Readers,
I want to thank you all for keeping up with this so far. I've reached the home stretch, the final tours and chapters, and after long consideration I've decided to finish the rest in solitude.
When I am done, I'll be releasing the whole thing in print form via my label Young Tobacco. Expect this to take until the end of the year and possibly beyond.
Meantime, I'll post updates on my progress periodically on this blog. Until then, keep checking back and I look forward to the day I can offer the entire thing to you in physical form.
Sincerely,
J
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Winter
We lost our practice space at the antique store, or rather, we left our practice space due to a disagreement with the owner over use of his PA. (He thought our $25 fee per practice didn't cover use of the new PA used to replace the one his son - our practice space point man - took with him when he skipped town.)
I called around trying to find a cheap or free place we could set up without having the cops called on us every time we turned our amps on. Even in this town, such a deal can be hard to find.
We eventually settled into my uncle Sonny's practice studio, which was a makeshift loft built on top of an old barn in his backyard in Selma, IN. It was a good thirty to forty minute drive for even us locals, so practices were infrequent but usually long with part of the time being spent getting one of our vehicles unstuck from his backyard.
Sonny was (and is) a sheet metal worker with a braided beard and pony tail that hung down to his ass who rode a loud-as-fuck chopper with ape hangers and drank like an alcoholic fish. His two bandmates were called Dink and Peanut and they'd all come over while we practiced to slurp beer and dig pickled sausages out of the jar with a set of dartboard darts.
This was a markedly different environment than our hipster basement beginnings, but somehow it felt more at home. We'd play through our set while my uncle and his chums drank in the corner, hooting between all the breaks, and then we'd set our instruments down and join in on the drinkfest ourselves, sometimes picking up the instruments again only this time with Sonny or Dink or Peanut at the helm of a bass or a six-string. We'd go through a Stevie Ray Vaughn-inspired blues jam with me or James on the drums until we decided we wanted another pickled sausage. Sometimes Eric and Sonny would trade off leads. I was proud. Family proud.
It was starkly cold outside those nights. The ground was covered in drifted snow. And we'd be up in this baseboard heated loft, carpeted in scraps in a no-name town in East Central Indiana with a population of 866, drinking and laughing like the cold world outside didn't exist. It made things seem fun again.
I started writing more non-music stuff. I was doing a regular blog for Purevolume, plus writing for the band Myspace blog. I also started writing Last.fm posts for our band account there. Gus from Chord Magazine gave me Dave Palaitis' (Lifetime) phone number so I called him for an interview. I went out and bought one of those suction cup things that stick to your phone receiver and record conversations like a private eye.
It was an interesting conversation. I found a lot of parallels in their story and ours. Not many people got what they were doing at the time they were around. They were too fast to be that melodic. Too melodic to be that fast. Caught in this weird limbo that constitutes a marketer's worst nightmare. Kind of like how we were too weird for the indie rock crowd, to square for the avant garde crowd. Apples to apples, in a way.
I still found myself nervous talking to other bands. I stuttered and stammered from time to time throughout the interview, knowing that Travis Barker had a title of their album tattooed across his chest.
And then I realized that was Dag Nasty, not Lifetime.
I called around trying to find a cheap or free place we could set up without having the cops called on us every time we turned our amps on. Even in this town, such a deal can be hard to find.
We eventually settled into my uncle Sonny's practice studio, which was a makeshift loft built on top of an old barn in his backyard in Selma, IN. It was a good thirty to forty minute drive for even us locals, so practices were infrequent but usually long with part of the time being spent getting one of our vehicles unstuck from his backyard.
Sonny was (and is) a sheet metal worker with a braided beard and pony tail that hung down to his ass who rode a loud-as-fuck chopper with ape hangers and drank like an alcoholic fish. His two bandmates were called Dink and Peanut and they'd all come over while we practiced to slurp beer and dig pickled sausages out of the jar with a set of dartboard darts.
This was a markedly different environment than our hipster basement beginnings, but somehow it felt more at home. We'd play through our set while my uncle and his chums drank in the corner, hooting between all the breaks, and then we'd set our instruments down and join in on the drinkfest ourselves, sometimes picking up the instruments again only this time with Sonny or Dink or Peanut at the helm of a bass or a six-string. We'd go through a Stevie Ray Vaughn-inspired blues jam with me or James on the drums until we decided we wanted another pickled sausage. Sometimes Eric and Sonny would trade off leads. I was proud. Family proud.
It was starkly cold outside those nights. The ground was covered in drifted snow. And we'd be up in this baseboard heated loft, carpeted in scraps in a no-name town in East Central Indiana with a population of 866, drinking and laughing like the cold world outside didn't exist. It made things seem fun again.
I started writing more non-music stuff. I was doing a regular blog for Purevolume, plus writing for the band Myspace blog. I also started writing Last.fm posts for our band account there. Gus from Chord Magazine gave me Dave Palaitis' (Lifetime) phone number so I called him for an interview. I went out and bought one of those suction cup things that stick to your phone receiver and record conversations like a private eye.
It was an interesting conversation. I found a lot of parallels in their story and ours. Not many people got what they were doing at the time they were around. They were too fast to be that melodic. Too melodic to be that fast. Caught in this weird limbo that constitutes a marketer's worst nightmare. Kind of like how we were too weird for the indie rock crowd, to square for the avant garde crowd. Apples to apples, in a way.
I still found myself nervous talking to other bands. I stuttered and stammered from time to time throughout the interview, knowing that Travis Barker had a title of their album tattooed across his chest.
And then I realized that was Dag Nasty, not Lifetime.
December 5, 2006 "Hand Jive"
12/05/2006 Pop's - Sauget, IL
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul
We had a final show scheduled two days or so after Pop's somewhere in Kansas or possibly Colorado, but we decided it would have raped our coffers financially, so we made the Sauget performance our last for the Smile Empty Soul radio X-fest Jagermeister tour.
We made some decent money, better than usual, but we spent a lot of it on hotel rooms and thus tempering our possible net gain. It was year 6 in Brazil's existence and the odd and almost pleading dynamic of sleeping on a stranger's floor had worn itself extremely thin. Privacy and the freedom to stink up a room for someone else to clean up was worth seventy or so dollars in this day and age.
Sauget during the warm months is desolate enough, but during in December it's nigh on apocalyptic. Most of it's real estate is owned by industry and that that isn't is typically a barren field of gravel or the parking lot of a rundown smoke shop.
(There are 250 full-time residents to accommodate the village's plethora of strip clubs and serve the incoming hoards of working drones populating its factories. It's Ayn Rand's dream monument to a pure free enterprise civilization catering to man's deepest desires to make money, eat meat and fuck.)
Scenic Sauget.
We made our last show count for something. I can't recall a more perfectly played show than what we did at Pop's that night. The crowd had never heard of us before, but by the end of our 35 minutes, they were eating out of my hand. Every swagger, every mic stand trick went off perfectly as if we and our gear were a single organism. Our charm bled into the headliner's set as we chanted them on, warming up the crowd.
It was cathartic and at the same time a relief, as my throat, mind and body were almost shot by this point. I had already called the metal shop where I worked part time to let them know I needed work when I got back home, and I knew I wasn't going to get much time to rest. Clock-in time was 6am.
We left that night to drive back home. I forgot to charge my phone and couldn't call Alison and when we finally arrived 4 hours later than when I estimated we would, she was a bundle of nerves in the quiet, angry way she could be a bundle of nerves.
I slept as much as I could. We got back on a Wednesday and I think I must have committed to working the following Thursday. We had nothing on the books. Nothing planned. For all I could tell, this could have been it for Philosophy touring.
A quick four-month eulogy to a great record unnoticed.
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul
We had a final show scheduled two days or so after Pop's somewhere in Kansas or possibly Colorado, but we decided it would have raped our coffers financially, so we made the Sauget performance our last for the Smile Empty Soul radio X-fest Jagermeister tour.
We made some decent money, better than usual, but we spent a lot of it on hotel rooms and thus tempering our possible net gain. It was year 6 in Brazil's existence and the odd and almost pleading dynamic of sleeping on a stranger's floor had worn itself extremely thin. Privacy and the freedom to stink up a room for someone else to clean up was worth seventy or so dollars in this day and age.
Sauget during the warm months is desolate enough, but during in December it's nigh on apocalyptic. Most of it's real estate is owned by industry and that that isn't is typically a barren field of gravel or the parking lot of a rundown smoke shop.
(There are 250 full-time residents to accommodate the village's plethora of strip clubs and serve the incoming hoards of working drones populating its factories. It's Ayn Rand's dream monument to a pure free enterprise civilization catering to man's deepest desires to make money, eat meat and fuck.)
Scenic Sauget.
We made our last show count for something. I can't recall a more perfectly played show than what we did at Pop's that night. The crowd had never heard of us before, but by the end of our 35 minutes, they were eating out of my hand. Every swagger, every mic stand trick went off perfectly as if we and our gear were a single organism. Our charm bled into the headliner's set as we chanted them on, warming up the crowd.
It was cathartic and at the same time a relief, as my throat, mind and body were almost shot by this point. I had already called the metal shop where I worked part time to let them know I needed work when I got back home, and I knew I wasn't going to get much time to rest. Clock-in time was 6am.
We left that night to drive back home. I forgot to charge my phone and couldn't call Alison and when we finally arrived 4 hours later than when I estimated we would, she was a bundle of nerves in the quiet, angry way she could be a bundle of nerves.
I slept as much as I could. We got back on a Wednesday and I think I must have committed to working the following Thursday. We had nothing on the books. Nothing planned. For all I could tell, this could have been it for Philosophy touring.
A quick four-month eulogy to a great record unnoticed.
December 3, 2006 "Shock Rock"
12/03/2006 The Rock - Maplewood, MN
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul
More of the same.
A dark bar with an unadventurous beer selection. Another meal of grease and processed meats. Only this time I had the entertainment of a fight between two semi-drunk women sitting across the horseshoe.
Their cacophony rose and fell in five to ten minute intervals, almost petering out entirely before another verbal jab was thrown and the volume rose once again. It was an eerie and lonely fight, played out in front of a laughing bartender, myself and a fat, silent ale-sucker at the far end. It was still early, not quite dark yet.
It never came to blows, which disappointed me. The myth of tour-as-neverending-vacation is easily disproved by that with which we inevitably use as stimuli. The crude and the bass. Misfortune and schadenfreude. If those girls started swinging and clawing, I would have kept eating my fries and steakburger and sipping my High Life like nothing happened. The numb blanket of boredom and world-weariness was thick.
Whatever advantage being flu-drunk was to my stage show was gone by the night of The Rock. The stage was narrow and wide, so I stayed in one place, hugging the mic stand and eating the SM57 that smelled like electronic components, rust and the gingivitis of a hundred other dirty singers before me.
The small crowd gave us all the interest of a mute street urchin with a concertina, tossing us a few token claps between songs like they were tuppence. It was mostly slightly overweight metal fans both male and female. Most of them sat at tables smoking and eating fried things.
I didn't really care. I had more important things to worry about, such as my 103-degree temperature. My performance was phoned in, each song a bullet point on an ordered checklist. My goal was to finish. It was fine.
No one's life was going to be changed tonight.
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul
More of the same.
A dark bar with an unadventurous beer selection. Another meal of grease and processed meats. Only this time I had the entertainment of a fight between two semi-drunk women sitting across the horseshoe.
Their cacophony rose and fell in five to ten minute intervals, almost petering out entirely before another verbal jab was thrown and the volume rose once again. It was an eerie and lonely fight, played out in front of a laughing bartender, myself and a fat, silent ale-sucker at the far end. It was still early, not quite dark yet.
It never came to blows, which disappointed me. The myth of tour-as-neverending-vacation is easily disproved by that with which we inevitably use as stimuli. The crude and the bass. Misfortune and schadenfreude. If those girls started swinging and clawing, I would have kept eating my fries and steakburger and sipping my High Life like nothing happened. The numb blanket of boredom and world-weariness was thick.
Whatever advantage being flu-drunk was to my stage show was gone by the night of The Rock. The stage was narrow and wide, so I stayed in one place, hugging the mic stand and eating the SM57 that smelled like electronic components, rust and the gingivitis of a hundred other dirty singers before me.
The small crowd gave us all the interest of a mute street urchin with a concertina, tossing us a few token claps between songs like they were tuppence. It was mostly slightly overweight metal fans both male and female. Most of them sat at tables smoking and eating fried things.
I didn't really care. I had more important things to worry about, such as my 103-degree temperature. My performance was phoned in, each song a bullet point on an ordered checklist. My goal was to finish. It was fine.
No one's life was going to be changed tonight.
December 2, 2006 "Shake Your Shit"
12/02/2006 3rd Street Live - Cedar Rapids, IA
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul
Sickness hit me like a burlap bag full of pickled ball peen hammers. I woke up in a light-headed fever swim that morning and by afternoon my head and body had exploded into a full-blown rage of aches and shivers that bore down into the very marrow of my bones.
Strangely, the effect on my stage show was positive, I think because it felt merely like another shade of drunk. I tried not to breathe on people, so as not to afflict them with this plague that had overcome me. It was brutal, and one of the worst times to get sick (as I've probably already written many times) is during the loneliness and ennui of a long tour.
Like a sick animal, I sought out the quietest, darkest place in the club I could find in the hopes of blanking out in a silent spell of primitive meditation, or perhaps even just passing away in my sleep. It was impossible. I was cold all the time. It was the middle of the beginning of a Midwestern winter. Pervasive cold that could slice through skin, fat and muscle.
I found a quiet place up in the balcony, but I knew there would be people milling around with domestic beerwater in hand within two hours. The last waning rays of daylight leaked through the windows facing the street and between the sickness, the onset of bleak winter and the neverending distance between my family and I, it was impossible but to hear the black dog scratching at the door.
After the set I told the rest of the band I was about ready to die and went out to the van to sleep while the headliner played. I turned the van on and let it idle, while I pulled three sleeping bags over my shivering body underneath the wooden cave deep in the bowels of the E350.
I laid there in a half-conscious dream, convulsing and moaning in a fetal position. My head was as hot as a flatiron and my lips were dry and felt like iguana skin when I licked them. I screwed my eyes shut tight and saw iridescent geometric shapes behind my eyelids, orbiting in no particular trajectory.
At some point I felt the van move, felt warm bodies in my presence. We stopped, got out at a nameless motel and I threw my sleeping bag onto the nearest bed and hoped that I didn't give anyone else whatever was coursing through my veins.
3rd Street during the Iowa floods of 2008.
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul
Sickness hit me like a burlap bag full of pickled ball peen hammers. I woke up in a light-headed fever swim that morning and by afternoon my head and body had exploded into a full-blown rage of aches and shivers that bore down into the very marrow of my bones.
Strangely, the effect on my stage show was positive, I think because it felt merely like another shade of drunk. I tried not to breathe on people, so as not to afflict them with this plague that had overcome me. It was brutal, and one of the worst times to get sick (as I've probably already written many times) is during the loneliness and ennui of a long tour.
Like a sick animal, I sought out the quietest, darkest place in the club I could find in the hopes of blanking out in a silent spell of primitive meditation, or perhaps even just passing away in my sleep. It was impossible. I was cold all the time. It was the middle of the beginning of a Midwestern winter. Pervasive cold that could slice through skin, fat and muscle.
I found a quiet place up in the balcony, but I knew there would be people milling around with domestic beerwater in hand within two hours. The last waning rays of daylight leaked through the windows facing the street and between the sickness, the onset of bleak winter and the neverending distance between my family and I, it was impossible but to hear the black dog scratching at the door.
After the set I told the rest of the band I was about ready to die and went out to the van to sleep while the headliner played. I turned the van on and let it idle, while I pulled three sleeping bags over my shivering body underneath the wooden cave deep in the bowels of the E350.
I laid there in a half-conscious dream, convulsing and moaning in a fetal position. My head was as hot as a flatiron and my lips were dry and felt like iguana skin when I licked them. I screwed my eyes shut tight and saw iridescent geometric shapes behind my eyelids, orbiting in no particular trajectory.
At some point I felt the van move, felt warm bodies in my presence. We stopped, got out at a nameless motel and I threw my sleeping bag onto the nearest bed and hoped that I didn't give anyone else whatever was coursing through my veins.
3rd Street during the Iowa floods of 2008.
December 1, 2006 "(You Don't Know) The First Thing About Blue
12/01/2006 Level 8 - Evansville, WI
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul
A freak snowstorm dumped almost two feet of snow on us overnight, stranding our van in a drift for five hours in a hotel parking lot. All we could do was drink gallons of free coffee from the lobby, and soon we were able to urinate our way out.
But we weren't the only ones with big problems en route. Smile's tour bus drove off into a snow-filled ditch and Eddie's already beet-red face was even beetier with rage at the driver for failing to properly navigate a turn that would have kept them out of such a predicament. They were safely at the club when we rolled up, but I assume they had to call one of those giant trucks with 50 wheels and a giant crane they use to pull other broken down giant things.
Level 8 was a roadhouse cut straight from the Patrick Swayze textbook. A wood-paneled grog cave nestled in some trees with a big VFW-style rec hall attached for concerts and pudding wrestling. Chord magazine called after load-in and talked to me about interviewing someone in the band Lifetime. They wanted to do an artist-on-artist series and liked my writing in other rags I'd appeared in.
The bar kitchen fed us more of the greasy pub food we were acclimating to, and that our bodies were frantically trying to detox through pores and orifices. There are only so many chicken tenders and steak fries one can enjoyably eat before feeling like a hundred years of sudden aging has suddenly befouled your skin and sense of well-being.
To make livers worse, we did shots in the back room with Smile Empty Soul and then drank some more before and during the set. A few hundred people showed and we performed another lung-puncturing set like we had trained ourselves to do.
Afterward we hung out on the bus, drinking more, and I remember talking about Incubus but calling them "Inkabus" in my near drunken stupor. I really had never indulged in the "bus party" culture and I don't really know why now, here in Evansville, WI, was the time I chose to dive in. Some girls from the show got on and one, swept up in the MTV moment, flashed her breasts to everyone, but then later nearly collapsed in a heap of shame.
All the bands migrated back to the bar, which had now ushered in karaoke night and was filled with ruddy-faced locals. After some peer prodding, I took the mic for first and last time I'd ever take a karaoke mic and chose Queen's We Will Rock You. Like anytime we ever did a cover, I bumbled through the lyrics Mrs. Stanley Drink My Wine-style, and Eric would later tell me I looked like I snapped right back into my stage skin. A tight horseshoe of band members and drunk barflys wrapped around me and sung along.
Then like all good films with a bar scene, the music slowed down and I slow danced with an old bar hag. She grabbed my ass and I tried to not sway my pelvis too close to hers. Nic had a hag of his own hanging on him, and we danced with our ladies of tanning bed skin and Virginia Slim lips.
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul
A freak snowstorm dumped almost two feet of snow on us overnight, stranding our van in a drift for five hours in a hotel parking lot. All we could do was drink gallons of free coffee from the lobby, and soon we were able to urinate our way out.
But we weren't the only ones with big problems en route. Smile's tour bus drove off into a snow-filled ditch and Eddie's already beet-red face was even beetier with rage at the driver for failing to properly navigate a turn that would have kept them out of such a predicament. They were safely at the club when we rolled up, but I assume they had to call one of those giant trucks with 50 wheels and a giant crane they use to pull other broken down giant things.
Level 8 was a roadhouse cut straight from the Patrick Swayze textbook. A wood-paneled grog cave nestled in some trees with a big VFW-style rec hall attached for concerts and pudding wrestling. Chord magazine called after load-in and talked to me about interviewing someone in the band Lifetime. They wanted to do an artist-on-artist series and liked my writing in other rags I'd appeared in.
The bar kitchen fed us more of the greasy pub food we were acclimating to, and that our bodies were frantically trying to detox through pores and orifices. There are only so many chicken tenders and steak fries one can enjoyably eat before feeling like a hundred years of sudden aging has suddenly befouled your skin and sense of well-being.
To make livers worse, we did shots in the back room with Smile Empty Soul and then drank some more before and during the set. A few hundred people showed and we performed another lung-puncturing set like we had trained ourselves to do.
Afterward we hung out on the bus, drinking more, and I remember talking about Incubus but calling them "Inkabus" in my near drunken stupor. I really had never indulged in the "bus party" culture and I don't really know why now, here in Evansville, WI, was the time I chose to dive in. Some girls from the show got on and one, swept up in the MTV moment, flashed her breasts to everyone, but then later nearly collapsed in a heap of shame.
All the bands migrated back to the bar, which had now ushered in karaoke night and was filled with ruddy-faced locals. After some peer prodding, I took the mic for first and last time I'd ever take a karaoke mic and chose Queen's We Will Rock You. Like anytime we ever did a cover, I bumbled through the lyrics Mrs. Stanley Drink My Wine-style, and Eric would later tell me I looked like I snapped right back into my stage skin. A tight horseshoe of band members and drunk barflys wrapped around me and sung along.
Then like all good films with a bar scene, the music slowed down and I slow danced with an old bar hag. She grabbed my ass and I tried to not sway my pelvis too close to hers. Nic had a hag of his own hanging on him, and we danced with our ladies of tanning bed skin and Virginia Slim lips.
November 30, 2006 "The Ballad of TV Violence"
11/30/2006 Elixur Night Club - Rockford, IL
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul
The brutal cold came in so we stopped at a Goodwill somewhere off the main drag in Rockford to buy some more layers of warmth. They had brand new knockoff socks and gloves there so I bought a pair of each of those, too. (Used socks and gloves are something I do not do.)
Then I walked across the parking lot and bought a bigger battery for my Motorola Q, the first non-flip smartphone I'd ever bought, thanks to Songs Publishing. I had joined the thumb army.
The club was partially hidden behind an eroding strip mall development, recognizable only by a hardly legible sign of pink glowing letters. It and its surrounding real estate were on the end of the retail spectrum that just precedes bankruptcy and vacancy. The retail age of Chinese buffets and places that buy gold.
Inside, it was a carnival of carnal decorum. Curtains and musty plush furniture spotted the floor and side walls. Backstage was crammed with broken chairs, tables and what I could only think were stage props for some kind of theater production.
The stage had dancing cages on either side. The lighting design was steeped in decadent reds and depressed blues and I had my doubts that the restrooms hadn't seen various forms of sex used as currency for controlled substances at least a few times.
We played to another inattentive crowd, but this time with a few drunk whoopers up front, doing the drunk dance, fingers pointing like rap stars, drinks held sloppily in the other hand. Still mostly an X-station crowd but I ran in to some girls who had a bit of scene flair. It was getting harder to delineate the tribes sometimes.
I kept by the merch mostly, after we played. There was a short-haired blond girl who spent a lot of time talking to us, telling us about her time as a diesel mechanic in the Army. She was Amazonian, toned and all. And there was something sexual in her energy. She didn't look like a stripper, but more like Tank Girl but without the bald patches in her hair.
We talked and I flirted, and despite the undertones she kept herself almost forcibly aloof. It goes without saying, long days on long tours filled with countless female-less hours takes its toll on even the most pious of males. A side of my brain wanted to see how far I could go with just words while the other side held fast and breathed quiet relief when she walked away and out the door.
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul
The brutal cold came in so we stopped at a Goodwill somewhere off the main drag in Rockford to buy some more layers of warmth. They had brand new knockoff socks and gloves there so I bought a pair of each of those, too. (Used socks and gloves are something I do not do.)
Then I walked across the parking lot and bought a bigger battery for my Motorola Q, the first non-flip smartphone I'd ever bought, thanks to Songs Publishing. I had joined the thumb army.
The club was partially hidden behind an eroding strip mall development, recognizable only by a hardly legible sign of pink glowing letters. It and its surrounding real estate were on the end of the retail spectrum that just precedes bankruptcy and vacancy. The retail age of Chinese buffets and places that buy gold.
Inside, it was a carnival of carnal decorum. Curtains and musty plush furniture spotted the floor and side walls. Backstage was crammed with broken chairs, tables and what I could only think were stage props for some kind of theater production.
The stage had dancing cages on either side. The lighting design was steeped in decadent reds and depressed blues and I had my doubts that the restrooms hadn't seen various forms of sex used as currency for controlled substances at least a few times.
We played to another inattentive crowd, but this time with a few drunk whoopers up front, doing the drunk dance, fingers pointing like rap stars, drinks held sloppily in the other hand. Still mostly an X-station crowd but I ran in to some girls who had a bit of scene flair. It was getting harder to delineate the tribes sometimes.
I kept by the merch mostly, after we played. There was a short-haired blond girl who spent a lot of time talking to us, telling us about her time as a diesel mechanic in the Army. She was Amazonian, toned and all. And there was something sexual in her energy. She didn't look like a stripper, but more like Tank Girl but without the bald patches in her hair.
We talked and I flirted, and despite the undertones she kept herself almost forcibly aloof. It goes without saying, long days on long tours filled with countless female-less hours takes its toll on even the most pious of males. A side of my brain wanted to see how far I could go with just words while the other side held fast and breathed quiet relief when she walked away and out the door.
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