We’re headed north. And not a moment too soon. The lowland countries that we’ve been occupying for the past week or so are supposed to be receiving rains, rains and more rains. As we sip coffee and wait our turn at red lights in northern Charleston, SC we’re increasingly aware of the dark band of storm clouds on the horizon and an even grey hanging over the rest of the sky. The weather is a palpable threat even as the winds stir and breathe Life into what’s been a hot, pressing, claustrophobic atmosphere and it’ll be something of a relief to climb another 400’ above sea level today, knowing that we’ll be a little further out of the reach of Atlantic. Getting inland won’t hurt either.
Maybe flooding’s on my mind because of all the Holy Holy Holy swirling around the radio dial. Powerful voices extolling the virtue of virtue and the wages of sin peek between Taylor Swift songs and Aerosmith, and they’re just not winning any arguments with me. For as good as the trip has been, and last night’s show was a LOT of fun, being in the south just feels like there’s a low, grinding hum of hostility in the form of angry bumper stickers and t-shirts and billboards and proud Christian straight white gu owners who really, really, really want you to just TRY something.
Sorry. Didn’t mean to go down that rabbit hole again. Passing yet another neon-lit mega-church it’s hard to see anything Godly in something so crass, especially when we’ve gotten the chance to visit some truly beautiful cathedrals in the past few weeks – constructs that truly seem to glorify something greater, not simple strip mall warehouses of faith.
Maybe hostility’s on my mind because the fading shreds of last night’s dreams are still with me. Trapped underground, something dead clutching at me, reaching. As I scrabble backwards in claustrophobic spaces, crawling on my belly and kicking backward with my feet, pieces of the things reaching for me are ground off against the rock, snapped off against my shoes, pinched off by my struggling legs – but still the jellied mass of stinking flesh came creeping towards me. The rock that I was squeezing through was soon littered with still twitching pieces of fingers and limbs.
I woke up in need of yet ANOTHER shower. Yesterday I’d gotten up at our friends’ house and taken a shower there. We grabbed breakfast and morning internets and then made our way through the soup of South Carolina’s last gasp of summer to our hotel room for the night, where I figured I’d take a pre-show shower… then we played at The Mill (the least millish of all the Mills we’ve ever played) which, though a LOT of fun and great environment, its atmosphere was that of a dark smoky bar… so I came home and took ANOTHER shower – and this morning I’d clearly been burrowing under blankets and pillows in a zombie-escaping panic and sweated my way through the terror of it all… shower four in under 24 hours? I’m probably actually TOO clean.
The angry voices on the radio dial, of course, would disagree.
