Excuses.

Please excuse the lack of updates. There have been many things. Reading to do. Tasks to procrastinate. Scrabble games to destroy. A feeling of unsurmountable hopelessness. A laptop that recognizes its hard drive only intermittently, like an Altzheimer's mother with her child, and the mother only has a G3 processor so she can't run Garageband or ProTools properly.

N. Western Ave. Mayhem Scrabble Rulebook Addendum

Extended Wordlist (modified)
Rule 34(a) Though a proper noun, "AVRIL" is legally playable.
Rule 34(b) "Avril" is legally expandable using standard pre- and suffixes (ie, "REAVRILIZE", "PROAVRILITES"), regardless of whether or not these words have ever been actually spoken by a human being.
Note: When playing an expansion of "AVRIL", the player is not required to provide a definition of the neologism, but doing so is considered proper etiquette.

From the 773 to the NYC

Woke up on the second day of tour in the Economy Inn of Maumee, Ohio. Maumee is Toledo's shriveled conjoined twin, a clutter of strip malls and floundering economy, steadfastly Republican. It is also a gleaming paragon of the type of raw, uncensored rural Midwestern-ness that after years of being sheltered by the urban ambitions of Chicago and a series of college towns, that I now feel totally alienated by. Now I get what East Coasters say about the Midwest, and I know why they say it. The churches in strip malls, the car insurance places in old Taco Bell buildings, the manager of the Waffle House cheerfully begging us to Have A Nice Day and Live Life To Its Fullest before he ducks out into the rain to go about his business, which maybe will be at the Christian hotel/conference center across the street, but will definitely be somewhere inside Maumee, Ohio, which is a place that offers very little to be cheerful about.
On the expressway heading east we followed a storm front. The clouds were huge, complex, overwrought, even. They made the cornfields and turnpike rest stops greyscale. We followed lighting and rain into DC. Rocked. Got drunk. Rode the front of a cold front up to NYC, dropped Brooklyn down ten degrees and then heated it up from the inside. Danced. Got drunk. Got hit on in the most NYC fashion (on a crowded dance floor, a girl pushed me bodily aside to get to the bar, but left a hand lingering on my hip as if to say, "I know I'm a total bitch, but if you're interested..."), got mistaken for a Stroke. Walked around the LES at 9am Sunday morning, streets and subways all but deserted, everybody sleeping it off.
We stopped for gas and sandwiches in some town in eastern PA. Settling hill folk near a nuclear reactor breeds a rural slowness that makes Deliverence seem more than believable. Added another town to the list of places in America I will never visit again. Maumee's on there too, if you were wondering.
Spent the last hour of 13 driving back from NYC in the front seat with Tim, trading elaborate threats in the voice of Dick Cheney ("...And the last thing you'll see on this godforsaken planet is Dick Cheney pissing in your eye."). Drank some whiskey. Went to bed covered in hand stamps.

Being oppressed.

Happy belated Columbus Day, by the way*. I celebrated my proud and slight Native American heritage by being angry at white people all day.
Work is full of pairs and small packs of 18-yr-old rural Midwestern girls, freshly-minted college friendships. They buy matching trucker hats, overuse the phrase "on crack", plan on being each other's maid of honor. They talk about sororities. You can actually see the adreneline surge of adolescent freedom and terror on their faces as they walk through the city and world that they are suddenly free to do whatever they want to do in, which in many cases what they choose to do with this newfound freedom is to put something around a hundred dollars of discount clothing on their brand new "emergencies only, now" parental credit card. Something around one in twenty transactions I ring up involves the customer telling her friend, "Dad's going to be so mad at me." Significantly less transactions end with a customer who offers to lift me out of this wage slave drudgery that I'm too good for and to support me financially and psychically so I can realize my artistic potential and make everyone in the word swooningly jealous of my talents, but we're working on changing that.


*The American Indian Movement has a super kick ass logo (the pissed-off eagle one at the bottom of their homepage) that they for some reason do not have on a tshirt. If you are a person in the American Indian Movement who can affect merch-related change, please put that kick ass logo on a tshirt for me.

Live

Typical show last night. Got paid in the usual way: congratulations from our friends, a $30 tab at the bar. At least the venue was considerate enough to tell us we weren't going to get paid when we were loading in, and at least the stage lights were aimed right in our eyes so we couldn't see half of the already-tiny crowd leaving during our set.

All of the shows.

Perfect Panther's going on a micro-tour. We'll be kicking it live at the following joints on the corresponding nights listed. If you read this and you don't go to the show I heard that it negatively affects your credit rating. So you should probably be there.

Chicago
Wed. Oct. 06 - 8PM - 21+ - BOTTOM LOUNGE
Perfect Panther
Quieting Syrup (ex Denali / mbr of Pinebender)
Leviride
Robert Cherry

Washington DC
Fri. Oct. 15 Warehouse Next Door
Perfect Panther
The Creeping Nobodies
Barr/Bobby Birdman/1999

Brooklyn, NY
Sat. Oct. 16 downstairs at North Six for CMJ festival. 10PM
Oil
Perfect Panther