October 24, 2006 "Snappy Kakkie"

10/24/2006 Numbers - Houston, TX
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald

I shot a kid in the face with a confetti cannon at close range.

It was an accident, but I wasn’t sorry. Nic suggested I aim higher next time. I laugh now, because I saw his hair blown back by the force and that’s the only thing I remember. I had about eighteen of the twenty cannons left from our ill-fated release show several days before, and I figured I might as well continue to end our sets with a CO2 bang as long as I could.

Aaron Weiss was eating out of a dumpster when we arrived. He was dirty, unkempt and stank. It was just how he wanted to be. He was a far cry from the mop top indie kid I knew from 1999, and the dapper Edwardian catechumen he became in 2002. I fault no one for evolving.

Our entourage was now three buses. Two of them were powered by restaurant grease. We were, again, the small man out. Still putting 87 octane through our injectors like petroleum dependent chumps. I’m half-joking. For as expensive as gas was at the time, the “free” alternative seemed to have a lot of time-consuming strings that eroded its overall net gain.

It stopped seeming an any way interesting, odd or exciting that our work week would begin with an eighteen hour drive south. Our main battles were to stave off boredom, stave off whatever it was that pissed us off about each other, and stave off our odds that increasingly favored a highway-related death.

Wiseguys in airports always like to quote the statistic that you're a million times more likely to die in a car wreck than you are a plane crash, but I always seemed to feel safe behind the wheel of our Super Duty. It sat high and it didn't take very long to get where you could feel like the trailer was extension of ourselves.

I was slowly becoming obsessed with death and with the macabre humor of the absurdity of life that had become a relentless joke upon every tenet of gospel that I had been hardwired to cognize: that if you would work hard, you would find your Alabama leprechaun.

If this were a David Fincher film, this is the sequence where you’d be directed, as a viewer, from my mind’s eye to the real-time scene in which I sat in the dank Numbers dressing room, surrounded by the debris of seven appetites to a nauseating wide shot of me screaming at the top of my lungs.

I don’t know when I started screaming. Nor breaking the bottles. I more or less came to, sometime after our set and found myself throwing half-full bottles of beer at the cinder block walls. I must have smashed two cases. The floor was covered in malt-smelling glass. And I screamed.

I did not know what I was screaming about at the time. There was still too much disconnect between me, myself, and I but the barbaric yalping was something to the effect of an emotional high colonic.

I was screaming because I was lost and had no money. I was screaming because I was a nerve ending, gradually exposed and scraped clean over the course of half a decade. I was screaming because the thought of humping another 120-foot aluminum extrusion from a semi at minimum wage was making me question the worth my existence and render morbid calculations in my head on the value of my current life insurance policy against the debts I held the family under. I was screaming because Max Bemis was considered the crazy one and I wasn’t. But fuck if I felt like it.

The universe was unjust.

The universe was unjust.

I did my best. Social justice is never served in the marketplace.

We were, however, served a warning by the TM in charge.