road rollin'

So.
I haven’t had any access to the internet for the past couple days, reason being, we’ve been sleeping in the middle of nowhere and driving all day.

I’m typing this up on the way to Dallas. I’m gonna try and remember the important details and catch up on a couple days worth of fun. We have a show tonight and the venue said that they’re gonna feed us fish tacos. We’re starved, so we’re really looking forward to it. I made


a deal with Josh that if I didn’t eat any red meat, and only ate fish or chicken 3 times a week, and wouldn’t drink any soda, he’d give me an extra $125 at the end of the tour. This is nice and all, but we’re playing a show in Austin at Stubbs BBQ, and they’re giving us free food. So I get to watch everyone else enjoying they’re amazing meat. Hopefully I can lose a bit of fat by the end of the tour and it’ll be worth it.

Court wanted a Slim Jim and I told him I’d buy it for him if he’d let me slap him in the face with it first. He was hungry and broke, so he agreed. Hope it was a good Slim Jim.

New Mexico was really…… (hard to describe) Dave Chappelle has a little piece about New Mexico. He said that he saw an Indian one time, but thought they were extinct, until he saw a gathering of 1500 indians. It was called Walmart in New Mexico. Dave was pretty accurate. We must have found that EXACT Walmart that Dave went to. We stayed the night off the side of the freeway next to a reservation. We had trucks driving by us for awhile, scoping out the situation. We ate our gourmet dinner of 1.5 tuna fish sandwichs and a carrot. We saw some rabbits, so we hunted them. Rabbit meat sounded good, but they were too rascally. We also realized that we camped right on a huge sulfur deposit, so of coarse we lit some in fire.
We also happened to park right next to some active railroad tracks…and that got old, fast. Literally, every 15-20min there’d be at least one, if not two trains driving by. No one really slept much that night. We got up and had our daily ration of one Poptart for breakfast and hit the road for Texas.

I started reading this great book by Ernest Hemmingway called Islands in the Stream. It’s a book I’ve been meaning to read for awhile. It was one of his last works. It was published posthumously, as well as another great book I’ve already read call The Dangerous Summer, about dueling bullfighters. Islands in the Stream was recommended to me by Sainsbury awhile ago. I’m glad to finally start getting into it.

Texas has been great. Humid as ever. REALLY humid. At first I was a little skeptical about the place. The only towns we’ve seen so far have been tiny little Podunk places. We stopped to get gas at this little station where the two ladies working were pretty classic. One was smoking right there by the counter and they were talking in these really heavy accents. It was almost a bit surreal. We drove around awhile trying to find a place to stay. We came to an RV park that had a bunch of old-timers sitting on lawnchairs by the lodge area. We chatted with them a bit, and then walked around the park to see the little swimming pool, and the fenced fields with horses, the mountain-less horizon with the clouds billowing in from the Gulf. It was the first time Texas felt genuinely sincere. The old folks there were just passing through on their way back home to east Texas. We told them that we were a traveling band, and they were excited for us, and excited to hear that we were a Country band. They were so nice and polite. I’m now a full believer in Southern Hospitality. When you can go somewhere and be this at home with complete strangers, it’s a pretty worthy note. Everyone that drove by us as we walked around the broken roads waved. Pretty endearing. Pretty hard to describe.
We found a cool little place to camp of the side of an old road. It was right next to an abandoned shack, (and some other trash people have dumped there in the past.) The owner of the land, an old farmer named Weston Johnson, came to see what was going on, and was really nice to us, and warned us about all the rattlesnakes. Kissle and Josh went out looking for the snakes, but didn’t find any.
We all stink pretty bad. None of us have had a shower or changed our clothes in a few days. We’re all smelling fairly ripe. Court continues to remind me of my stench, but if he only knew that we can SEE his odor radiating off his body… (I just showed Court this line, and he’s mad that I’m throwing him under the bus on this. Now we’re now having an interesting conversation on smell. You know that you smell bad when you can smell yourself. It’s like when you rip one, on the ride home from the Renshaws in Alpine, and YOU think it stinks, so you actually feel bad for the others in the car. It’s like that.) ( I just read Court that last bit in parenthesis, and now he’s not so mad that I threw him under the bus.)
There was a killer storm blowing in when we were going to bed, but it never really materialized into anything. The sky is so big here, that you can watch the whole lightning storm as its coming from miles away. Never even reached us, but it was amazing to watch it in the distance. It didn’t rain but it was so humid that we woke up wet anyway.
We got up this morning to a new friend. A random dog had wandered into our camp.
Kissle named him “brroommm brrrooommm” (you gotta say it like the sound of a car starting?)
Skinny dog. Looked hungry. I bet Brrooommm Brrroooommmm would have let me hit him in the face with a Slim Jim if I’d buy it for him to eat after.