why does slam poetry always fucking suck? its like hardcore if there was only a lead singer and no band. what a terrible idea. i’ll spare you my initial rant i wrote about how mean are trained to feel ugly and stupid and are encouraged to be ugly and stupid, and the difficulty associated with that. i’ll spare you because i read some shit on that site, Jezebel.com and now im self conscious about ever complaining about being a white male. rightfully so but c’mon, don’t deny me the ability to whine.
lemme tell you, motherfucker – we’re all aware of this beauty shit. when i was 8, i had eczema/psoriasis/ringworm/something. i was embarrassed so i tried cutting the sores off with a razor blade. i recalled this only recently when something similar looking appeared on my left shoulder – so maybe keep your distance at shows for a while if you didn’t before.
n e wayz. this Yadokai is kicking my ass. slept on ’em, but i’m on it now – don’t worry.
we woke up in Portland, OR, and left early. the picture to the left accurately sums up Portland – someone just leaves their bike in their yard and no one steals it.
we argued along the way driving out because Joel was pacing around on the phone and i’m pretty sure we bought some water and bullshit at a Circle K to pass the long drive to Arcata, CA. nothing too exciting. there was also a place i saw called The Boom Boom Room, which i first heard of from watching Al Bundy on Married with Children.
so this is another one of those driving days where i have too many pictures of land formations taken from a tinted van window. sorry, no fighting hobos or smashing bottles on our heads. just more gas stations and stupid jokes from dan with the occasional one-horse town. we stopped at one and i bought coffee from a young lady with dyed hair who im certain was extremely happy to see ugly dudes in black t-shirts. i also went inside of this old timey malt shop where people were oddly friendly and not suspicious of ugly dudes in black t-shirts.
we went down highway 5 for a long time, making jokes about all the hitchhikers along the way. serious assholes walking in the middle of nowhere. this is also about where we saw some long distance bikers which we theorized were probably on thousand mile treks. everyone knows one of those guys – someone who biked across the country and makes us all feel like a bunch of fat, lazy, weeping cowards.
we stopped in Crescent City so Pat could see the Pacific Ocean. Pat had never been out that way. maybe he had never seen the Ocean, either. i don’t think the experience of standing around in an old crabbing town had the same effect on him as the ocean has on me (i become overwhelmed and want to weep like a fat, lazy, coward) but it had to suffice. Max went to a taco bell, maybe others went to a taco bell. i went to a natural foods store to find some “Throat Coat” and found some chubby dude with a ponytail explaining the therapeutic values of turmeric and ear candles to a confused older dork. they had an unreasonable amount of eyedrops, even for a town where there is one headshop to every five people
while in the Taco Bell, Max overheard two dudes at a table, one interviewing the other for a job. one of the questions asked was,
“do you know the difference between fast and slow?”
California is a magical place.
sorry. these pictures are probably only interesting to people who live in places like Minnesota and Nebraska.
the rest of my notes say, “looked at crazy bullshit, arrived in Arcata.” so I guess that wraps that up. it also says, “shit rules” but there are more notes after that.
and shit did rule, thanks to the fuckers in Komatose, who i think are finally recording a demo.
we got to The Big Tree and instantly realized we were going to have a good show. the place is fucking wallpapered with fliers for awesome shows that came there as there’s nowhere else to fucking go between San Francisco and Portland, basically. i’m sure a lot of bands still skip Arcata but god damn it, they shouldn’t, even though they kicked out all the Chinese people in 1886.
we hung out in the backyard with a cat. i took a fucking art school picture of a flower with a tiny frog sitting on it. there was a port-a-john in the backyard so dipshits didn’t wander through the house and the show was in a soundproofed garage. Nick made us all vegan spaghetti.
i bought tequila to help me slim down and to help ruin everyone’s lives. everyone who paid to get into the show had one of their fingernails painted, which i thought was some pretty creative shit.
Oodles of Heroin were great although i had been drinking by then so i cant remember. Aleister Christ were a bunch of young kids playing shit that sounded like Black Flag and Bad Brains. Komatose were fast, noisy, and tight. it was the first show where we got to play with a few bands of what we would call “kids”, which i personally love to watch. it’s a holy experience in a way that i can’t really describe. the singer was shirtless and nuts.
we played. everyone had fun. nice young and diverse crowd. i threw up in a corner of the backyard later and passed out on the floor, having an intense dream about pat crashing the van into a mall. while i slept, joel put rice and a cigarette in my ear.
i woke up the next day and we drove into town in search of food. i went to some crepe place called Renata’s, because i am a bastard. i met up with joel and pat at some hippie shitty coffeeshop. we picked up literature in how to get our masters degrees in alchemy or spellcasting, or Dumpstaphunk or Burning Man. it sucked.walking around, i realized everyone in Arcata was high.
we went back to The Big Tree and watched a dog chase an RC car while a family watched, a wife blasting Pink Floyd out of her truck. then Dire Straits, who fucking suck. fuck Mark Knopfler and his dumb name. sounds like the name of a fucking rabbit.
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