the condition of the bride

sleepless, mindless, on a plane from manchester to munich after three nights off in leeds.

disrupting the pattern of touring is heartbreaking, Real Life shoves itself in my face like a battering ram, and everything real looks so unreal, so untouchable, every common, mundane object takes on some sort of sacred quality.
i suppose disrupting the pattern of life is heartbreaking for anyone. maybe enlightening, always bizarre. there it is, everything you've gotten used to in stark relief to something else. look! you're tired! look! you're homesick! ha! thought you'd gotten used to that, no? look! you haven't been falling in love very much. i'm not homesick. it could be anybody's home...anywhere but here. right?

right. it's most fulfilling when i'm off on my own, the crew and the touring machine a distant nightmare, some life i try to forget i have. there are no airports, there is no soundcheck. i have no voice to lose, nobody to be. i think i'm permanently motion sick. going at a pace too fast for any amanda human. i know i sound like a broken record. i know. i know. i know. i know.

we finished the reading festival and the rest of the crew pushed on to munich via london for the time off. i got in a car that took me to a train that took me to a station in leeds, where ricky picked me up. i spent most of the next 24 hours in bed. new sheets. new house. new bed. he just moved in. it's beautiful. the house is on a quiet cobbled lane and the first morning i floated myself down to the cafe. everything was made of stone, dark, wet brick walls lined every street, covered in thick vines that caught the light. walked down the sidewalks with my eyes half closed. i'm in england...remind yourself, i'm in england and i'm freeeeee. i ran my hand against the walls and tried to walk without looking, dragging the roughness under my fingers, trying to pretend that i had recently had a near-death experience. i tried to imagine what it would be like to just be laying there, under the wheels of that drunken car. or in that bloody hospital bed with the beeep beeep beeeeeep getting more frightening. and thinking: oh what i wouldn't give for morning. roughness. walking. eyes closed. brick wall. fingers. now.....look you're alive.

in leeds, it rains for a few minutes and then it's blazing sunshine. then it pours again. people seem to be used to this. it's like boston weather on permanent times six fast-forward. the rain puddles and reflects the light and everything is always shining. i went outside yesterday to see what the weather was like and lay down in the grass where the shade from a big wall of trees met the sun. i decided to stay there. the dirt and the cut grass smelled wonderful and i was reminded that i never touch the ground anymore, barely ever see it. much less smell it. there's always something paved in the way. i used to grow out of the sidewalk.

the weekend before we left for tour, i went to harvard square and did the bride. it feels odd needing to explain what that means. everybody who knows me knows. for five or six years, before the band broke and we went off on endless touring, this was how i made most of my money. for a good part of the year i would work up to 4 or 5 days a week, doing 3 or 4 performances a day for an hour and a half each, totally exhausting myself. i always wanted to write a book about it. there's a booksworth in it. i was a living statue, a street performer, standing on a hidden pedestal wearing a wedding gown with my face painted white and every other inch of my skin covered with gloves and tulle. i would stand there, completely motionless and holding a bouquet of white daisy poms, until some passerby dropped money into a box at my feet. then i would come to life and share a short moment with the person who had set me free. i would give them a flower, sometimes a kiss to go along with it. i made, on average, forty dollars an hour. sometimes much more. sometimes much less. some people tossed in pennies. some people tossed in twenties. i was an art stripper. it was the most extraordinary job. i loved it with everything i had. i hated it sometimes. i dealt with the most obnoxious street scum assholes berating me (get a fucking job you whore) and encountered the most profound artists and poets (you have changed my life today), who would sometimes sit for hours and sketch, write poems about the bride and the crowd, young romantic boys and girls who would stop and stay, let themsleves fall in love with a stranger. i often fell in love back. then they'd leave.

a few blocks along the wall, then in the cafe, i sat down for a green tea and took out my journal. oh a little piece of paradise. one thing i love so much about england is the standard quality of music, everywhere. people sing on the train (probably because people also drink on the train), typically trashy bars play incredible songs. the leeds shopping mall was blasting radiohead. the cafe was playing the white stripes. the owner came over and sat down next to me. i ordered eggs. sat and wrote and waited and soaked it up like a sponge. i live for these moments that cost me nothing. for just a few cents a day - the cost of a cup of coffee - you can save a starving rock star. won't you please consider donating? by now i'm in hamburg, sitting at another one. the music here is terrible. there's soccer fever in the air. there's loud americans at the next table. no ground left to see, back in the grind but there's such a bright light at the end of the tunnel. i forget what it's like to like people sometimes.

children would be terrified or enraptured. countless marriage proposals. lots of tears. lots of screams of o-my-god-it's-real-you-scared-the-shit-out-of-me. i was free to fixate my gaze on anybody or anything i wanted, and it was perfectly acceptable. nobody looked away. they would stare right back. i would play games like this with people for stretches of up to five minutes. daring people. people would tease me, taunt me, poke me, try to make me laugh. tell me to get a fucking job. i earn more than you, fucker, i would always want to say to the meatheads who yelled that at me. and i'm doing more. when was the last time you made somebody fucking happy, you fucking twit?? who'd have guessed that under my mona lisa smile and longing eyes was a complete bitch. some days. not all days. not most days. most days i would just let it all slide off, let my heart surge with love when the harvard professors would stop and stare, and stay. sometimes i would put poems down at my feet. shakespeare. keats. most people didn't read it. but the ones who did...they did.

i've decided that what i like most in life isn't as obvious as singing or performing or writing. i think i've come to realize that my true passion is for surprising people. that's it. that's all. really. truly. one person, thousands of people. kin dof doesn't matter. the bride was very handy for this.

i traveled with her sometimes, packed up my box with wheels and did the bride in florida, LA, vegas, germany, australia. it was surprising how similar groups of people are all over the world. the same patterns. the same types. the stories and pieces of paper i collected could fill a two volume novel/scrapbook. everythings piled in a drawer at home. it wasn't until we really started touring, on stage, under lights, every night, that i realized how painfully perfect she was. a white knife that cut straight to the heart of all of this, so little in the way.

he took me to the hills outside leeds, to a rock formation called the cow and calf - guess which one is the small one. there was graffiti up there from the 1800s, when people really took the time to do it right. all etched out in olde englishe font, so much care put into every line and corner of each letter. it looked like the scottish highlands up there, all rocky and barren with the wind whipping something fierce, pale flowers and weeds clinging to the rocks for dear life. sheep tottering around aimlessly. it was a bank holiday and so families were doing what he said the english call "rambling". i can ramble. i can rumble. watch me. we went to a stand and ordered popsicles and for some reason i could not get over the hysterical sound of a grown man ordering a "lemon lolly and raspberry lolly". he told me to stop making fun of him. we sat and ate our lollies, wondering why we stupid enough to be eating anything frozen when it was freezing outside. he showed me the spot from which he painted a landscape when he was sixteen. later i saw a photograph of the painting. it was beautiful. he used to paint. now he doesn't. la la la la la....oh, manchester, so much to answer for....there is a light and it never goes out. etc. we used to do all these things. and now we get up in front of crowds of people and thrash around. we agreed it's ridiculous.

some famous german, nietzsche i think, said "all art aspires to the condition of music". i think all performance aspires to the condition of the bride. fifty or fifty thousand screaming fans couldn't touch the feeling of looking into one unsuspecting person's eyes for a few moments. they hadn't been expecting me. i hadn't been expecting them. we just found each other for a second and the world stops, something vital happens.

we find each other like this sometimes, this is what it's like. trying to prolong a moment like that almost never works.

while i was back in boston on the last break, i ventured out to the cambridge arts council and bought my $40 street performing permit for 2007. i left it tacked to my door. we left on some tour or another. ah yes, the panic tour. thank fucking god that's over. right. and came back. on friday night i crawled under my loft-bed and dragged out the box. the smell alone when i opened it up brought me right back, a totally unique combination of stale make-up and sour sweat and wig spray and powder. it's never changed at all. i dusted everything off and fell right back into 1999. the air outside starting to turn into fall, the airplanes making that sound that i swear is totally unique to chilly late summer mornings. it must have to do with the air pressure outside, but there's this SOUND they make, only when it's bright out, and morning, a piercing sound that sounds like cosmic paper ripping apart.

in germany, a week before, i watched the torrents of rain come down on the crowd while they played their set. not just any rain, it was biblical, sheets of rain and freezing. but the crowd, they all stayed and danced. they clappped, they lost their minds. the band knew how to take care of them. it's a different fucking world, it's a different set of expectations.

one evening was spent making up dirty limericks. he was much better at it than i was. i want our fans to dance, i said. he said, it's all nonsense. i said, the hit single will be called "you make them dance, i'll make them cry". i woke up in the morning with a limerick in my head. it wasn't funny, and it was too depressing to start the day off that way. i let him sleep, rolled off the bed and onto the floor, scratched it on a piece of cardboard that was lying there.

the basement of toscanini's smelled the same, the ice-cream cups all piled in the same place next to the freezer, the pipes all hanging janglely, and the little bathroom where i used to get dressed was still out of soap. i put on the dress, caked my face, donned the wig, pulled on my gloves, cut up the flowers with the scissors from upstairs. i felt like i was moving through a drawing of myself. my motor memory was right there, no time had passed. that walk from toscanini's to the spot across from au bon pain is always the most interesting, and totally different from the walk back when i'm finished. i am a grown woman, walking two city blocks and waiting at stoplights, wearing full bridal gear with veil and my face painted. it always gets some strange looks. i always felt this mixture of pride and embarrassment. nothing to see, nothing to see, please go about your business. then up to the pedestal, climb on top, fix my eyes on one spot and wait. i wondered if any dresden dolls fans would wander by and know it was me. the sun was in my eyes and i had to squint.

returning to the tour in germany i looked at my life like an outsider. the stultifying superficiality of the road and the care we all must take with each other, because every nerve seems to be a frayed one after four days on the road. the lack of privacy which has become de rigeur, shut shut shut shut shut your mind off, turn your body and your voice on, become somebody you were and remind yourslef that you'll sort it all out later. soon enough.

i find myself wanting less and less. and less and less and less and less and less. i know. i feel like i'm somehow disappointing everyone around me by not caring about certain things i used to care about. i think about january coming, with time to myself, time to learn how to play the piano, time to write new songs, time to become myself and everything else just pales. records not selling? that's fine. label is dropping us? wouldn't mind. world is ending? about time.
it all feels like a very irrelevant game compared to washing some dishes, running my hand against the wall, smelling the ground, feeling somebody's arms reach for me even if it's only for a second.

typical tourist influx, the passersby of harvard square on a random summer saturday, the harvard students and the average people. my wondering: there was one boy with a cure t-shirt who gave me a i-know-who-you-are smile. it was very sweet. but mostly it was glorious to stand there unknown and ignored or loved for standing on a street corner in a dress painted white. i can love everybody here so safely. everyone can love me but nobody can touch me. why did i ever think this was perfect. of course i know. it is perfect. i stood there for two hours in heaven. an old man in a tweed jacket with glasses came and stayed for a half an hour. he came back up for a final flower and we looked at each other for a long time. he knew. that was enough for me. that made my year worthwhile. we must be really close to the football stadium. i hear giant cheers. everyone at the bar was wearing a st. pauli shirt. it must be hunting season.

back in the bus, i try to care about our sets, throw myself into the music for two hours with everything i have and scratch off days on the calendar. all or nothing, all of this. sometime i look at brian and don't even recognize him. the unrecognizable has become common, i get it, i get it. i tried out a brand new song in bochum last night...i wrote it a few months ago. the long way out. it ties all of this together. it's the long way out. past the bar, and past the awning. past the yawning crowd. back into the end of harmony. back into the grind. back into the non-music land of music.

i dragged my box home, up the stairs to the apartment, and felt like i had given myself a profound pinch. i left it there, not unpacking the box or even counting the money i had made for several days. i almost wanted to just give it away. i used to think it was so absurd, to get paid for doing something that i probably would just do anyway. maybe that's why it's still so impossible for me to come to terms with the fact that i have a job. fucking ridiculous. it is. it's not. i don't expect anything. i expect everything. it's two o'clock, time for press.


an odd couple lay under the covers
who could never attach to their lovers
as she packed up to leave
he just smiled and agreed
"tis a joy reserved solely for others".

o fuck my mouth has fallen into the john

i'd been slowly and carefully composing a new diary entry in my head, which involved long-winded and clever meditations on the nature of art and street performance and blah blah blah (don't worry i'm sure i'll still wank it all over you once i get this out of my system) when my plans were laid to waste. the last 48 hours happened and it was all too good to skip.

we were home for about a week, and we've been back out on this european tour for about a week. it's an odd one, we have no bus. we're a crew of just 4, brian and me and emily and our wonderful sound-man psycho-dave, hopping from european city to european festival in planes and trains and automobiles and it's incredibly uncomfortable and disorienting. there is not only no home routine, there is no road routine, there is just chaos every day. my inner rainman is really bitching. one day in germany, next day in belgium, then next day england, next in germany, next in england. i've stopped noticing.

anyway.
i used to be REALLY bad about losing and breaking shit. beyond. i couldn't keep a set of keys or a wallet for more than a year and every item of clothing, body part, family heirloom and any other possibly portable-outside-of-my-home (and even indoors, things weren't necessarily safe) was invariably broken, lost, sprained, stained or otherwise mangled in my careless, billion-mile-an-hour clutches. at a certain point i realized that instead of adjusting my habits, which seemed impossible, i would simply adjust my sensitive attitude towards myself and my belongings and realize that they were simply fleeting, earthbased baubles, meant to be broken and lost ANYWAY in the great churning of cosmos movement (ohh and maybe i was just some cosmic helper, not only part of the universal puzzle but there to speed up the process of things!....oh!! special! special!! charming!) and fuck it let it break and let it get lost. i dun carrrre.

this may have started to be a decent solution for own collection of earthly goods and mortal coil, but it didn't make me many intimate friends as i was likely to break them. there was a time when i was about 22 when i remember absolutely Freaking Out. i had been living in my little harvard square sublet, street performing and working at toscanini's (the awesome ice cream & coffee shop) and basically living bohemian paradise before moving back to germany on my fully accidental graduate student scholarship. it was the day that i lost my wallet, my keys AND left the water running over a crate of strawberries in the kitchen sink for a full few hours until it hit me (one mile away) that things were getting out of control. i wondered if there was some kind of medication you could take for flakiness. i could go on and on about how i've left my wallet in my refridgerator, slept through my finals, accidentally brushed my teeth with shampoo, fallen over a 12-foot balcony, gone to the emergency room for drop-kicking a cactus which permeated my thick german army boots giving me possible tetanus, drank myself into a blackout in belgium and woken up naked and penniless in a strange....i'll stop there. you name it, if it was stupid, i've done it. i need to spare my mother the details. hi mom. i know you're reading this.

it wasn't too long after that i discovered sitting zen and started slowing my shit the fuck down, even a little bit, and i think i've made progress. i even fold my clothes out of the laundry (once or twice a year) and have started folding my clothes when i pack for tour (they do not stay that way after first unpacking). i try to make lists. i try to take deep breaths. i try to clean as i go. it is not at all natural. but it does feel amazing when it happens. i started wondering what it was that made this way, unlike some Other People that i knew who were clean, organized, dependable and otherwise upstanding compared to my overwhelming (but charming!) haphazardness.

i developed the theory a few years ago that i had, at one point in my warped life, decided that cleanliness and dependability were the polar opposite of freedom and independence and must therefor be avoided at all costs. this is, obviously, complete bullshit. the total freedom to make a complete fucking mess of my apartment as i write, compose, sort, correspond, paste and create is one of the things i hold dear. but it took me years to realize that i could create much more effectively with a clean space. the problem NOW is that it seems i reallly have to choose between one and the other. my space is never dirty so much as it is cluttered; lists and piles and unpacked packages and clothes tower in my room from the dawn til dusk and i usually start any given day with the cheerful optimism that i can spend the afternoon attacking the piles and then retire into an evening of artmaking. but i can't make art if the piles are there. so i work on the piles until 3 in the morning, fall into bed exhausted but feeling rather satisfied that, because i've made so much progress, tomorrow will be different. it's never true. i wake up to 74 emails, a load of complicated problems, more CDs from tour that i uncover, there's always something. i am unable to clear my mind. it stays perpetually cluttered. i think this is one of the essential keys to unlocking the mystery of Why I Cannot Write On The Road. things at home are hard enough, and when i start traveling my brain can barely keep up with the amount of daily to-do shit and stimulus that any creative output starts to seem like a distant dream. things come in, but don't come together. things come together when the table is clear, when i feel like my brain doesn't have mundane things to do. i've gotten to the point in my life where i feel like an "adult" because i am taking care of my "responsibilities" and the cost seems to have been the part of me that is an artist. self-fulfilling prophecy? probably. i thought that getting a team of managers would solve this problem but instead, because of the amount of shit involved with running a band, i spend more time keeping track of what people have and haven't actually taken care of. shit, i digressed.

-

it's 24 hours later but i must finish story......so. we came back on tour, played a few festival shows, and went to edinburgh for a few days off. i wanted to be at the fringe festival. i had wanted to be there for an entire month, but three days, with a show in the middle, was all i got. it was better than nothing, i fell into the fringe like a fucking junkie diving headfirst into a hefty-sized bag of dope...just walking down the street during the fringe is like paradise to me....theater everywhere, street performers everywhere, music everywhere. home. paradise. i found reggie watts, an amazing hip-hop/spoken word artist/singer/comedian and we spent the majority of the fringe hanging out and going to shows and generally making each other laugh. i took regina and her right-on russian mom over to his show (after hers, which was brilliant as always) and she loved him. everything felt good. even though i'd pulled my fucking neck out and spent every morning at the chiropractor. i turned my computer off and at this moment have an automatic message answering that i have vacated the planet and have over 450 mails to answer, post-spam. i don't care.

the second night, i was kicking it at the spiegel garden outside the fabulous famous spiegeltent, a portable wood-and-glass circus venue i've been in love with since i first laid eyes on it back in melbourne a few years ago, and a general meeting spot for actors and fringe folks til late late at night. i was moving too fast, trying to meet up with one person and another, and rushed off to use the bathroom (they have these trailer port-a-bathrooms off stationed there all month) and there was a line of five or six women waiting for the female toilet (as they call it in britain). there was nobody in the line for the men's. i went for the men's, out of habit. years of travel have made me impervious to such distinctions, but i do still take pains to look as gay boy as possible when walking into a men's room. i was wearing a freakish outfit (and i was at the fringe, for god's sake, where everybody's a fucking actor in a post-modern performance art piece anyway) so i figured i was fine. i got a few raised eyebrows from my friends at the urinals. warning: the following scene is about to become uncomfortably graphic. so i went into a stall, shuffling and huffing and covered with backpack and fanny pack (don't say that in the UK, they laugh their heads off at you because it translates to "vagina pack") and drink in hand and realized that i had to change my tampon. i usually use the sponge, but i was out of sponges, and i usually use applicator-less tampons, but i had left those at home in a packing snafu and so i was left with the box of super-absorbant tampax that i bought that day at the convenient store. i grabbed the box out of my backpack and ripped one open, whereupon it promptly fell on the floor of the stall and rolled neatly under the divider and into the well-polished shoe of a man at the urinal directly to my left. i made an attempt at retrieval while trying to utter a "he he why isn't this just delightfully funny" little chortle but my grabbing hands pushed mr. tampon further out of sight and at that moment i was distracted by my ringing phone (my blackberry, to be precise, or crackberry (as they call it in new york, or blackmailer, as they call it over here). my ringing phone was Fabian from future cinema, i was supposed to have a business meeting with him and we'd arranged he would call me when he got to the area. it felt urgent. we'd been trying to meet all day and night, and i didn't want to think i was blowing him off. i suppose i could have patiently ignored the call (ass on toilet seat, tampon-debacle in full swing) and waited for a calmer time, but noooo, i answered it. however, as i went to answer it i also realized that my Somewhat Feminine voice would give away my stall ruse, so i answered with a deep " Hullo" that was, uh, the best impresison of a man i could muster at the moment. only about two sentences were exchanged while i tried to gather my self, my wits and my tampax and as i rose from the throne, mid-conversation, my phone slipped out from between my ear and my neck. it was one of those beautifully cinematic slow-motion movements where my face contorts into a silent "NNNNNNOOoooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" as i spin, looking toilet-ward, in just enough time to see it splash all swan-lake- like into the murky blue pond of port-a-john. this was a flushable port-a-john, so there was nobody else's piss to contend with but my own, and my hand instinctively shot into the murk to try to slavage my two-hundred dollar device (and, if possible, my business meeting). no suck fucking luck, it was frantically vibrating with a blank screen and i heard that electronic death toll ring.

the rest of the night was a wash (no pun intended) and i went home to email fabian that, though it sounded like the lamest excuse in the world, i had indeed dropped my toilet in the phone during our conversation and could we possibly re-schedule our appointment for tomorrow evening? i thought i heard you taking a piss, he said. my god, is it always that obvious? i do it all the time, does that mean EVERYBODY knows? at least i know now. i glumly attempted to remove all moving phone parts and covers and batteries and sim cards, letting them air out in the clear scottish breeze, but to no avail. the phone stayed dead and i found myself giving myself that familiar old lashing. stupid stupid girl!!! what are you thinking, using mens bathrooms and changing your tampax and disguising your voice for important business meetings all at the same time. BAD!!! grow up.

as my friend asked when i told his this story: ah, pretty telling. are you TRYING to flush your life away? this was food for thought.
perhaps. yeah. maybe. so??

things went from bad to worse the next night, when i decided that playing a THIRD show, after our spiegeltent show (relatively awesome) and future cinema event (also awesome - these people created a MAGIC fucking space in a building based on the original nosferatu...). brian went back to our communally rented apartment to hit the sack and i met up with reggie watts at the bongo club for the after-after party. we didn't have any songs planned, but we';d been beat-boxing on the street the day before and it sounded pretty good (well, HE sounded pretty good, he's reggie watts....i sounded like a white girl punk cabaret singer with a torn-up voice trying to beat-box...but, you know, charming!!!) so we grabbed two mics and mikelangelo, an amazing mulit-instrumentalist who had MC'd our show (and fronts an amazing band, i'l give you the link below), took to the drums. we just free-formed and got totally into it, jumping around on stage and acting like complete clowns until i knocked my front left tooth out with my microphone in a moment of over-enthusiastic mouth-drums. it (well, a piece of it) landed on my tongue and while reggie kept the bass going (and mikaelangelo didn't miss a beat) i explained my situation to the crowd, handed my tooth to larisa, the gorgeous promoter in the front row (asking her to pleeeease keep it in this glass of water...cos....i might need it) and kept on singing. i'm not sure if it was the impact of the microphone itself that did it, i've certainly been whacking my teeth against the damn mic for years now, maybe it was just fractured....ready to go and wanted to wait for the right show. not to mention i use my teeth to open everything from beers and bottled water to bags of crisps (uk) and fedex packages and basically anything else that my impatient little mits can't tear open in under 2.5 seconds. i may never know. but the tooth wasn't even fully real to begin with. in true amanda fashion, i've knocked it out 5 times now starting with:

1 - age 7, ran down fiske elemantry schjool hallway in wet snowboots, slipped and face-planted. this was the original break
2 - age 10, was chewing feverishly on a tunafish sandwich when it gave way again. not so dramatic
3 - age 12, hit it on the pool-bottom while doing a backflip underwater in the lexington recreation center. i was probably showing off
4 - age 19, lost it in a clearly humilating make-out session with mike ouyang, with whom i was drunkenly snogging on an armchair at a college house party. he was rather taken aback and (perhaps wisely) we never made it to second base
5 - age 30 - beatboxing with reggie watts, hit with beta 58 microphone

if i view this as a kind of an ongoing life/status chart, i think i'm doing fine, making progress.

back to the night, i ignored the jagged gaping tooth-hole and we followed the beatbox numebr with reggie's magic "what about blow jobs?" song - a heart-wrenching 80's ballad in c minor ("What about blow jobs?/In the middle of a dark and stormy night?"), me on piano and impromptu back-ups and mikelangelo still doing drums. it was an epic rendition. i fell off stage, and started blearily wondering how i was going to fix my tooth, when larisa announced that she had found a dentist in the audience. what? there were only 60 people in the whole dark noisy club. she grabbed him. enter chris cunningham, the senior community dentist at Lothian Primary Care NHS Trust, had come along with his son sam, a 19-year old scottish lad. they were both fans. i love our fucking band. i love our band so much. they had seen the spiegeltent show and wandered over to the after-party to see what was happening. chris had the next day free, and he offered to fix my gaping tooth-hole, pro bono. i almost cried. i felt all covered in tired universe band love. i had to sleep. we set a time over the din of dance music and i grabbed our fine friend max melton, (who needed a crash space - and i'd offered the floor) and we went in search of a cab home. i was barely conscious. it took us half an hour to find one and by the time we got to the apartment, i could barely make it up the stairs. i didn't have keys, brian had them, and he had left for home hours before.

we reached the fourth floor landing of the apartment only to find brian passed out, using his backpack as a pillow, in front of the (locked) apartment door. he'd been there for three hours. he didn't have the key. much ironic laughter was heard. we called emily in despair to see if SHE had them, and she managed to bribe psycho dave to cab it over and let us in. it took another half hour. i collapsed into bed at 5 a.m., toothless, phoneless, lifeless....but actually feeling quite content.

so here:

1 - have i actually grown up? this may never happen
2 - is it time to throw everything i own into the nearest body of water and live in the woods,
until such point when i learn to fend for myself or get eaten by a bear?




i'll leave the other musings i want to muse on for later but fill you in on the latest news & gossip, in no particular order.

1 - we went to see muse (great live, but i was zonked) in edinburgh right before leaving. amazing piano player, that guy is.
2 - my chemical romance opened and i met the singer, gerard way, who has been a really vocal fan of the dolls. he was a sweetheart and we talked for a while about music and music and touring then watched muse together...from behind a glass security window. seeing their life reminded me of being on tour with panic, though...their inability to go out because fans will maul you still seems scary to me. mental note to you: if we do get famous, please don't maul us. what a terrible problem to have at a rock show.
3 - leeds was good but not fantastic and the kaiser chiefs song went over very well with the local punters. sometimes i wish we played dance music.
4 - mr ben folds and i have been writing and plotting and it looks like we're going to join him on stage in aussie for a few of his symphony orchestra shows (for now, brisbane and melbourne, but its not confirmed). he's awesome.
5 - i ordered a new blackberry from the states and as of today, have fully resumed sucking on the electronic teat. yum!!! i have decided, however, that my emailing habit is out of control. i have admitted i have a "problem". we'll see what happens next. my fantasy is to try to go a solid month of 2007 email free, once we get off the road
6 - speaking of which, we're FINALLY TAKING A FUCKING BREAK from this madness, it's official. starting in january, once the play in boston is over, we're taking about five months off from touring so i can live, write, do some solo work and hopefully magically turn back into a Full-Functioning Human Being with Real Friends and Relationships, just like they have on the TV. joy!!!!!!!! rapture!!!!!!!
7 - my tooth is now repaired care of the Most Amazing Dentist in Scotland, who treated me like family in his little office. sam came along and we hung out and chatted it up and hit it off. i want to adopt them. chris put on his favorite Nick Drake CD while he drilled my tooth away and put on a nice new one. sam told me about drama school. we ate italian and chris and i discovered our shared love of bill bryson and john irving. we got sam a ticket to the leeds festival. when i come back to edinburgh (all of next august, if all goes according to plan), i'm moving in with them, if there's room in their garage.
8 - avril got married. did you SEE the wedding pictures? WTF, avril.
9- before i lose my mind and keep going, one more thing...we are touring with the most incredible band from australia in the USofA this october (and in aussie, coming right up).....and you should all educate yourselves and prepare to be blown away: www.theredpaintings.com. they are looking for live painters and human canvasses for the shows. email them. all tour dates are up at www.dresdendolls.com/calendar as usual.


and now, more links....

1 - reggie watts. my new musical hero: www.reggiewatts.com

2 - mikelangelo and the black sea gentlemen. nick cave meets cabaret. go, go go!:
www.oninvisiblewings.com/bsg/black_sea_01.html

3 - www.beyondhollywood.com/gallery/avril-lavigne-wedding-pictures/




love
a

imagine all the panic (!)

my body is heaving a kind of relief that it's never known before.

it's so hard to relate to anyone, even those who know me well, the combination of good and bad and evil i've been whizzing through in the past five weeks. one minute, playing in front of vapid mallrats who are alternately ignoring us and screaming at us. seeing the look in brian's face (he is, in my humble opinion, one of the top drummers of the century) after kids scream at him "YOU SUCK!!!!" after his heartwrenching drum solos. dressing rooms with no food, and sometimes no water, fluorescent lights, no trees, no quiet, no soundchecks, the haze of nothing to do in the middle of giant parking lots that stretch as far as the eye can see. squeeeeeeeling fourteen-year-old girls hanging around the tour buses all night, hoping to catch a glimpse of a panic member. trying to relate to the boys in the band, mostly not getting anywhere. the bus starting to feel like a cage.

the next minute, getting in a cab for Fuck The Back Row, into the arms of our fans, watching our little world growing slowly, as it does, step by step, friend through friend, word by mouth. being so exhausted i can barely stand. feeling the realness of a makeshift vaudeville theater dressing room instead of a corporate cubicle, laughing with the drag queens, watching all the beautiful art that people are making and bringing, wanting to spend more time with every person i meet, not wanting to go back to the bus. ever. feeling the difference between being on stage in front of three hundred people listening, slowly, versus being on stage in front of 3000 people chewing gum, blinking wildly and texting.

and mostly, moving too fast to feel anything. seriously. emotions just shutting down and assuming they'll have time to manifest at some later date.

the panic tour did have it's bright spots. the boys themselves continued to be gentlemen and sweethearts, and i got to know ryan (the guitarist and songwriter that i had over to the cloud club, see last long blog) a little better. i felt like i had something, anything, in common with him....he has an artist's head, i said, he thinks in lyrics, he likes to wear wild make-up (but had never heard of adam ant?? i tried to rectify and gave him an adam ant mix, but who knows if that'll do any good)...he must be from a similar planet. he grew on me. we sat down one night after a particularly harrowing show and i decided we'd fight fire with fire and start covering "imagine" by john lennon. so what do you think, when all this is going on? you've sold a million records, the girls scream your name....what the fuck is happening in your head? what's going on? we talked about wsriting on the road, how it's impossible. how there's no mental space to get to the place where you can possibly articulate an idea. he looked at me and told me that he'd never talked to another artist about this before. there's not that many of us, you know. you're writing this, performing that, whatever. the struggles are the same. i close my eyes, i see myself in the same way. i wish i had someone to talk to who has been through the same thing. maybe ben folds will call up randomly.

ryan learned "imagine" and we played it on stage with us the next night, and instead of people throwing water bottles at us, i think they were just really confused. i was hoping for water bottles. you win some, you lose some. at any rate, any irony was lost. note to self: this crowd doesn't yet "get" the irony thing. was it their age or their parents? brian and i would discuss this. will they learn to appreciate irony, at some later date? the answer at the end of the night was a pretty firm "no fucking way". a lot of these kids were attending a concert for the first time. for many it was the second. their first concert? the polls revealed: britney spears. i'm dead serious. so we covered "hit me baby" nightly as well, with brendon from panic on vocal. irony lost, but what good fun!! if the tour had continued, we were going to work on "living on a prayer". we tried to have fun. we did what we do. take lemons, make lemonade. take situation, make art.

two years ago, when we were touring europe and i was at my wits end, thinking that the band was going to break up, thinking that it was all over and that brian and I had had enough of each other for good, i found a bright spot in listening to avril lavigne's new record and deciding to make a fake video out of the song "together". you've seen the results (if you haven't: www.dresdendolls.com/music/karaoke/index.htm). it was truly cathartic. i don't think anyone really believes me when i say that. having a project like that to throw myself into saved me. the song, with all it's adolescent cheese and overproduction, gave me a wormhole back to 15-year-old self, the lonely confused one eating her lunch in the piano practice room.

this tour felt the same way. brian and i were getting along fine. we were bonded through our vehement frustration of a common enemy, the panic fans. we went out on stage every night ready for battle. but i turned to myself for a solution, and i foudn it in this: why not make a video with these guys? they're here, they're bored like we are, they're hilarious. so we did. we decided to film a home-movie video of the two bands trying to kill each other, spy vs. spy style, and the results will be forthcoming. they were all excellent actors. the label nitpicked us until we couldn't handle it anymore and the deal was broken. we aren't making a "real" video for our next single. backstabber. what's more real than this?, we keep asking. nothing.

a week before the tour ended, we got the call in seattle that ryan's dad had suddenly died. his only close family. he was an only child and his mom was out of the picture. our hearts sank, we sat in the bus and all looked at each other at a loss for words.

they canceled two shows. we almost didn't want to get the call that the shows were on, because we assumed that that would mean that ryan had been talked into coming back on tour when he should be at home, dealing. dealing with who, with what? ryan came back on tour after three days off, we finished up in california. the whole crew felt strange, their whole gang seemed out of sorts. no wonder. i took a long walk with ryan around the parking lot in anaheim. i felt like the whole world had been thrown at him, in all it's shitty ugliness, and what could i say? better to say nothing. we walked, saying nothing and occasionally something. we started at the hooters billboard, hoisted 5 stories in the air to reach the passing traffic from the highway. we waled to the bud light billboard, hoisted 5 stories in the air to reach the passing traffic from the highway. do you have anyone real to talk to? i will. i'll talk to you. when you're ready. don't lose me. i'm an ally. really. i hugged him and i went back to the bus, getting into my bunk with a heaviness i couldn't describe.

................

back in my apartment, i face the classic bullshit of myself and my expectations of myself. ben folds called last night. he emailed a week ago, raving about our records and asking if we would share the stage with him at the sydney opera house when we're down there in a few weeks. we attached like long lost siblings, the same sense of self-what, the same instrument hanging us up by it's strings. we talked for two hours, ranting and raving and laughing with each other about this treadmill of sings and recordings and touring that we've been on. he's an ally. he was in tomorrow, in adelaide. i was in today, in boston.

i wander into my bathroom and look at myself naked in the mirror. not bad, i say. you're fine. go to bed.

i put on my kimono, pretend to be romantic, sit down at my computer, pour an apple martini and read the short story one my best friends sent me weeks ago, i havent had time to read it on the road with all the mental clutter. i close my eyes halfway through, drag my finger along the frame of the screen which is warm and silver, and think to myself: now, enjoy yourself. it's quick. it's over so quickly.

.....................

every time i come home i feel the same stressful triptych, quadrupltych, of feelings and prioritues all in conflict with each other. be with your people. move forward, write music and make things. catch up and stay on top of managing the band. rest. amanda. the night i got back i went out with pope and the house and we drank and smoked cigarettes until i came tumbling into my apartment with becca. i threw on one of my favorite king missile discs and sang at the top of my lungs to "as i walked through queens". i still miss listening to music. i can't do it on tour. then we lip-synched together, creating impromptu videos to the entirety of "under my skin". thank god she knew most of the lyrics. becca had made a july mix for me and we listened to it but i was unable to pull myself away from the piano, playing along with every chord to every song by razorlight, the eels, the french kicks, and rilo kiley. becca! you're too hip for your own good. they're just chords!!! she can play piano the way i can't, i've seen her sitting at the piano and reading music. show-off. she was in drunken awe of my ability to sit and play chords by ear. we'll trade, i said. someday.

.....................

the sheet music book is finally out, it's released about two weeks into the tour and my mother emails. she's upset. she feels like i painted a not-so-flattering picture of her, my step-father and the beloved steinway i grew up on.
my mother was like any mother. how can i say this? i love her. but i saw her as a constant artistic obstacle as i was growing up. how could it be any other way? she gave birth to me, carried me in her womb for nine months. the buddha once said (i paraphrase) "we can carry our parents on our backs for our entire lives and never repay the debt". i feel the same way. my mother and my step-father gave me all the tools, for better or worse, that made everything possible. i love them more than i can possibly ever articulate. the teenager in me will always scream in defiance. but i've seen the alternative, and they're not on the dark side. they're on the side of the force. and for that, i will be eternally indebted. my mother brought me to music. she fed me music, by making me sing, even when i didn't want to. and it was that action that solidified the performer in me. mom, i know you're reading this. i love you. thank you.

.........................



today i woke up at one o'clock in the afternoon and went straight out to shoot filler for our homemade video with pope and brian. we went over to the steinway dealership in boston to shoot some footage of brian trying to heave a grand piano out of the window (onto, poetically, ryan's head). the guy who worked there offered to show us a secret, if we came back at 6. we went and shot on the beach, then went back, burning with curiosity. he let us in, the staff were gone. underneath the steinway store on boylston street, two stories undergroung, is the first concert hall in boston. it's decrepit, water-damaged and pink, and utterly beautiful. filled with dead pianos and filing cabinets, and seated about four hundred in it's day, including the balcony. poe and brian and i (and brianna and julian, who came along for the trip) wandered through it....doors leading into blackness, the floorboards ready to give out into the 6th circle of hell, mozart and beethoven and schubert all embalmed in the script at the top of the walls...and at the end of the theater, a little stage the size of a flatbed truck. why was the stage so small, i asked. piano concert hall, he answered, no need for more space. i know where we're doing our next photoshoot.

.................

two drops of peppermint oil in a bottle of water is fucking excellent. a massage thearpist showed me the way.

.................

i only have another six days at home. i want to make love to my tea kettle, i want to go to the museum of science and see the bodies exhibit. i want to drink apple martinis and smoke cigarettes and read books by bill bryson. but i feel like i should learn a new german song for our upcoming tour, finish the ideas that are in my head for songs that planted themselves there on the road, deal with the business of life and keep my interview appointments, clean the closet, take my boots in for repair. who will fucking tell me what to do? i need someone to tell me what my priorites are, because i sure as hell don't know. i want to go back to harvard square and stand there, painted white, for strangers to see. i bought my cambridge street perfomers' permit, on a whim, the last time i was home. maybe i will. i miss myself.

.................

i buy thom yorke's new solo album, the eraser. and read his interview in spin magazine.

"so, mr. yorke, you seem upset about the fact that the world is ending, that we're all about to die in a glorious combustion of greed and selfishness."

"yes."

ha!

i light another cigarette and keep typing.

...................

while on tour, i listen incessantly to the kaiser chiefs' record. it's excellent workout music. especially on the elliptical machine.

i light another cigarette.

...................

haiku

i think i may start to blog purely in haiku





o! camera phone
nine billion megapixels
that they cannot feel

femming out

we left the panic tour for a one-off show in san jose...flew out to california and spent, literally, about 16 hours in the state.
the show was outdoors, and we were filled with immense happy joy joy to be invited onstage to play with the violent femmes. we sat in for about 4 songs, including "good feeling", "confessions"...they were so mellow and cool and the whole thing was like a little dose of music medicine for both of us. you couldn't wipe the grinsd off either of our faces....though gordon gano came back to my piano with a towel and bound my arms because i was so happy and banging away that i didn't realize i was stepping all over what was supposed to be a drum solo. hopefully somebody got some good pictures.

the land of contrast continues, back to the airport to come home to boston for another 16 hours, make love to my own bed, and get back on the bus. one good thing did happen: i invited the panic boys over to the cloud club since we were all in town at the same time and ryan, the shy and retiring lyricist, took me up on my offer. there was a raging party here the night before, so wading through the carnage and hungover vibe i showed him our magic house and we watched some ghetto impromptu fireworks from the roof. we had a wonderful time...the way it's supposed to be, everybody in the cloud club sitting around til late late, drinking and philosophizing about nothing important, michael pope in true michael pope form chain-smoking and entertaining us with his every utterance, becca talking about sleeping in the bathtub and wanting a pony, lee probing sweetly deep into all of pschyes and mother issues, noah and pope arguing about media, brianna soaking it all in with her beautiful wide eyes and agreeing with me (thanks brianna) that honesty is always the best policy when dealing with normal-people-relationship adultery. peter sand came by at about 1 am and showed us his vintage volkswagen cartruck (cruck? or trar?). things were still loud down on the stoop when i went to bed, in heaven under my own quilt. now it's morning, we leave for hampton beach in an hour and i won't see this paradise of home for another month. i wish i could beam myself back here every three days for just an hour. it's fuel for me. i think i am going to take this last hour, and instead of blogging like an idiot, ride my bike to the public garden and look at the ducks and get some edamame succotash at whole foods.

ach: some business before i forget. the songbook is OFFICIALLY FINISHED (aaaahhh!) and has been shipped.
you can order it here: www.jsrdirect.com/bands/dresdendolls
only one snag: the DVD is still in production and is being shipped separately to everyone who ordered the book.
if you already received your copy and are wondering, it's on the way.
don't despair. i've already been getting fantastic feedback on the book, so hopefully the painful wait was worth it.


love & happy The Man Day



a

panic! at the mindfuck

..................................

three days ago

..................................

i'm on a plane on the way to washington DC, to start the panic at the disco tour. we'll be opening for a band i've never met, never talked to, and whose music i barely know. it should be interesting. and they're almost half my age. my god. it's sort of the flip side of the NIN tour. who knows what.

i never really got to come home after the european tour. i had enough time to start opening the mail and doing laundry and we left for a 48-hour trip to london, where we played on jools holland. television appearances are so fucking nerve-wracking. there i was, jetlagged, tired, disoreinted and caffeinated and all of a sudden...look wonderful. play wonderful. i ain't that sort of performer. i ain't the dixie chicks. they were very nice & friendly, though, and they went out of their way to say hello.

i had never seen this show (for those of you int he dark, jools holland's music show ont he BBC is the equivalent of saturday night live...only much more musically respectable). so i went to youtube. i have become a huge fan of youtube and have been gluttoning on old adam ant videos. i digress: so i went to youtube a few hours before we played and started downloading random clips from bands who had previously appeared on the show. radiohead. tori amos. whoever. just to see how they were shot and what the vibe was. and it struck me: my god, everybody is just as nerve-wracked as i am. there are little hints. you can tell. television is scary.

it's a strange land back there, backstage. i did have a wonderful walk around the BBC television headquarters, somewhere in london. it's like an army-base, you need special passes to get in and the entire building is shaped like a donut with a large ring road running around it. since they wouldn't let me out to take a walk (AAAAHHHH) i just walked in circles. there were sheds with entire dismantled situation-comedy sets. i saw an entire soda shop on it's side. fake wallpapered walls everywhere, laying on their sides and stuffed into holding tanks, waiting to become part of a room on a set next season. entire fake worlds, the backdrops of unreal situations. that was a nice walk.

we flew back exhausted and i faced my apartment and my non-ness in it for another 48-hours and then we got on a plane headed for bonnaroo, a huge hippie music festival in tennessee. upon landing we took a surreal walk through a forest in nashville with a lawyer and then i escaped my life for a while and went to see doni from ...and you will know us by the trail of dead (my favorite press on them lately refered to them as "...and you will know us by the length of our name".) he had a piano. i heard some roughs from the new record (which i sang a played pianer on, a while back, in austin) and it's fucking amazing, but i expected no less. we played along to a skipping ravi shankar record for a while. it was in 12/35. a difficult time signature.

bonnaroo itself was, as festivals go, pretty beautiful. it's situated in Really The Middle Of Nowhere, and there were tens of thousands of hippies and freeks. beautiful to see, even though i was, as usual, too spent to actually get out there in the crowd and shake my boot-ay to the guitar meanderings of beck. i watched quietly, in awe of his greatness, his royal beckness. when i saw the puppet show he had choreographed, i decided that we should be soul art lovers in some alternate universe (some alternate universe in which i don't need to deal with scientology, which creeps me out). radiohead came on and failed to hold my interest, but this was probably due to the fact that i was about .4 miles from the stage.

we killed more time throwing a tennis ball around and videotaping ourselves (you will seeeeeeeee) and didn't take stage til 2 am. which was fine, because people were up, and primed and obviously ready to be Rocked, so we Rocked. backstage at bonnaroo was a trailer next to our friends in the bindlestiff family cirkus, so i got to feel nice and at home - despite the trailerness, there were men juggling discs and girls applying bizarre make-up. this always cheers me up to see, no matter who is doing it and for what reason. then slept and went home in the morning.

then i crashed completely. this was when things got a little weird: i got home, again expecting to throw myself into the fervor of Home and Happy and Oh, and instead i plummeted into a wicked funk of PMS proportion (certainly at the wrong time of month). i found myself crying every time i lay still during yoga, i found myself crying over a four-page biographical introduction to a book of photos by robert capa. i didn't even really feel sad, i just felt sort of strange and dissociated, and angry at myself that i let my sacred time off get once again eaten by This Is Really Important You Should Do It obligations. i was finally home and i really only had six days off until my next show. on top of it, i had to practice practice practice for the film and solo nights, which i hate hate hate doing. i need to come to terms with this at some point. anyway. don't get me wrong, i fucking love playing the thing. but it ends there. practicing and playing for me are two separate issues. at some point i will write about this, and it will take up page after painful page of valuable blogspace, alienating you forever.

..........

two days later

..........


last night was a completely beautiful mindfuck.

the first night of the tour - in DC - was fine, strange to be back in it but the boys in the panic at the disco band are total sweethearts, like lambs. i tried to prepare myself for how young everything would feel but walking through the crowd i almost feel like something was illegal. there are not going to be a ton of our fans at these shows, definitely something i was expecting and something i tried to remedy by booking these simultaneous "fuck the back row" film festivals at which i'm also playing solo: to give our fans a place to go if they a) couldn't get tickets or b) didn't want to deal with the situation only to watch us play a support set for 40 minutes. that's why i booked it. it seems that it's going to be serving a far more medicinal purpose.

we showed up yesterday in new york to the typical flurry of activity that greets us here, always a little more to deal with than usual given it's the home of All Press, Our Label, Our Manager...we went to sirius radio in teh morning and i didn't see howard stern walking by our studio until it was too late to flash my tits at him. next time. the venue itself left much to be desired. though clean, it was too clean, and completely sterile, and reminded us of a cross between an aquarium and a movie theater. there were cell phone advertisements installed everywhere. it always takes me a while to realize what's missing and then i realize there is nothing going on offstage and nothing to fucking do in the lobby....and that these fans are not dresden dolls fans. the sense of community is so different, so remote and impersonal. no brigade. I am starting to realize how much I take it all for granted, our fans, the community, the feeling in the audience. I've never known it any other way. I assumed NIN was some sort of excpeption (music about isolation and anger = isolated and angry crowd, n'est pas?). I'm starting to understand. It aint no fucking accident. for years now, our own opening bands always tell us how overly kind our crowd is, how supportive, how open-minded to their music or band. and I've never paid that much attention, thinking: well, of course. why wouldn't they be? they are people, they like music, they will listen, they will be respectful. to disrespect the opening band would be disrespecting us, because we are allies, comrades. Simple. and we take great care in picking our openers so that we can maintain the trust of our audience.

back to our story. so the panic crowd last night seemed to me to be tepid, but decent. i did notice one asshole flying his middle finger when we first came out but I told him where he could stick it. meredith joined us on violin (as she often does) for "missed me" and i left stage feeling like we'd played a great set. but why were all these people backstage giving me timid and sympathetic looks? it turns out that my in-ears were providing with with a sonic wall of ignorant bliss, because there was a contingent in the audience shouting at us throughout the entire set. meredith was yelled at, called a "fat troll" and was threatened with fat kidn sof ass-fuckings, and there were multiple requests for her - and us - to get the fuck off stage. and to shut up and go home, etc etc etc. brian was livid and bashed the fuck out of the drums. w'ere not used to this. we're used to the land of Art Love. this is the sort of shit we were expceting on NIN but luckily missed out on. my god, is it karma? but i was ignorant while it was happening, i found this all out after the show, in the dressing room and in a taxi on the way to the Fuck The Back Row show at the Brooklyn Lyceum. i was troubled, upset by all of it, wondering if we'd made a terrible fucking decision to come on this tour. and then oh

so i arrived in brooklyn, all verklempt, to a land that looked like oz to me. everywhere there were people laughing, making art, performing, being humans....i flashed back to the nokia theater from 24 minutes before where i was walking by 13-year olds screaming at each other while cell phone ads on giant TV screens blazed in all of our faces. i had certainly been through hell to arrive in heaven. films were running, people were drinking, even the brick walls looked beautiful like i'd never seen. everything breathed like it was alive. while the projector ran, the upstairs loft above the space was covered in huge paintings and black emptiness with an old player piano in the corner that i tried to practice on. only every other note worked. mali showed up and we decided to sing delilah together, so we practiced on the incredibly out-of-tune piano, laughing at it. meredith came up and brought her violin. peter brought over a clip light and illuminated the inside of the piano and filmed. titler (hitler in drag, who showed some AMAZING films and played some songs on piano) brought his two dogs up. it was real. i looked around and i saw people i cared about and who cared about me, saw people i wanted to know, felt like i could live here, stay here, catch this moment forever and bottle it. i've never felt more grateful for our fans, the world that we've accidentally on purpose created. and then the films ended and i played my fucking ass off on the piano, knowing that i needed to prove nothing to anybody, that i could just sing and play, that defenses weren't necessary. the audience wasn't really an audience, it was more like a living room of 300 people. so if this tour will teach me anything, it's that i'm fucking lucky for what i have. some bands don't have it, some people may never know it. i feel like the luckiest girl alive, trapped in a lesson in the shape of a sports arena.

i don't have to go home but i can't stay here

last night, for the first time in my life, i was actually awakened by two (well, i assume it was two) people having sex. sex like you read about, sex like you rent at the porn store: like, serious, SCREAMING, wild, pounding sex. they must have been in the hotel room above me, they must have woken half the hotel or at least everybody in the adjacent rooms, i felt the ceiling shaking. thwok thwok thwok thwok thwok and then a rest, and another scream, and then silence, for a moment....then again. but i wasn't upset at all, even though it was about 4:30 am, and i'd had a terrible time trying to get to sleep...this was exciting. i lay there smiling to myself, thinking "I'm in hotel room in berlin listening to people have sex like you rent at the porn store." it made me feel happy, then horribly alone in my empty bed. i've been staying in this hotel room for three days, waiting to leave for home, where i'll only be for four days before turning around and coming right back. this has been the loneliest tour yet, and i've never wanted to be more alone. it's confusing to say the least.

i was seventeen. i was in germany for the first time and had just slammed my hand a good centimeter into a rusty nail, which was jutting out, unseen, from a door in the squat in east berlin where I was staying with jason.
that whole flood of emotions still feels the same, or - at least - I can detect them even though they've been pushed underground and given years of caring, karaoke and karate.

we were convinced that jan was home, since he'd said he would be. so we were knocking hard. It was freezing, winter vacation, just after christmas. the only heat jan had in the squat, next to his towering piles of dubbed cassettes (millions of dead cops, the cramps, sex pistols) was a retro little stove that barely kept the room above see-your-breath level. cold cold cold. he wasn't there. we pounded. then my hand went through the nail. i screamed. was it serious? well, it was bleeding, but not much. it was a hole, a nice little german stigmata. it only took 15 seconds before i didn't know myself whether i was crying to get attention for a wound that wasn't all that bad, actually in pain or shock, or crying about the fact that i was confused about whether i was crying for some real pain or over the confusion my possible ruse. this was a typical pattern in my life. maybe i was homesick. maybe i was just looking for a reason to weep and the nail was just a little gift. we bandaged and disinfected. the incident was easily forgotten. i think jan wasn't there. but he must have come home at some point. thwok thwok thwok thwok thwok. is there anybody out there?

i walked by that door yesterday. it's 13 years later and jan is still living in the same squat, one floor up. the cassettes are CDs, but most everything else is the same, jan still smiles his shining czech smile, his girlfriend cut up watermelon. we rode around on his motorcycle and watched berlin setting up for the world cup, the russian war memorial, drank come coffee, walked through a church with no insides. there are lots of these in berlin. in my bunk, hiding from the tour and the world outside, i've been watching DVDs of american propaganda films that were shown to soldiers in 1943...right before they were shipped off to die. a series of Seven Informational Films called "Why We Fight". brought to you by the ministry of war, the letter Z and the number 8. this is a jap, this is a german. kill, kill, kill kill kill kill. thwok thwok thwok, watching the bombs drop on every side, watching the bodies fall. hitler at nuremburg. metallica at nuremburg. morrissey at nuremburg. the dresden dolls at nuremburg. that was four days ago. we played right on the rally grounds.

the last three days of the proper tour were those huge festivals. i remember the purgatory-like feeling it had last summer. not many fond memories, mostly images of trailers, where we sat and waited to play, unfriendly people all waiting in the same miserable conditions, pointy shoes, and rain.

one day was good, there was some sun and some air and some shyness that was criminally vulgar....i hiked, with the Dancer, up the huge dutch hill and we looked down on it. there were tens of thousands of people gathered below. tranfixed in the flashing lights and the spectacle of it all. around us, european teenagers were all smoking cigarettes and throwing trash into the tall grass. you just played in front of all of those people, i said. so did you, he said. then we laughed, at the people. at ourselves, at all the trash.

you want your solitude, miss thing? you may just get what you wish for. you may just wake up one day in that twilight zone earth after all the bombs have gone off, surrounded by a pile of books. with no reading glasses.
we joked that it was the only hill in holland. made after the war.

when i was 9, i was at summer camp. not sleep-over camp, but a sort of dregs-of-whoever-was-left day camp at the local rec center. i was one of the richer kids with intellectual parents who simply didn't Believe in overnight camp (the way they didn't Believe in sugar cereal or gel toothpaste or nintendo). when there was a costume contest at the end of the summer, a la halloween, i (of course) threw myself into it full-force. alongside the makeshift draculas, freddy kreugers and michael jacksons, i went as The World. i sported an electric blue leotard and tights and onto my flat-chested, scrawny little body were safety-pinned asia, africa and the rest of continents that my step-sister helped me to cut out from green felt in the kitchen the night before, while my parents probably looked lovingly at their wholesome and intelligent children . but the majority of the contestants, who were mostly boys, went as boxers. not boxers with everlast belts, mouthguards and shiny warm-up capes and fancy boxing shoes. just 10-year old boys who had no costumes. take off the t-shirt, throw it around the neck and when you are asked to parade on front of the costume judges, start punching the air as hard as you can. then you were a boxer. i remember feeling that bizarre combination of feeling costume-proud and insanely jealous of those boxers and their raw power, as i stood there, looking like a spoiled rich art fag in my The World costume. i imagined them at home, eating sugar cereal and playing nintendo til the sun came up, unable to buy materials for any clever costume because their parents were mean and on welfare. but they were punching, punching, swinging with everything they had, putting me to shame.

one morning i woke up to find myself in a city that i had seen before. i hadn't recognized it in the tour book. i was in france, in an Again venue. i wandered up the stairs. ah yes, i remember this. was it a good show here? when was it, a year ago? six months ago? was it a good show? i couldn't tell you, i couldn't tell you if you held a gun to my head. but i remember what amandas remember, and this is what starts to disturb me. and then it hit me that this was happening in every city. was it my mood? was it bad luck? there it is, that's the same yellow backstage couch where i slept when i was ill before the last show here. hey, that's the closet with the electrical supplies where i tried to get some privacy to make a phone call home. that's the airport cafe with the internet. that's the industrial parking lot where i walked in circles for an hour to warm up my voice, and probably where i'll walk in circles tonight. that's where i couldn't find a bathroom in the morning so i had to poop in a plastic bag. that's the dressing room with no door and that's the same potato salad they put out last time. that's the guy i met with the long hair, whats-his-name, who promoted the show. hi. are there any good memories? honestly, they're really few and far between. tour doesn't tend to leave many fond memories. what makes it worth it? the shows should. but i can't remember them. they are mostly the same, even when they're good. it's like taking an amazing shower. do you remember it? even if something remarkable happens, like you have a profound thought, or come up with a wonderful idea? not when you take a shower every day. i doubt it. i don't take a shower every day. i don't want to. mike penta used to say, amanda palmer, amanda palmer is a dirty girl. he started a new toothbrush every two weeks.

when i go back to milan, if we play in the rolling stone again, i'll remember being doubled over with menstrual cramps in the bathroom before the show, not doubled over to really fix anything, because nothing was fixable, and not doubled over for the effect, because nobody was watching. just stuck, knowing full well that the few people outside the door were rolling their eyes at me. uh-oh. amanda's turning into a rock star. here we go. but maybe i was paranoid. it was too late for me to separate the cramps from the confusion. pounding pounding on the door. then i went back into my bunk, and watched The Wall, again, and the maid keeps knocking. thwok thwok thwok thwok thwok. housekeep-iiing. housekeep-iiing. brian throws his sticks, exits stage. i play another solo song. is there everybody....out there.

that was the day my mother emailed me some old pictures of my cat, govinda, sprawled on the back yard with first litter of kittens. the four of them are flopping all over her and her head is all upside-down with her tongue sticking out a little bit.

there i was, crouching in my pajamas with my eyebrows shaved and bleeding. in an overhead shot, in the the corner of a dank bathroom in a random rock club, clutching my little black book of poetry after the teacher smacked my wrists. smack smack smack. watching my 12-year old self come running at me with a dead rat.

bill asked me why i hadn't blogged in a while, that he felt the hole. i asked for a suggestion. if you can't say something nice, he suggested, don't say anything at all. nail on the head, i said. on the nosey!! so i decided to save it all for one, nice, poetic and painfully long entry. better that way.

it took a while, but it occured to me i wasn't really homesick. i was myself-sick, just sick to death of not being alone, sick to death of not having space to breathe, to make anything. to feel anything other than a kind of numb irritation and simultaneously sick of feeling disconnected, alone, missing my friends, my grounding home and hearth, my piano, the things that make me feel like myself.

this tour, which lasted seven weeks, is over. i'm getting on a plane. but it's not over. it's a four-day break. this was the first tour where, prison-like, i started crossing off days on my tourbook list, ripping out each page as it passed, one day closer to...what? to four days off? whatever i was looking forward to, i'm not getting it. i'm here forever, or at least for anohter five months, which feels close ot forever.

but there were some nice things. there was the scene with the rat. there was the beautiful flower animation. there was the dinner i ate in portugal, treated like a queen, eating real food, cooked by real people. this was good. there was dinner with dahlia the first time round in berlin. she made some broccoli soup, which was wonderful. there was the cafe in fribourg. there were a few other cafes. and there was seeing my family in dublin, for an evening. that was over a month ago. but it left a nice memory. stained, as it was, as it always is, with the soil of sorry-i'm-so-tired. sorry i'm not myself. sorry i'm not available because i'm exhausted and sorry i've been too much of a pussy to organize my life in such a way that i can sit with you without feeling like i'm collapsing into my appetizer, that i can enjoy a conversation with you without losing my voice. different city same story. i've started to sound like a broken record when i run into my old freinds, when it's now going on three visits and two years in a row and it's still: "i'd love to hang out but I'm just too tired...i look unhappy....well, yeah....i've been touring too much....we should take a break....i said that last time?....well, you know, it's hard to find the time to really go home for longer than a week or two...i said that last time? ...oh...i guess i must have...listen, the NEXT time i come to town we'll grab a cup of coffee and i'll....i know....i said that last time....well, what can i say....(insert ironic laugh).....i don't have a real life anymore......" and they let go of my hand and wave good-bye. with pity.

that was supposed to be a positive paragraph, it derailed. just like most days in the past month when i woke up thinking that it wasn't that bad.

i wrote a long blog about two or three weeks ago, when i was really in the thick of it, but i let it be, didn't post it.

now i am looking back over it, cherry-picking the parts that i want to reveal and letting the rest rot in it's stinking heap of negativity.
here are some excerpts:

.......................

excerpt 1

when I first went on tour, it felt a little like a vacation. free from the routines of home which had become too mundane and repetitive, leaving behind the smallness of playing local clubs to convincing a new audience, and the illusion of freedom and the open road. but even then, i went into the process unwilling.

i never wanted to Get Away or Escape From My Life As I Knew It. i walked blindly into it, taking each sacrifice as it came, since it wasn't real life. i assumed that the situation would either improve to the point where it would be enjoyable instead of just tolerated, either that, or it would end.

nowadays i'm softly banging my head against the thin curtain of my tour-bus bunk, not wanting to make any noise because i don't want to wake the ones sleeping.

all the journalists ask me: "aren't you afraid you expose your private life too much?" i find this funny. my family reads this blog, my manager reads it, the label publicist reads it, brian reads it, our crew and promotors read it. this is the fucking ART of telling the truth carefully.

if i actually shared my private life in all it's complexity and detail, i would anger and worry and confuse these people so much....i'd be crucified. so i generally save my personal conflicts, my true heartbreak, for the emails i send to the ones who don't need me as a boss, a rock star, a musician, an idol, a promotional tool or even an artist.

it shouldn't come as a surprise that everything i share here is heavily censored, well, slanted at least..a combination of the reckless impulses to emote and the simultaneous, hyper-conscious measuring of the consequences. i can complain about my own faults, my own mistakes, my own fears, but the line ends there. it's not my place to complain about everybody else's.

...........................

excerpt 2

i am a performer. it's my job to get up on that stage and entertain the crowd, even when i'm sick, even when i'm sick of it, even when i'm ready to keel over in exhaustion. there's something noble about plastering that grimace and/or smile on your face and heaving yourself up there, trying anyway. but for god's sake, i still need to be honest about it. i feel like that's the only saving grace. hello everyone, here are my mistakes. i don't want to be here tonight. we're touring too much and the show is starting to suffer, my voice is starting to sound like it's being ripped apart by the middle of every set. good evening everyone: no illusion for you.

i fuck up on stage, a lot. i never play a song perfectly, and i think that's just fine and dandy. i've played girl anachronism, by my count, over ONE THOUSAND times and i STILL fuck up the lyrics. i can forgive myself everything and anything as long as deep down, i am convinced that i am trying as hard as i possibly can. and i actually like it when things beyond my control take over and force some kind of snafu. i don't invite disaster, but when it comes in the form of a power outage or a blown monitor system or a broken keyboard, i notice how human i become on stage. and i notice, more and more and show by show, that people have not paid their money to sit down and witness perfection. they've come to experience something, feel something, see something real and human. and to err is human. to err while striving for perfection, the small but inevitable glitch of Real Life, is more beautiful than perfection in my book. i believe the japanese have a term for this.

..............................

....and the rest of it was too negative, childish and bitchy.
and i want everyone to love me and think that i am compassionate, wise, kind and clever.

somewhere in the UK, a girl near the front row fainted during "shores of california". she must have been no further than ten feet away from me, and i watched her limp body get passed over the barrier to the security guards. this is where things just seem insane. the human being in me, the woman named amanda, says: "stop. wait, there's someone suffering, do something." the performer smiles and keeps playing, continuing the ruse for the 92% of the audience that has no idea what's going on, in cahoots with the 8% that knows full well that you are deliberately ignoring a fucked-up situation. the solution? none. just mention over the microphone, after the song, how fucked up and inhuman it felt. but when there's no body, when the girl passed out is you, when the girl passed out is the drummer, ah, this is different. then, sometimes, you should downright lie.

or not.

or smile and nod?
or tell the truth?
or dramatize the truth? laugh about it?

when you're playing solo, the choice is yours.
when you're playing with a band, you need to agree to believe in the same decisions.
this will never be easy.

i do have still have fantasies.
i do love touring, and god, do i love playing for people.
when my life isn't ridden with pounds of extra rubbish.
it's sort of like anything you love. something pollutes it, and it really turns on you.
try eating a chocolate cake while listening to babies getting strangled. ruins it.
you want to be able to enjoy your situation, your work. you don't want the noise pollution, the emotional pollution, the baggage and the stress around you. but eveyone, including you, creates it. you're all stuck in a zoo-like environment, and nobody comes to clean up the cage very often. so you adjust. you learn to ignore it, grapple with it, evade it, solve it, eventually....you take it or leave it.

or, someone gives you a Book. you escape. you breathe and find a minute to read Alone even though people are shouting everywhere.

after watching The Wall again Again, i watched the commentary.
roger waters recited the beginning of a poem he had written:

There is a magic in some books
That sucks a man into connections with
The spirits hard to touch
That join him to his kind
A man will seek the reading out
Guarded like a canteen in the desert heat
But sometimes needs must drink
And then the final drop falls sweet
The last page turns
The end

and it goes on, more hopeful, turning the metaphor to his wife, to the book that doesn't end. i have had this Book on tour with me. it's remained unfinished quite on purpose, i was sucked into it and then started to measure Very Carefully how many pages at a sitting. i looked forward to two things for a few weeks. reading the Book, and having a cup of coffee alone in a cafe at the beginning of the day. but it needed to be Away. and sitting down.

a cup of coffee in the venue was worthless, and cup of coffee on the bus was more than worthless. the best cup of coffee was in a good cafe. a bad cafe was better than no cafe. a restaurant was also passable and i did that a few times but it could be unnerving, bothered by waiters. the worst case scenario, but still coffee, was to brew myself a cup of tea on the bus, walk in a straight line away from the Mess and towards Being Alone and sit there, on a stone, on a bench, on a mound of dirt. anything. just give me some solitude, some time to process those thousands of faces, those nasty comments, those conflicting thoughts battling in my already-boiling-over brain. stick me in a room full of people all sitting around, making small talk and sandwiches, staring at the wall, waiting for time to pass, and i will eventually just Go Postal.

there was another book, the one i kept stealing for the camera out of different hotel night tables, dramatically ripping out pages of genesis or whatever. but most of the good footage from prague got lost, and i don't know if it will ever see the light of day. as it poured down rain on the charles bridge, we tried to cover up the camera to get the shots of the book falling, page by page, into the river. under the covered entrance to the brigde were two blind women, street performers. one was playing a synthesizer and both were singing.....ave maria for an unwilling crowd. all trying to escape the downpour, crushed up against them. everyone was forced to listen, barely anyone gave them any money, and the blind woman playing the synthesizer just kept singing, empty eye-sockets rolling heavenward. when the rain lets up, the crowd will thin, and maybe people will listen. i knelt at her side and closed my eyes, all i could see was the heavy coat of the rich italian tourist in from of me. manta tried to get a shot, but the coat. the coat got in the way. a few nights later, a boy from the Brigade named valentin gave me his eye. i thought it was a language barrier issue, when he handed my a small cardboard box at the end of a show in switzerland and said "here's my eye." but no, i opened it up on the bus, and there it was. he was missing an eye, and this was his prosthetic. i put it over my own, stuck a wedge of orange in my mouth and scared the shit out of brian the next morning. when i want to i can make him laugh.

"It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world - billiard balls are most often used for illustration - they don't actually strike each other. 'Rather,' as Timothy Ferris explains, 'the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other . . . were it not for their electrical charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed." When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.'"
-Bill Bryson (from A Short History of Nearly Everything, aka The Book)

people complain in different ways and at different volumes. smelling the heroin cooking from the next dressing room cubicle, never being able to escape the noise, wading through piles of trash. and i LIVE here, i keep reminding myself. the floor on which i daily tread is sticky from vomit, stained with ashes and i rarely see a dressing room wall without a giant, hairy penis staring me in the face, bidding me a happy welcome. hello, amanda! i wanted to take pictures of every penis in every dressing room i've been in and make a nice little children's book. i wanted to take pictures of every piece of art hanging above every bed in every hotel i've ever stayed in and make a nice little flip-book. i wanted to do a lot of things. sometimes i get a good view of the sky. sometimes there's a hill nearby.

that was the day my mother emailed me some pictures that she had taken that morning of the newly blossomed rhododendron bushes ouside the old house.

after we climbed down from the view, it was dark and the festival was over, placebo had left the stage, we walked onto the space where we had both just played. where the hoards of people had just stood was now just a capret of cups and bottles, the smell of ashes and sweat and french fries and ripped-up dirt. we trudged through it with no snow shoes. wondering, as you do, who is going to pick this up before tomorrow, when it starts all over again? machines? immigrant workers, punching, punching, punching sticks into these cups at a rate of 2000 cups and 6 euros an hour? probably. don't complain you, we say to each other. what's your work day consist of? singing? getting your photo taken with a bunch of fans? sitting and waiting in a bus all day? shut up. just SHUT UP.

i miss myself more than anybody else.

everyday i reach back home, see my apartment, remember my life. when i get enough quiet to myself, the picture becomes clear. i see myself through four lenses, on the television, sitting in the chair in a hotel room, outside in the middle of a huge field in dunkirk, as a couple in the hotel room above me pounds and punches away, having sex like you rent t the porn store. so what was it? did you want to be alone? or have someone here in bed with you?

hand into the nail on the door. thwok. i remember when it seemed like staying in a hotel was a huge luxury. now the fists pound on the door. housekeep-iiing! housekeep-iiing! housekeep-iiing! thwok thwok thwok thwok. cardinal hits his head against the window. housekeep-iiing! stab those plastic cups. thwok thwok thwok thwok thwok. housekeep-iiing!! thwok thwok thwok! shoot that heroin, my friend in the next dressing room. smack smack smack. there's always somewhere out there a little less well off, isn't there? bombs could be dropping, i could have be ODing, there are much worse things out there than not getting your solitude. solitude is a fucking modern phenomenon, anyway. they didn't use to have it back before the 1500s. it was invented. by da vinci.

my friend reminded me this one: "i complained that i had no shoes, then i saw a man with no feet."

i, unlike a lot of my contemporaries, never actually went through a obsessive full-on pink floyd phase in high school. i've simply gone through a life-long Wall phase. it's not too late, i was discussing with dave. i don't have a bedroom in which to do it anymore, but i do have my bunk. i could download every album, leave them on repeat from my mac and exchange my bunk curtain with a big black-light tapestry of a fractal, put in some spider plants and start taking more drugs. a waft of incense and pot would wave out behind me every time i exited my bunk for the bathroom. i would become comfortably numb, and communicate with nobody (except via my sneakers, which would be covered with meaningful lyrics in sharpie) simply because NOBODY WOULD UNDERSTAND ME. and to a certain extent, i would be right. nobody understands fuck all about anybody else at a certain level. it's just the degree to which we want to be understood that screws some people.

it all became clear to me quickly: i need more time Alone. vast amounts of time Alone, dripping, oozing, mountains of time Alone. enough to fill up a stadium. but i ain't going to get it. i'm lucky if i get 1 or 2 hours a day, and that's not even actual solitude. that's cafe, walking-down-the-street-surrounded-by-voices solitude. from the start of this tour i felt like a polar bear in a zoo-cage. except i made the choice. i want desperately to entertain those people on the other side of the bars. i need them. i was supposed to have a full week off after this tour and i deliberately chose to give it up, to head back to england to do more promotion after being told by Everyone that it was So Important. still, my decision. why am i doing it, when i know it means yet more time in airports, with people, going crazy? i make these decisions in times of stress and accidental high morale, then regret them sorely. i suppose i continue to believe, as all of my rock elders keep telling me, that if i give it all up now, i may be free later. free to tour when i want, free to spend time with my friends and family, free to spend time alone, free to think. free to become myself again. free to write again. but all later. if i think it's worth it. today, i think it is. and it's never all bad. i am juts going to have to learn to be greedier in the correct ways, in the wise and compassionate ways, despite the pain in the ass it causes. there's no other choice.

every band has much the same different same story, every famous singer i meet gives me that knowing You Sucker sympathetic look when you tell them you're been on the road for six weeks and don't have much of a break for the next six months. but they can't do much to help you. they know you Know. they way they Knew. when they were that sucker. that's what the wink they give says. then where you headed? australia? brilliant! then back to the states? then japan? lovely! then europe for another while, good, good, new single coming out. great. this is the push, you know! someday you won't have to be this sucker. they pat you on the arm. but here they are, themselves. some happier, some more trapped, some less, some more free than me, some on the other side already. but we all talk about how we can't complain, because we don't want to, because it's Just Wrong, when there are bands in vans playing to 12 people and children starving in china. and we all sit there, mumbling black ego humor to ourselves, cooking at a slow roast in the dressing room trailer behind the tent, triumphantly safety-pinning another green continent to our electric blue leotards. grinning that toothless grin of empty accomplishment, stealing jealous sideward glances as the boxers around us punch into the air.

Again

I had a dream last night that I was in Chicago, then took a subway to Japan and was suddenly in a tall observation tower in Washington DC. Down below there were giant sights to see, huge statues of liberty, giant pagodas, crumbling buildings...i watched peopl jumping. Upon descending, it was night and I found myself in the cast of extras in an anti-terrorist art-film that involved everyone straddling on free-floating planks in a fake ocean lit from beneath. planes painted white (both inside and out) housed drama between people threatening each other with forks as we all started to freeze (titanic, anyone?). finally we all decided to mutiny and plummet into the ocean because we just couldn't balance anymore and it seemed warmer in the water.

i must be back on tour.

but i'm not. i'm home. for another day, at least. we spent a week on tour came back to boston for a five day break. i call it a cock-tease. hello beautiful apartment and friends. goodbye. the week back on tour, astonishingly, was our first tour back on a bus since October. but we haven't really been home much since october and i find myself really confused by this. where have we been if we haven't been on tour? i had to ask brian. where were we? ah yes, making the record, ah yes, the promo tours, ah yes....but now back to the grind. back on a bus, and this time, for a long time. between now and November we're scheduled to be home no more than about a month in total. oh my god.

i wouldn't say i'm happy about it, but maybe not as sad as i used to be. this last tour felt like a typical example of what life on the road can be like, all the contrast. the first few days were painfully hard and then i had a few sublime moments.

we left for tour a few days after i posted the last entry about ben's death. in the past few weeks, i have watched my entire relationship with the internet evolve in a way i hadn't anticipated. it's never seemed so real.

after i posted that entry, i started to get emails and diary comments from people i had never met that were total strangers, friends of ben, cousins of ben, ex-girlfriends of ben....and they all shared their stories. i had shared mine, and now i got stories back. all of a sudden, i was having conversations with people about grief and life and it all felt totally natural. the point hit particularly close to home when brian and i were somewhere in the midwest (was it kansas city?), crammed into a closet-sized stockroom to do a quick video interview with a local music TV station. tour life. the blur. all the standard questions. when the cameras turned off, the woman who had been interviewing us turned to me and said: "I just wanted to let you know, I read your last blog. It hit really close to home, and I just wanted to thank you." and we hugged each other. and all of a sudden we were human.

i need that humanity so badly. i've started to realize that i rely on this journal and the ongoing conversation as if it were another significant relationship in my life. except this one, i realized in a moment of mortal reflection, can't suddenly up and die on me (unless the internet happens to explode, in which case we'd all be fucked). no, it can only metamorphisize as people come and go, comment or don't, drop in and out. in my nightmares, i imagine myself like that poor has-been actress in "sunset boulevard". i am 65 and aging in a dank room lit only by fringed red lamps with 5-watt light bulbs, typing manically all morning to an online community of non-existent fans about how i could've been a contender. the diary comments, which i will read with wringing hands and shaking false teeth, will all be secretly written by a wretched man-servant who lives in my garage and was once a great Dresden Dolls fan and now has lost his mind and lives in servitude of my Aged Monstrous Ego. he sits patiently with me every night as i pour my pint-sized glass of gin and force him to watch the Paradise DVD for the 23,456th time. "see that!!!" i'll exclaim. "i was HOT back then, you fucker. nobody could touch me!!!" then i will keel over in a drunken haze and he will carry me to my bed, which is shaped like a gigantic swan and there i will lie, backlit and surrounded by fluffy things, until another day comes to torment me. hee.

so all of these emails and comments poured in as we were leaving for/left for tour, and i sat and sifted through them and treated them as my own private funeral and lesson on life and death and how people connect with each other.

but the most beautiful was the photo that jen sent, who read the blog and was reminded that she had taken a picture of me and ben on the day of the aborted-interview meeting.
it was the first night of tour, we were in salt lake city in an airless basement production office, killing time and catching up on email before the show. brian and emily were sitting on either side of me, we were a little army of mac-zombies. i opened the email from jen....and before i even got a chance to see the details i shut my computer and felt like i'd had the wind knocked out of me.

but the worst thing was having nowhere to go. i was surrounded by people and crew and outside was an industrial park and a line of fans. i left the room and left the building. i just started walking, and eventually i came to two buildings off of the highway that were divided by a small, grassy alleyway. the buildings were empty, closed for the day. i sat down on that grass and just bawled, uncontrollably, like a three year old. huge, racking sobs and a throbbing head and spewing phlegm and gutteral moans the likes of which i haven't heard come out of myself since i was in my early twenties. (here's a good time in the sotry to tell you that i posted the photo: it's at www.dresdendolls.com/ben, it's almost religious for christ's sake....like an ominous foreshadowing pieta...). but i knew it wasn't just about ben and the photograph. it was about that, plus everybody dying everywhere else, but mostly it was about being back on the road, away from a lot of my closest friends and feeling totally alone in this environment where i have to just shut myself off and smile all day and act agreeable so i don't rock the very sensitive boat that we are all stuck in together. but then a few miracles happened. as i walked back to the club, pulling myself together, i got a phone call from one of those friends. i poured it all out and talked about how disconnected i felt, how alone and foreign, and he reminded me that you don't go to filene's to buy milk. you can't expect certain things from certain people and situations. and as we were talking, another friend who never calls beeped in from london. he is an accordian player that i've known for years, and he had happened to email me a few hours earlier and knew i was having a rough day. our relationship is a ben-like one. instant connection and not much need for explaining. but very little knowledge of each other. just a caring and an intuition. and the parking lot mud i was standing in as the sky got dark seemed actually comforting. i trudged around in it, getting my shoes all wet as i clung to this little piece of plastic connecting me to people who were thousands of miles away, remembering that they aren't always visible, but they're there. it's like this. it's completely real. it's just not obvious.

the next day was better and i found solace in a cafe in denver (st. marks) all day. i found it by accident and felt like the hand of god had reached down and put it there just for me. there was a woman painting watercolors in the corner, people were talking and reading, the tables were marble-topped, the music was bach cello suites and jimi hendrix and i just melted into a wooden pew for three hours and thought: if i could only find this place in every city, every morning, touring life would be balanced. spending the morning in a best western lobby (which is often the case) is just....fucked.

i find myself wanting badly to return to places i have been. any place. i call it Again. I am becoming a very big fan of Again, but i realize i've actually always been this way. I crave adventure and strange places and surprises to an almost unhealthy degree, but within those surprises i want Again. I want to take a ship to a faraway country, but always sit at the same table in that ship when i drink my morning tea. and when i get to the foreign country, i want to go back to the same park every day and sit under the strange foreign tree and watch it change if it rains. Again Again Again Again Again. Some of the best trips i've taken have been trips BACK to places, when i get to be enveloped not only in the place itself but in my own nostalgia surrounding it. it's like an oreo.

the record is out in three days. it feels like christmas.

now i am going to get capitalistic and remind you to walk into a store and BUY THE FUCKING THING.
i know you've downloaded it, and i am proud of you. now go buy it. buy it the week it comes out, buy 45 copies and give them to your friends and loved ones. it's an amazing piece of packaging and it's an amazing record. end of adverstisement.

hm, and now that i've gone all capitalist on you i feel dirty. i am going to go to bed.

love





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