itinerary is on the internet. Relieved, they do not pursue the investigation further.

I live on. The updates from the road, however, are on a spotty basis since my computer crashed. the hard drive? No, the fucking thing landed on the Chicago pavement and exists primarily now for nostalgic purposes. But there is no time right now to worry about that. I am at the Madison Public Library and I have an hour on their computer, the Red Sox are in the World Series, and the Houston Astros crashed and burned in game seven.

It’s tempting to read too much symbolism into the success of the Red Sox and the failure of the Astros. But fuck it — I am touring as a poet and spoken word artist. Symbolism is very important to people of my persuasion, says the boy with the Alamo tattoo. And so the success of the underdogs from Massachusetts who were widely believed doomed after an astonishing comeback in a heated contest against the perceived invincible entrenched power brings a bit of hope to people who want to see George Bush beheaded and his head kicked down the street like a soccer ball, to quote both Bill Hicks and Saddam Hussein. And the failure of the Texans to overcome a Midwestern hurdle on their holy quest for supremacy is equally encouraging. If nothing else, it definitely confirms that there is still some truth to the old cliche — it ain’t over till it’s over. Do the Red Sox represent John Kerry? Did both the Yankees and the Astros simultaneously represent George Bush? I am in Wisconsin on a lovely October afternoon and today I’m giving the universe some points for its interest in poetic symmetry.

The poetic symmetry would have been lost on the kids at the show in Aberdeen SD back on Monday night, but somehow we found ourselves beloved by the good people of the town formerly known as the Hub City anyway. It was entirely unbeknownst to us until after the show was over that the venue we were playing was actually a Christian coffee shop, and that the audience was nearly entirely composed of conservative Christian kids who wish only that they were old enough to cast their votes for George W. Bush in November.

i have found them, I thought to myself when it all became clear. I had wondered, during my performance, why the reaction was so heavily slanted in favor of the personal material, the poetry about girls with eating disorders and traveling the country in search of something new and real and beautiful in its flaws, why the jokes about Monroe LA and the RNC protests in New York were met with icy silence. I learned why after the kids — all of whom were, it must be noted, very kind to us — took us out to dinner after the show.

I met a twenty-one year old girl who train-hopped and chained herself to trees in California to protect them from loggers, who ate only vegan food and spoke against violence, and I asked her why she was voting for George Bush.

my family is republican, she offered by way of explanation, as though Republicanism is an ethnicity, unshakable even by distance and idealogical differences. I pressed her further. i don’t know that this will make sense to you, she said, but he is a good christian man.

if he’s a good one, what do the bad ones do? I shot back.

There are times, she said, when i am not certain that he and i worship the same god. i disagree with his environmental policies, but it feels right.

Perhaps I am too scientific in these things. What feels right to me is a write-in vote for Willie Nelson, but wanting someone in office who will not press for drilling in the arctic wildlife refuge, I find myself stuck in the unenviable position of endorsing Red Sox enthusiast John Kerry instead. I forget that not everyone shares my approach to Presidential politics.

But despite it all, the show in Aberdeen was successful. The kids, despite our many and varied differences in belief systems both theological and political, were very kind and I will return there to further push for answers. I have been looking for the people who choose this, who choose to ignore the great disagreements they have ideologically with the people who they choose to represent them based on vague affiliations — after all, John Kerry speaks at length about the same god that George Bush does — and I have found them. I will continue to visit them until I understand them.

No such excitement was to be had in Minnesota. Prince comes from Minnesota, but he don’t live there anymore. It’s not the funkiest state in the union.

St. Paul is where the people who work in Minneapolis live. The entire town shuts down at five o’clock and that includes not going out to rock clubs on Tuesday nights. It’s clean to the point of being sterile; if homeless people ever lurked the streets of St. Paul they were likely washed away with powerful hoses and sent floating into the Mississippi River that divides the twin cities.

Minneapolis, by comparison, is a happenin’ town. Ignore the skyway and the Mall of America. We played a show to a dozen people in a basement who half-listened and half-smirked through it and Tony burned our bridges from the stage out of spite, forcing us to drive to Chicago at three in the morning lest we be attacked in our sleep by the angry residents of that house, resentful of being admonished for being hipsters.

In those towns, the ones that do not have the overwhelming youth culture scenes of Austin or Portland or Williamsburg or Chicago, the hipster kids have an uphill battle to fight. I saw it when I lived in San Antonio. In the interest of trying to build a scene for the hipsters to dwell in comfortably they alienate anyone who does not immediately identify, presuming those people to be one of them, the words spat with venom. In Austin you are looked down on if you ignorantly reveal that you have not heard of Calvin Johnson. In Minneapolis you are treated as hostile until you prove that you have. It’s a subtle difference, but the kind that is becoming all too apparent to me these days.

And so we drove to Chicago all night and landed in town that morning. It was the first time I have ever played a Big Rock Show in that city; I have done poetry slams and coffee shops, singer-songwriter showcases and more, but never a Big Rock Show. It was, strangely, the experience one would expect when generically picturing a performance at a Big Rock Show. Audience members listened attentively, chatted loudly, and occasionally chatted loudly about how they were listening attentively all at various different points during my set. The room was loud but I have learned through it all, through California and Montreal, how to maintain my focus in a loud room. After the set both the people who had been listening and those who had not came up to me to express their appreciation; one young woman offered, if I had no other plans, to give me a private reading of her own poetry later that night. Well, gosh. I asked her for a moment to consider her kind offer but as Tony played his set the same young woman and her friends talked loudly in the back of the room, showing great disrespect to my friend and tourmate. I lost interest; the guys in your average Warped Tour screamo band would cast aspersions on my manhood but there are things that you learn when touring on this level that you do not learn when things are made easy for you.

It is funny, the way that the bonds formed through touring are unlike any that I’ve experienced outside of my family. The way that, even if the stresses of the road and the shows and the constant lack of food and money wear you down, you know that the people in the car with you would take a bullet for you and you for them, is something that gets lost when things are easy. I experienced it in June when touring with the Malcontent Party and it’s no different now. The lifestyle that this becomes, sleeping on floors and making friends that will last only a few hours before it all starts over again, creates a new sort of family with the people who share the experience. I think that maybe these are important things to learn, things that people who have it a little easier are missing out on.

It’s things like that that led me to spend that scheduled night off in Milwaukee in a different car, traveling with a friend to Madison to see Shearwater play. Shearwater are a good band from Austin and the thing to remember is that even if they haven’t learned the lessons you have the same way you’ve learned them, we are all in this together. Dan Solomon or Shearwater or Frankenixon, we’re all on the same path. And if fortune favors us, we’ll pull out the same victories against overwhelming odds that the Red Sox did, that John Kerry will. It’s not long now at all before I’m back in Austin, and I’ve got a reserve of optimism to get me through until I’m home.

 

10 26 04. 00:35.

Ann Arbor MI.

 

You should know that all of these places are the same.

At the show tonight I talked about Ann Arbor, about Austin, about Madison, about Bellingham and Santa Cruz and Ithaca and Burlington and Minneapolis. About how they’re all the same place. We had it all sold to us before we even realized what we were buying. All we wanted was a place to buy a cheap sandwich on whole-wheat bread with organic vegetables, a place to buy cruelty-free cosmetics and fair-trade coffee and hemp clothing. We didn’t care if it all came from the same place.

America is a country that can break your heart a hundred times over the course of two months. Even the bastions of open discussion and free thought are the same place everywhere. It’s a dirty secret. There’s a reason why John Kerry is the best we can do — because we’re all homogenized to the point where we don’t really expect anything better than that the mass-produced product, whether it be a sandwich or shoes or a candidate, give us an approximation of what we actually want. The people who want cheap used clothes buy them from Buffalo Exchange in Austin or Portland or San Francisco and no one feels the same guilt for it that they do when they sneak the Frappucino from Starbucks and pour it into their own cup so their friends won’t catch on. The people who want the organic groceries buy them at Whole Foods and they don’t feel like they’re doing anything wrong, and they’re not, except they’re voting every time to make the world’s mediocrity just a little bit more entrenched.

But it’s all a little bit futile, at least for the time being, for the same reason that there’s really no choice about voting for Kerry. You could protest the fact that shopping at Whole Foods arms the corporation with money they’ll use to expand their markets, snaking their way through college towns until they look like the kudzu that’s made it all the way to Maryland by not shopping there but if you do that then you don’t have anywhere else to buy the food you want to eat. Entrenched mediocrity. The sandwich you get from the funky little Potbelly’s restaurant in Madison is the same one you got in Chicago, in Ann Arbor, in Portland. It all tastes the same.

When I talked about voting for John Kerry a few weeks ago I wasn’t talking about how John Kerry would make our lives better. Voting for John Kerry now and expecting life to get better, for him to fix anything, is like eating the healthier option at the restaurant chain and smirking with self-satisfaction, forgetting the fact that every time you do that you make the scenario that you will someday not have the option to eat anywhere other than that restaurant chain more likely. John Kerry doesn’t fix anything but if you approach it with the right idea about what your role is in America at this point as a political creature then voting for him is like choosing to shop at Whole Foods rather than the Circle K while you get together the people you need to start your own co-op. It’s something to keep from getting sick while you build the world you want to live in. If you want proof, walk the streets of Austin and then do the same thing in Buffalo. Only one of them still has the potential there to be turned around.

But these places do break my heart. After the show tonight a woman told me about Ann Arbor as it used to be, before the rent shot up and chased away the businesses that didn’t cater directly to the college kids, before every coffee shop in town got replaced with an Espresso Royale except the ones that became Starbucks. In Chicago we played in an art gallery that lost its lease and was closing in December. It used to be an auto transmission repair shop in a warehouse district. Building the gallery in the neighborhood and attracting a clientèle with more money helped change the landlord’s idea of what the space could be used for. if a gallery can succeed here, perhaps people will want to live here. And so he pulled the lease to build lofts in that space. It’s a built-in self-destruct mechanism. They talk about old austin as it was in the Seventies, wild and free as it was when Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings founded it. Everywhere I go people talk to me about it, assuming it’s still Linklater’s slacker paradise from a decade ago. Their hearts break just a little bit, just like mine does when I forget how to distinguish Ann Arbor from Madison, when I tell them that all of the locations used in slacker are gone now, replaced by Diesel and Baja Fresh Mexican Grill¹⁴.

I had a conversation about Austin with a man in Madison after that show and he didn’t want to believe it. People flee to these towns, chasing the promised land that Bruce Springsteen sang about when he talked about pulling out of the town full of losers to win in “Thunder Road”. What Springsteen forgets to mention is that eventually when all the losers pull out of a place and move somewhere new, eventually you end up with another town full of losers. It’s too easy in these places to get so self-satisfied that you stop trying to create the new. Springsteen endorsed John Kerry, even put together a giant package tour with everyone from the Dixie Chicks and James Taylor to little Bright Eyes in order to raise some money for the guy’s campaign and to encourage people to vote. When you reach Springsteen’s age and status, your life is more or less the same whether or not George Bush or John Kerry or Ralph Nader is the President. It’s not much different from the old hippies who have the money to stay in Ann Arbor even though all of the poorer people had to move to Ypsilanti. You don’t want to blame them for it, but the hard work is yet to be done. The real work lies in transforming these places so that the people who live there can maintain the healthy lifestyles without ultimately funding people who don’t give a shit at all whether or not they’re healthy. The real work lies in starting the day after Kerry gets elected to build a system where we’ll have to elect fewer and fewer people who act like John Kerry does.

 

10 31 04. 23:09.

Indianapolis IN.

 

We have completed the home stretch. Our bodies are battered, emaciated husks, but our spirit remains strong as we relax after the final show of this leg of the tour at my parents’ house in Indianapolis. We have been well-fed and the Packers even beat the Redskins, which history assures us is proof that the incumbent Presidential candidate is on his way out.

But we will not dwell on superstition like that. Fuck the Packers. The Red Sox won the World Series a few short days ago and that is more noteworthy, but still no guarantee of a change in the country’s political fortunes. Osama bin-Laden resurfaced with a video tape in which he quotes David Cross and refers to Michael Moore’s film, but even that may make no difference. Pundits tripped over themselves on television, as I watched cable news this morning with my dad, to declare that bin-Laden’s sudden reappearance would all but ensure a victory for their chosen candidate but in the end it is no more significant than the Redskins’ failure or the triumph of Massachusetts’ other favorite sons. The political climate in America can be predicted by the fact that nowhere you go are you able to find people en masse who really want George Bush to be elected to President of the United States¹⁵.

It is like Venezuela. The wealthy and the frightened will cast their votes, and they will attempt to bully the right-thinking people who choose to march down to the polls in an attempt to actively reject Abu Ghriab and dead brown children and unfunded non-profit organizations that leave teenagers suddenly unable to find beds in the shelters they had come to rely upon, but it will all prove fruitless. There will be misguided anarchist kids who argue against the concept of voting entirely, apparently under a strange delusion that if no one voted then no one would be elected President of the United States, but they are irrelevant.

I have seen this country. The election will be interesting, and it may be close, but I have seen the streets of Little Rock and Lexington as they exist in 2004; I have been to Wisconsin and Minnesota, through Ohio and Colorado and New Mexico. I have seen the overwhelming kindness of the people in America in 2004 in all of the various forms it takes. This is not a country full of people who will choose to embrace the War on Some Sand Gooks. Regardless of Osama bin-Laden, the Redskins, or the Red Sox.

This is true, and it extends even to the Bloomington hipsters, way too cool for us Texas motherfuckers, who stared at me like I was made out of cancer during my set only to tell me afterward that they really enjoyed it. This is true in Little Rock, at the community space and infoshop run by the family of four who can cover the rent check for their downtown storefront almost every month by taking on extra jobs when things get tight. This is true in Jackson TN, the site of a terrible June show that led to a great October show where we played with Requiem and The Spectacle, staying up late into the night with seven Norwegians in a Tennessee record store, sleeping on the floor when it got too late for even the hardiest soul. This is true in Huntsville, where by all rights it should not be, but that night in Alabama we were cared for as though we were family to the very few people who came to our show, introduced to their friends and family afterward, fed and housed and they gave us gas money out of their own pockets. This is true in Lexington, despite the frustrated anarchists who revealed quietly that they secretly hope Bush loses, but not enough to vote, despite the harsh judgments they cast on people who did not share their beliefs, despite the fact that an eighteen year old girl in that town feels the need to keep her own personal convictions hidden lest her militant housemates turn on her, because they fight the battles that need to be fought on a separate front.

This is not about John Kerry, not really, and all of the activists who refuse to vote serve to fill the holes left by those who will vote for Kerry but who will lose interest in trying to actively create a finer world by November 3. We need all of them, and even the Zapatistas vote for the lesser of two evils but they wouldn’t win the electoral victories without the help of the moderates, and the moderates would not have much hope for real power without the struggle of the Zapatistas. The American struggle is not very much different. Not really.

And so tomorrow we begin the long drive back to Texas. There will be a day of riding in a car followed by four days of rest in Austin. I need it; I have never been this tired. There will be triumphant return shows in Fort Worth and Austin and then the future calls. There is so much to do — there is a commitment to honor to the people I have spoken in front of, spoken to, spoken with these past two and a half months. I have said that I have ideas that are worth listening to. I have said that I have recognized problems and learned things from all of this traveling. I have said these things and I have changed my message as I have seen more and the conclusion that I have come to, that if you are not living in the world you want to live in you must create it, requires that I back up that talk with actions. I will be back in Texas on election day. There is so much to do.

 

11 03 04. 12:38.

Austin TX.

 

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11 04 04. 11:28.

Austin TX.

 

The night before last I slept for three hours then woke up and staggered around Austin with my hands in my pockets at seven o’clock in the morning. A man came up to me and asked me if he was walking toward San Jacinto St.

no, it’s the other way.

ah! i’m always going the wrong way! he said.

you and everyone else in this country.

I walked around Austin for the first time in months and it was good to be back but I really hadn’t pictured it to look the way it did. I didn’t expect to be so angry. I really had more faith in people than that.

I ran some errands with a friend I hadn’t seen since before I left and got phone calls from five different people, all of them in various stages of grieving. Mostly depression and anger. No bargaining. Denial was done with by the time John Kerry gave his concession speech, struggling as he was to find nicer words to give a speech whose main thrust was fuck all ya’ll. And nobody’s quite ready for acceptance yet.

Around five o’clock I wrote a letter to a few of my friends, declaring through sleep deprivation that we had the power to rebuild a new political party that would replace the failed, finished Democrats in four years, a tongue-in-cheek rant whose ultimate points — that the way progressive politics have been done for the past thirty years have finally uttered their death rattle — still rings true. Something else will emerge.

And that may end up being good news, in some ways, because none of us loved John Kerry. I liked when he got to yell at George Bush on television. Something else will emerge, and I wrote a letter to some of my friends to discuss what that will be and how we can be active in it. I don’t have those answers yet.

This is a very strange country to wake up in right now. More than half the people in it are untrustworthy, insane, evil retards who want to be represented by one of their own. The problem is cultural. We are that country.

I’m rambling, but I’m well-rested. I slept for ten hours last night, crashing after a day of heartbreak and ten weeks of exhaustion. Things are different now and if that seems like more fear-mongering or exaggeration, realize that things have been getting more and more different for years, and that this was a tacit endorsement of all of that.

You are tired of hearing about the election. There is a lot of work to do — better terms on which to discuss these things must be found.

 

11 09 04. 20:30.

Austin TX.

 

The tour’s officially done. Has been since Sunday. After a few days off in Austin, full of sleeplessness and manic energy and the realization that something has changed but not yet the realization of what that means in simple terms for right now, we went up to Ft. Worth to do one more show at 1919 Hemphill before running down the demon in Austin.

Both shows were good; the hometown show was great. It was good to come back home with all of the experience of a ten-week tour under my belt and really let it all out in an environment full of people who already knew me. I think that is the most concrete benefit of this tour so far — next time, there will be many more cities where people already know me. Hemphill was rougher because most of the material was very new, talking about the election and things like that.

I’ve had PPD-related things to do every day this week. Whatever the next thing to do is, part of it is going to include getting some money very quickly. This tour cleaned me out financially. Need to buy a new computer too since mine landed on the pavement in Chicago a few weeks ago.

I’m cleaned out in good ways too. My head’s clearer than when I left. I’m not certain that I’m going to stay in Austin but the need to leave isn’t as pressing as it was a few months ago when I put the Alamo on my arm as a reminder. Things’re wide open.

Which can be a problem. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the next few months, maybe longer. Tony’s back on tour already, doing a few weeks with the people we played with in Ft. Worth and Austin this weekend. Part of me is jealous. Part of me isn’t. I don’t have time to be tired, but sometimes I don’t have the faintest idea what it is I want. All I’m trying to do right now is figure out a way to make myself useful till I come up with whatever answers I’m looking for.

But all of that can wait, at least for a little while. If things go well I’ll be in the nowhere-land of PPD in a few days, where options are limited and no one can blame you for wasting time because what else is there to do? That’s the key to the whole lab rat mentality, and right now I definitely understand the appeal.

New challenges. Whatever I decide to do next, I need to come up with a new set. Talking about Monroe, Louisiana and the Republican National Convention and “Love Poem For An Anorexic” are all past their sell-buy date. Time for something new. In a lot of areas.

1We didn’t, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying. We couldn’t get ahold of them to set up as we were both desperately trying to avoid arrest so we could do our scheduled shows in NYC during the convention.

2Among the ‘dead’ was Matt Fuller from Bellingham WA. Matt performs under the name 1985 and we played a show with him in Syracuse a few days after he was released. The song he wrote about the experience was called “Safe In The Backyard- Howling” from a line in a poem of mine called “Howling”. Six weeks later, in Bellingham, we did a radio interview on Matt’s show.

3The NYPD, during the entire RNC Convention, was in the midst of some serious contract negotiations with the city and on the verge of a strike. Sometimes this worked in our favor, as the cops weren’t really all that into the people signing their checks, and sometimes it worked against us, as they were also in a pretty shitty mood.

4About fifteen minutes from the CD ended up making it onto the Man of Action! record after all.

5No, we didn’t.

6In Falfurrias TX, halfway between McAllen and Corpus Christi, there is a checkpoint inspecting all vehicles for drugs and illegal immigrants.

7This was the first, but not the last time, I went on the record with an observation that turned out to be heartbreakingly incorrect.

8No, I didn’t.

9There are already two Buffalo Exchange stores in Portland, actually.

10I’m still not convinced that the answer to this question is as obvious as the electoral map makes it look – ‘The South’ and ‘The Midwest’ are not acceptable answers. At worst, my statement earlier that they were not in the majority was wrong, but it is never as simple as mere regional differences.

11I caught a lot of shit for this statement, but I stand by it. The cost/benefit analysis regarding voting leads to a very simple conclusion it takes no effort to cast a vote beyond going to the poll, and the benefit to even a handful of people, even just an old woman who would benefit from an improved prescription drug coverage plan, is enough change to make the cost worth it. Voting for a third-party Presidential candidate does not directly benefit anyone, so there’s no gain. Build a foundation before you put a fancy roof on that house.

12Read What’s the Matter With Kansas by Thomas Frank and get a rough idea of the answer to this question.

13He didn’t.

14To be fair, the owner of that Baja Fresh Mexican Grill preserved the Daniel Johnston mural on the side of his building when a group of concerned citizens pointed out that it was a landmark that meant something to the people of the community. It’s still there, on the side of the Baja Fresh on 21^st St. and Guadalupe, on the building that used to be the legendary record store Sound Exchange.

15Obviously not true. My brother suggested the fact that I thought this meant that I had been outside of Texas for too long. He may have been right.