burns shaped like stoves

Sometimes I realize that touring life is real, but mostly it feels like an accident happening and I keep thinking real life will resume. And then there are the moments where I am able to stop and say “I am truly happy right now.” It's happening right now, sitting in the back of a stranger's car watching the sunlit pensylvania countryside rushing by, feeling my sore neck and my lost voice, listening to classic girl by jane's addiction on the speakers. It happened two nights ago, backstage at the hammerstein in NYC, sitting alone in the dressing room twenty minutes before our set, when my bloody valentine came over the house speakers and I could only half-hear it, but that was perfect. The music I love ties me to reality.

Things that should make me happy (from the outside) often don't. This or that thing related to the band, this or that achievment, how many records and tikkets sold...it all tends to blur together in one place in my brain. There's a lot of space left in there.

The diary checklist in my head of musical/rockstar accomplishments stays constant. I might has well just list them this time around, instead of trying to pepper them into the prose of the past two weeks, here goes

1. Met David Bowie backstage. He likes the band and complimented the record, which he said he got ages ago. Bowie is plugged in. Does it matter? Met David Bowie and feel complete/ok with dying.

2. Brian Bell, the guitarist from weezer, found us backstage. He likes the band too.

3. Jerome (the very wonderful drummer from NIN) suggested sitting in with us, so we've been playing “karma police” by radiohead in the set (I wanted to play an avril song, but jerome heavily vetoed)

4. Tom Hamilton, the bass player from Aerosmith, came and found us after the boston show. Boston Rock Powah. He likes the band too.

5. We've been invited to play the Royal Albert Hall in london as part of the patti smith-curated meltdown festival, we'll be playing songs by Brecht, as it is a Brecht tribute night, with the likes of Ms. smith, wonderful Antony (with or without the Johnsens I'm not sure), Sparks, Martha Wainwright and others.....

6. Margaret Cho gave us a shout-out at her show at the Orpheum in boston. I sort of want to run away to a desert island with her.


I'm not sure where this accomplishment goes in the box of life, but we made trent reznor a creative birthday surprise involving a living statue in a beautiful green dress, a dark and dank boiler room in therpheum basement, a fruit tart with candles and a neutral milk hotel cd (he'd never heard of it). He smiled.

Mid-tour malaise has set in and the throat-porcupines have returned to set up camp. This was not at all aided by the party we threw in boston, where I deemed it a reasonable idea to stay up til sunrise. I was actually saved by further debotchery that night by a freak accident at the party which found me and the NIN guitar tech driving the NIN PA tech to the emergency room in ye olde volvo. We had lit a fire in the old woodstove of the cloud club and the PA tech, a very sweet guy from france named Florent, stepped right through the floor plexiglass in front of it and fell through. Luckily he didn't fall into Lee's apartment, but he did break the fall by putting his forearm on the stove, which is from the 19th century, and so his burn is very beautiful and covered with tasteful lines and arabesque little curly-q's.