12/12/04 - Air New Zealand

I am sitting on a plane, on the last leg of London to New Zealand. We've been flying for almost 24 hours straight.

My head is a right mess, and my body is exhausted. We've been touring almost non-stop since summer. I remember once reading studies about the effects of Rapid Eye Movement sleep interruption....when you deprive people of REM, they can't dream. When they can't dream, they can't subconsciously process their lives. Then they slowly go insane. I'm feeling something similar.

The endless travelling with no real time to stop and reflect (and more importantly, create) has stunted my mental state of being - which I only notice in flashes here or there, like an amnesiac confronted with a sentimental photo. I try not to be too hard on myself, but I get scared by the fact that I can barely concentrate on a mindless magazine lately. My brain is being reprogrammed to think in shallow, five-minute intervals.

Things have gotten even more complicated lately by the fact that Brian and I have such an intense relationship, and it's being put to the test on the road. We're often like an old married couple, bitching mercilessly one moment and then caringly wonderful the next, and the manic-depressive relationship cycle slowly but surely starts to wear me down to the point where I feel like shutting off completely just to avoid further conflict. We're possessive and jealous like lovers, without the obvious silver lining that carries most lovers through the night. This relationship is one for the fucking books, I tell you....it'll take them years to figure out what actually happened. We barely know ourselves.

We found out yesterday that “dimebag” daryl from pantera was shot, along with the others onstage in ohio, and we were just dumbstruck. Brian was hard hit, this was an old idol of his from high school. And we ask each other, as we always do: what the fuck? what is happening to people? But we know it's the same old question...it's been happening for years and we can only use it for what it's worth. We're here, this is it, and if we think we're heading to something bigger and better and brighter down the road, we're fools. Here we are, on stage, alive. End of story.

I hate plane food. I want vegetables.

We're barely able to believe what's going on in New Zealand and Australia....the album is blowing up and we're in heavy rotation on MTV and the national alternative radio station, triple j. Most of the shows are sold out. I'm not even sure what to expect. The last time I was in Austrlia it was 2000 and I was on my own, performing the Eight Foot Bride at the Adelaide fringe festival. I almost got arrested twice.

On a brighter note (I should tattoo “don't post under the influence of less than 5 hours sleep in a 48 hour period” to my left hand), I've developed a new art form that keeps me from feeling I am entirely creatively zombified on the road. Together with Manta, who came on the tour to do morning martial arts exercises (www.shintaido.org) in addition to being the offical tour videographer, we have been carving out the framwork of a revolution in bad taste and narcissistic media.

It is called Karaoke Verité.

It fuses the art of film with the kitsch of karoake and basically amounts to me making ridiculous lipsyched videos in my free time as a kind of emotional/physical travelogue. For the time being, I am using the music of other artists. You can take a stab. The first one will be posted by christmas, I hope. I hope she doesn't sue.