October 25, 2006 "Piney Woods Money Mama"

10/25/2006 The Door - Dallas, TX
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald

One thing I can say about the screaming high colonic is that rather than signifying a mental implosion, it initiated the final breaking off of a thirty-year ice floe. Or put another way, an accelerator was mashed to the floor of my brain and my injectors were knocking off stone-cold black deposits of old-think like a stock car on Carb Day.

I was transfigured again.

The day started with sleep paralysis. We rolled into town well before dawn to stay with some Texas friends, a group of girls with crushes on all of us. I was in the passenger seat, vaguely aware that we were stopping in a parking lot. When the engine went off, I realized I couldn't open my eyes. Couldn't move my hands. Could barely breathe.

I felt like I was drowning. I could say, for dramatic effect, it was because of my fragile state of mind that I was trapped in my corpse-like body. But to be truthful, sleep paralysis happens a lot when you sleep sitting up. And I had been, for the past few drives. It was scary as hell, and I was kind of afraid to go back to sleep thereafter.

The Door filled up with another gaggle of the girl-jeans-for-Christ crowd. In these Bible Belt shows, the direct support act was getting more love than the headliner. I wondered what Aaron did with his money, because it seemed like he wore the same clothes and ate tossed food. Story was, he gave it away. Which must have been a lot, because I have good reason to assume their nightly guarantees were more than we were making per week, not to mention long lines at the merch table.

The merch table. Our merch table.

Our lonely merch table.

Kids still weren't biting in droves. Five to ten shirts a night was still the average, and on a tour like this I was usually too embarrassed to provide our management or label with accurate sales figures, and instead chose to say something vaguely positive like "we sold more than last night!" On rare occasion, I inflated the numbers. Lots of bands did that, even when it was numerically impossible for them to have done so.

$1500 worth of merch sold to a crowd of thirty, you say?

It used to bother me. But now I didn't care. Not about anything. The sole purpose of my existence out here was as a conductor of energy. In a manner of speaking, I was killing my self.

And it felt good.

The rest of the year and beyond saw the finest shows we had ever played.