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.