November 27, 2006 "I Wasted a Nickel"

11/27/2006 Monkey Bar - Huntington, WV
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul

There was a homeless person crouched next to the dumpster in the back alley of the Monkey Bar. He or perhaps she sat cross-legged, talking to himself, drunk and incoherent and for a split second I saw him as an embodiment of future me, an Vader-Skywalker-esque superimposition, a harbinger of what lay at the end of this dark road. I drowned away the image with my Bose Noise-Canceling headphones.


This is good for taking you somewhere.

Drives weren't long on this tour, which was almost enough to make up for the stonefaced crowds and skeevy club scene. Some shows were within three hours of each other which meant less money on gas and more time to be outside of the van and away from the nerve cloud. It was an orange afternoon when we loaded up the ramp and commandeered a dark unused upper room to make our speakeasy. We filled it with cigar smoke and yeasty burps of High Life. We made an altar out of lighting and parts of furniture we found, and we made a helmet for Nic.


Nic w/ helmet.

We sat smoking thinking drinking in the dark. Faces lit with the pale purple of the light ropes and the low rumble of a soundcheck somewhere far off in the distance, several walls away. The Monkey Bar was an old cavernous building. Probably a grocery store or a department store from back when men parted their hair in the middle and wore Hitler mustaches like it was no big deal.

I smoked cigars onstage with my hat drooped down into my eyes, hair mangled and matte, where I could fully hide in plain view, nipping on the flask, stinging my throat into an eventual dull ache that gave my singing voice the cancerous edge I thought it needed.

At home, I was three breads into my bread book. My latest loaf was the 'poppyseed bloomer,' which was in the British breads section and was notable for its long rising time. In total, it took about ten hours - an initial 8-hour rise, then a punch down, then another 2 hours.

If you haven't baked your own bread, it's hard to describe the primordial satisfaction of eating a steaming warm chunk with honey or butter, having put in the time and fistpower to bring it into being. It's like linking yourself to your peasant ancestors, or at least John Lennon.