so far this whole tour has consisted of almost exclusively driving, which doesn't make for much of a tour blog. it does, however, lend itself to a lot of inside-joking and delirious free association. And, a lot of funny made-up names like E.J. Turnbuckle, Chuck E. Jesus, and Dick Nail.
here is some stuff, though...mostly lies
Weird Owl Yankovic
what's there to say about this picture? brook has had this mustache in his bag since we left bloomington, and it was only when we were halfway across vermont in the rain that he decided to unveil it. at first, i did think he was nate, though.
nothing new here. moving right along...
here's tim sweet talking the border patrol. it was a VERY close call, but thanks to tim's unmatched charm and way with words we got trough the border with all of ty's k2 spice and bath salts in tact.
welcome to canada. have a seat.
after the show in montreal, a few of the guys in our crew kept insisting that you could get the best bagel in the world right around the corner from the venue. the next time someone says that to you, especially if you're very tired, just toss a baseball mitt in the microwave and chow down. it's virtually the same experience.
as is usual on any husband&wife tour, someone sat in gum...this time it was bryant.
Believe it or not, coming down off the high of an alternate, parallel dimension is not exactly a walk in the park. Not a single one of us has any recollection of what happened after the show in Boston, but when we woke up the next morning, this is what we found...
Ty and Burke woke up next to each other, neither knowing what unspeakable events had transpired in the night, but sharing an overwhelming sense of shame and crushing guilt.
Fortunately, Burke found a quiet place to reflect and try to make heads or tails of his foggy memories. He seemed better in the end, but for the duration of this quiet time I could hear him repeatedly muttering, "horror of horrors...".
When I came to, I found that my consciousness was being occupied by this cat. I don't know how he found his way into the annals of my mind, but for the truths he revealed to me, I will be forever grateful. Many of them were so vast and incomprehensable that I could never begin to explain them. However, one of the easy ones was that wet catfood looks just as gross to cats as it does to humans. Who knew!?
When we finally found Nate, he was in the sorriest state I've ever seen a man. He was stumbling around, wobbling back and forth almost growling, "horror of horrors...". We threw some water in his face, got out the smelling salts, and screamed at him, "WHAT IS THE HORROR OF HORRORS!". He began, hesitantly, to explain it to us. He was talking so fast that it was hard to catch it all, but there was something about a teenage barn party, skinny dipping, and an ocean full of dead, decaying bodies. Freaky stuff.
Thanks, in no small part, to our gracious host and friend Chris and his family we were all quickly snapped back into reality. We knew it was true because when we looked back on this photo, the food was real, and normal colors. No more of that psychedelic hook food crap.
we knew that getting to New York wasn't going to be easy. after all, bryant had no head. the first thing we tried was nate's idea of building a portal to an alternate dimension using only the stuff at the merch table. it didn't get us to new york any faster, but we did see some weird stuff...
...including this giant that dan asked for directions.
as it turns out, the quickest way back into our own physical reality was by taking the train. kinda boring after such a sweet entrance into another universe, but it was safe and it was practical.
while we were on the train we met the two most beautiful people in the world. here they are being nice to us in spite of our deficiencies.
they decided to take us under their wing on the remainder of our journey back to the one true reality. here we are eating food with them. you can't see it in the picture, but that's because the food in the alternate universe was exactly like the food the lost boys eat in "hook". for that reason, you can't tell right now, but tim's got a face full of blue mashed potatoes in his beard.
once our beautiful tour guides left us, we bumped into our animal spirit guide, Airbud. from here, he showed us the way. his first order of business was to concentrate on our auras and gather the proper psychic info he needed in order for us to find our way to the show. it was hard to gather what he was seeing, but he just kept muttering under his breath, "horror of horrors..." so i don't think it was good.
however, i think captain beefox was probably just thinking of some totally weird stuff on purpose in order to throw our spiritual guide of the trail and punk'd him. he's mischievous that way. oh, also, in the alternate universe, he had his head back.
eventually, we made it back to the show in our normal boring universe where we discovered that no fun was allowed, whatsoever.
by the way, Boston ruled last night. the middle east was super sweet to us, and all the other bands were out of sight. mondo thanks to ben hoffman, pretty and nice, and night fruit for hosting us!
Let me start off by telling you just how sincerely sorry i am that this blog entry has been so long coming. The first few days of this tour have been full of action, and LOTS of driving. Driving, which not only impedes our ability to to update the blog, but also makes for some boring reporting from the road. we'll try to get into the swing and have the updates be as regular as possible, as soon as possible. we know how much you love them.
less go...
our newest besties State Park came down to bloomington for the tour kickoff show. they were real good, the real deal. you can probably already tell though, by the excitement on Tulo's face. If you don't know Tulo, he's the guy in the photo doing nothing.
packing th van on the first day of a tour is always a real challenge and always takes longer than you think its going to. so, this time we planned for it. it still took longer than we had planned, but not by much.
before we headed for cleveland to play at Happy Dog, a gourmet hot dog restaurant/bar, Ty convinced us all to walk across the street and grab some food at Naughty Dog, a bloomington based gourmet hotdog restaurant. So, we headed over there to meet up with our friends Fabio and Popeye the Sailor Man and grab a dog before we drove 7 hours and ate another dog.
bryant ate so many hotdogs at our first stop that this head fell off. here it is just lying in the back of the van on top of some gear. we figured we'd try to reattach it at the show. it was kind of rolling around a lot and making a bunch of racket, so eventually we just jammed it under the seat for the remainder of the van ride.
however, his headless body did keep walking around and bumping into (and breaking) stuff everytime we had to stop, so we bought this indian head to screw on in the meantime. it worked pretty well, but it definitely didn't speak the same language as us, which posed a problem.
the happy dog, while its perfectly delicious, does not make your life easy. here are tim and burke agonizing over the myriad choices they have for hotdog toppings. if you know these two guys at all, then it will not surprise you that this decision took them well over 4 1/2 hours.
...and THIS is what they ended up with. i promise you there is a hotdog under all of that mess.
Metavari at the Happy Dog, Cleveland, OH.
Soporus at Kung Fu Necktie, Philadelphia, PA. Soporus were great, and also very nice fellows. it was fun hanging in Philly, and meeting some friends and strangers we hadn't met before.
we started rehearsing today, and it went really well. here's the proof:
tim and bryant discussing guitar amp sounds...bryant's all like "i need more BASS!", to which tim replies "there's already too much bass as it is, i'm not going to turn it up just for the HALIBUT!" to which bryant replied "oh, i can't hear it. my hearing used to be pretty good. i must've LOBSTER and never FLOUNDER" to which tim replied "huh?".
and here's burke. staring off into space without a thought in his pea brain.
we're really excited about these shows. so, if you know anyone in or near those towns we're approaching, tell them to come on out. we're intentionally planning to have fun at each and every show on this whole tour.
i'm a little behind....sorry about that. it's been a whirlwind couple of days with lots of traveling. not much internet time.
enough excuses.
after the show and gourmet hotdogs in cleveland, it was time for one of our favorite old haunts, columbus, oh. we hadn't gotten enough skin-tubes of oozing parts-is-parts "pork" and "beef" at the happy dog, so our first stop was a much anticipated visit to the schmidthaus. it's a german buffet in germantown. tim stayed home to recuperate flu-wise while the rest of us chowed down.
we were all feeling pretty ripe after all that sour kraut and knockwurst, so we went for a long-distance hike through the columbian wilderness to work it off. here's lewis and dave guiding us on our spiritual quest.
i'm getting sleepy....
the show was in a short basement.
sleeping bag in action.
after columbus was luna music in indianapolis. give them your business. here's what that show looked like during the sleeping boys set where lewis dogged us, thinking we were not in the room. we were in the room, and lewis is a chowder head.
on with the show...
after the show, we played taboo. here are two of my oldest friends. well, not that they're old, they're their normal age, we've just been friends for a long time is what i mean.
andy really wanted to make the tour blog, but unfortunately his photo came out blurry...andy, if you're out there, send me your senior pic or something and we'll treat you right. sorry for the poor photo quality.
this is emily, and the reason her hand came out blurry is because she just got done smacking tim. that's why tim looks so scared. she also went to space camp.
tim was really upset about getting smacked, so he went off and pouted with lennon sitting in his lap. lennon's the dog.
lennon likes to smooch.
you may remember ryan from our austin blog entry. here he is, making another appearance. so....that's what that is.
see you tomorrowzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
so we threw him in the van with no a/c and drove to Cleveland for a hot dog. the show was great, and we had some old friends out. we're also on tour at the moment with Sleeping Bag, who are a very good band. If you don't want to take my word for it, just ask Dave Segedy. He'll tell you.
David Woodruff saw what we were doing to Tim, what with the fever and the no a/c, and he DID NOT go for it. So, he jumped in his time machine, flew back to the 1800's real quick and grabbed this bike. Then he pedaled all the way Cleveland, OH. Here's the proof...
I'm still waiting for Zac to text me the picture we got of Aaron sleeping (he's bryant's replacement for the summer), but his verizon connection is no good here. can you hear me NOW?
here's sleeping bag:
EDIT i finally got that photo of Aaron...welcome to the club, buddy
