Weird dreams last night. Hell, I’ve been having weird dreams for the whole trip… but last night I dreamt that Heather and I were going back to school. Rather – SHE was going and I figured eh, what the Hell. We ended up going up to some New England college with a campus off in the woods, sort of a little commune unto itself. It was absolutely beautiful, springtime, slow snow melt slowly melting. Somehow we were being allowed to move in before making final decisions and I’d brought all my stuff (the same stuff we’re touring with, incidentally) to my dorm room and plunked it down.
I followed up with exploring the bathroom, of course – and was surprised to find that one of my dormitory mates had brought her pet lobsters! The big aquarium was sort of balanced over the toilet tank so while I was sitting on the toilet I just heard a lot of bubbling and scuffling right behind me. It was kind of unnerving – and even though the lobster was a clawless lobster of some sort, it didn’t help. It just liked to watch me a little too intently.
Plus, knowing that we had a lobster in the bathroom, lots of OTHER people were constantly trying to barge in because they wanted to see the beast. My friend Amelia was particularly guilty of this, she’d barge in and tell me to just go about my business and then stand over me watching the lobster making notes in a little spiral-bound notebook.
Despite the presence of Heather and (apparently) Amelia, I wandered the campus swiftly realizing that this just wasn’t the place for me. I peeked in on classrooms and at racks of dusty equipment. Their AV classrooms were museum-like, making a big point of carrying every model of television from their early tiny black and white screens to modern LCDs in huge walls of glossy eyes, and I tried to convince myself that I wanted to go to school and get a sound engineering degree or something with video but slowly was overwhelmed with sadness over abandoning my friends back home, including my girlfriend, and the band and everything… there was nothing for me there.
But I did sort of like the lobster.
Today we’re slow-moving. Columbus, OH waits for us outside the door, and I’m eager to sniff it, wander it, poke it and eat some of it – but I must admit I’m looking forward to going home. Tonight we’re playing in Pittsburgh and it looks like we’ll see a lot of familiar faces. Don’t get me wrong – I’m really excited to play tonight, but there are weights on me about the gig: first off I’m simply tired of being in the car – and it’s 3.5 hours there and 4.5 hours home… second Kristen’s sore throat is lingering and that’s got me worried, and certainly effects her enthusiasm… also the jack on her cello’s been playing up and we’re sort of struggling to keep it from having further issues so we can just get home where we trust the electricians! This may or may not be the root of the trouble I thought we were having with our DIs – it’d be kind of nice to know that I didn’t have two Rapco DIs and three Planet Waves cables fail on this trip, that it was just the input jack all along… it’s felt like we’ve been dogged by tech issues, but if it’s just that jack that might make me feel a little bit better.
Fuck you intermittent electrical failures!
Last night saw our return to World of Beer – and true to the booker’s prediction, Mondays are slooooow. We played to the 20 sum people in the bar, a quarter of which were there to see us (including singer/songwriter Eric Nassau) but we were having tech issues there too, and the audience was patchily responsive. I really DO have to learn a Metallica song for us to perform. How to ilyAIMYize something fast and hard? I might just look into slowing and softening something… hrm.
Brainmeats churning.
