SNAFU
Dear Everybody,I am speaking specifically to the people who didn't get to see our shows in Amherst and Philadelphia in the last two days. Hi. Welcome to the world inside of me, the hello- and oh shit!- Khaela system. Basically, I got the scheduling wrong, and never righted it, so there we were in Philadelphia on Tuesday getting ready to play an in-store-- we had a lovely plan:play the early show, and then have a restful evening in Atlantic City. Stay in a motel? Double a few of our earnings? Just before playing I checked my email and saw one titled, "AMHERST: Show Tonight!" and I had to digest my shock, and then walk up to Katy and Jona with this terrible look on my face, and get them to get in the car with me and immediately drive 5 hours to Massachutes to play Amherst at 11pm. Oh god.So, the lovely crowd of people who had shown up in Philadelphia at Marvelous Records got to watch us leave after playing for 8 minutes. And all the people in Amherst/Northhampton who thought the Amherst show was on Wednesday the 17th, because that's what the website said, didn't find out about the switch and had to write me a sad collective email. Philadelphia, Massachutes, I am really sorry. Also dear Boston: we aren't gonna play another show there on the 22nd, since we're doing Philadelphia that night now.oy!It blows my mind that people come to shows, and care and write a sad email if they miss the show. And, friends, we can all see from this mix-up that somewhere along the line my mind already had gotten completely blown out somehow, because it clearly isn't working as well as it should.
So, my brain is partly broken, and at the same time, I am the only doctor who can really fix it. Yow. ORGANIZATION! Like, the doctor with the shaky hands is the only one who actually knows anything about shaky hands, and how to fix them. And in she enters with the sharply gleaming instruments. Do we trust her? Well, the more pressing question issue is, who else is there that could even do the job? And the answer is, nobody. There's nobody else. Only me.
When you guys were growing up, was one of the common themes/props among the neighborhood kids a "Sack of Shit"?I have asked people this before, and nobody seems to ever chime in on my memories of this, which is funny, because it seemed like such a big part of growing up to me. I remember this cute boy Peyton walking past the park with a plastic grocery store bag filled with poops, swinging it around and around and then flinging it into the air and letting it sail over our heads into the middle of the street. And it was just this thing that I recognized among the catalogue of kid-things: legos, skateboards, barbies, the popsicle truck, small sized sneakers, bags of poop. I never really thought until recently about where the poop came from. Was it dog poops? I kind of always imagined it as human poo, I kind of guess that I pictured Peyton or Mike Killion or one of the other fearsome cool boys taking a dump into the bag, and then playing with it. But really, nobody else ever had one of these flinging across the field? Was it just Queen Anne Hill, in Seattle?I remember one time, Sr. Judy, the principal of my catholic grade school, coming into our class and saying in this kind of whiny voice, "I want to know who smeared the feces all over the boys' bathroom." And we were all like, "feces??" Who pooped on the walls and spread it around?! The time is always ripe for talking about warm hearted poo stories, especially when you're on tour. Talking about your bowel movements just makes perfect sense when you're stuck with people in a car for weeks, and you're totally forfeitting all your personal space and privacy for the opportunity to play shows and be together. On tour you're just putting everything out there all the time, and letting the tour buddies in on the rhythms of your innards and their expulsion seems to somehow make perfect sense.Coming back from the rest-stop after being in the girls' room for a while:Tour buddy who was buying a coke: "Big Jobs?"Person who had been in bathroom, with a funny screwed up face: "mm hmm."Or you just proclaim it really boldly, "Guys I gotta rip a D. Let's pull over."From the inside to the outside. And the challenge to keep it all under control.Thanks to everybody who gave me awesome birthday specialness. Matt Patalano of the Specific Heats in Boston made me a cake in the shape of a "Man's Head", and that seriously kicked off the week in a good way. It actually almost made me cry. ( I guess it was a Harry Potter shape cake, but I liked the idea of it just being a man). And Rafael of Mudboy in Providence threw himself a birthday dance party in his living room, which I got to rage myself around inside of, and got to take for a ride as my own little birthday party, pure joy.
Thanks to everybody. I felt it.