March 29th, 2007.

Wednesday found us racing from Los Angeles to the San Francisco bay area trying to get on the list for an apparently very well-attended open mic in Santa Clara.

The postcard perfect picture of mountains and mountain lake, somewhere betwixt Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA. Below – as we entered the area south of San Jose we were passing through wild rolling hills that looked like they had all sorts of farming going on – not sure what, though at one point the drive was fragrant with smell of spring onions, it sort of made me think of what I wanted the Shire to smell like, minus the smell of Hobbits. Which was fine.

The Saturn in Santa Clara, California – dirty as she’s every been. Most of her filth was actually acquired during a rain storm in Los Angeles and has proven to be articularly recalcitrant.

There we were meeting up with Frank Rusch, our old bass player from the Myxomatosis albums. I’d met Frank a couple of years ago while hunting through AOL profiles looking for bass players back when I Lived in College Park. I remember I mostly ran across bass fishers during my hunt, and that that lead to a lot of really frustrating email conversations.

The bathroom at Barefoot Roasters Coffee in Santa Clara, CA was absolutely beautiful.

The Barefoot Roasters open mic turned out to be pretty cool, reminescent of a lot of my college days – but not really the crossroads of San Francisco scene that I was hoping for. We met some pretty cool artists and made some booking connections, and more importantly, showed off for Frank – but I’m not entirely sure if it wouldn’t have been better to just continue into San Francisco proper and start plugging away at our rice-a-roni city network.

Frank has always been very quiet, so staying with him for a couple of days sort of felt like an exploration into the unknown, and sort of felt like an invasion by the crude and slouching two-headed beast that is ilyAIMY. We made friends with his pet bunny, Winston, and ate a LOT of peanuts.