We’re currently two shows in with the Routes, and I couldn’t be happier, but this picture still scares the living hell out of me. I pray for short sets, so I don’t have to turn my back on these two for more than a few minutes per day.

I’ve been thinking about one short paragraph all day:
“While we yearn for clarity and authenticity, we are awash in choices and distractions. Never before have there been so many tempting incentives not to pay attention to what’s important. We have created staggering, historic amounts of noise, all the while yearning for more substance. There’s never been more to watch — and yet the odds are slim that any two people in any given community are watching the same thing at any given time. These days our shared experience is the fact that none of us shares an experience with anyone else.”

Isn’t it strange that at a time when we could know more about the world than ever before, we can more easily opt not to? And isn’t it strange that in an era when it should be so easy for us to become better connected, we might actually be moving farther apart?

that aside, speechwriters llc has successfully completed yet another marathon drive and are presently gearing up for our first show with the alternate routes in chicago. i love chicago and wish the white sox the best of luck and it must be said that il duque is a fuck-off amazing pitcher, but chicago needs to get its act together when it comes to as side of fruit with oatmeal. a side of fruit for oatmeal should be berries and such, not watermelon and chunks of orange. i don’t know how the hell that happened this morning, but hopefully, chicago, it was a fluke.

mark, if you happen to read this, you have saved the band hours of tedious boredom and we are eternally thankful in spite of the fact that castlevania 2 doesn’t work.

dave is tapping me on the shoulder, which is llc code for “get off the damn kinko’s internet work station.” dave in a rush is up probably the only contender against dave with a few drinks in him for the title of scariest incarnation of dave. he’s like a cornered mountain goat. it’s sublime and poetic to see in the flesh, but poke it with the stick of delay and you will reap the wrath of dave as a mountain goat. dear god i need some sleep.

respek.

Well, it appears my brother is a criminal. I can’t say I’m suprised. I guess I’ve always known ever since that time we free-based outside a synagogue…

Okay that’s not true, but it could be.

That brings me to the next point, technology and it’s effect on human beings. In my line of work, I deal with aggrivating technology on a daily basis and work yesterday was no different. If you’ve ever dealt with password encrypted PDFs, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Somehow having the tools to do something, but not being able to do it just makes people go crazy. Beyond that, my computer’s been in the shop for a week and managed to crap out after I spent the better part of my free time in the course of a week scanning in pictures for my sister’s birthday, only to try to show the slideshow to my brother-in-law and have the thing note even be able to start up.

The moral of the story of course is to wear leather clothing and live in rural Kentucky.

And let’s fucking hope this holds, yes? Two nights ago, I was pursued by one of Maine’s finest and, my apologies to any family members who wind up reading this, was able to duck down a back alley, kill the lights, slink real low in my seat, and wait until they roared by in a glittering blaze of red and blue after some other speeder and pursue unmolested for the next 35 miles down route 302.

Last night, as Misha mentioned, we were pulled over again by the border patrol. Similar situation: late night, little bit of fog, some small town squad car pulls out of its speed trap and starts following me. I have technology on my side – I set the cruise control for one mile over the speed limit and divide my time between monitoring road signs and checking the status of Officer Friendly in my rearview. We finally get pulled over, but I’ve got that weird confidence you get from not having done anything wrong, and we go from there.

Miraculously, we are allowed to go on our way, despite having a van with tinted windows, California plates, one brown-skinned naturalized Briton, one vaguely “ethnic-looking” Israeli, one Irish guy with tattoos and a knife, and a bleary-eyed Jew with a bad haircut behind the wheel.

Tonight, my daily beatdown from the world of men came in the form of a broken power adapter for my one and only effects pedal. It’s not the kind of thing I’d brandish on the pages of Guitar Player magazine, but it’s an iron horse of a multi-FX processor that has gotten me through more tours of duty than I know how to count, and its power cord died somewhere between Boston and New York. Since it’s an effects pedal, it (of course) has some weird combination of voltages and impedences that means you have to go to Guitar Center and throw down $30+ for a replacement when it inevitably starts acting skittish, but here I was, in Potsdam NY, and I wasn’t about to make some side trip to the nearest major city just to replace my damned power cord. We’d been staying with our best friends in Potsdam, the inimitable Mark Zagarelli and Eric Arzberger, who possessed, among other things, the entire first season of “McGuyver” on DVD. This inspired me to rip an embedded staple from the wall of the Cheel Center, bend in painstakingly into a 180mm ox-bow, then jam it into the power supply as a means of bridging the severed wire in the power supply.

My father went to MIT back in the 60’s, and I feel like he would have been proud. He taught me at an early age that it was really fun to take electrical things apart, and then at a later age that, statistically, the things that you’ve taken apart probably won’t work as well once you put them back together as they did just before you took them apart, both of which were pretty valuable lessons. Because on the one hand, taking electronic shit apart, when you know what you’re doing, is an incredibly worthwhile experience. On the other hand, though, there comes a point in your life when you have to say to yourself, “You know, it isn’t 1964 anymore. Your hi-fi system wasn’t hand-assmebled from some mail-order Damark kit – you bought it from Sony, and if something goes weird with it, God help you if you don’t go into an authorized service center and get it taken care of by a paid professional.”

My new best friend in all of Philadelphia, Matt @ the World Cafe Live, helped me take apart my guitar amp and reassemble it for fun and profit, and it was a legitimately pleasant experience: two well-meaning people assembling a piece of precision crafted Japanese machinery, talking shop and presumably filling superficial voids in each other’s lives with words like “quarterphone” and “transducer,” securing power sources with Phillips heads and becoming closer as men.

I wrote a great end-piece to this, but the laptop I was using lashed out and erased it. I don’t know if this is a sign of things to come or merely a fluke of technology. The bottom line is, we’re happy to be here, we consistently get fucked with by machinery, and we’re ultimately children of the 21st century who are able to either triumph or pretend like we’re triumphing in light of these circumstances, especially when we’ve been drinking, which is presently the case, so goodnight.

Cheers,
Dave

i think it’s a strange concept that we have somehow invested power in these random dudes who can flip on a siren and install fear in a generally law abiding young group of musicians.. did i ever sign a contract to authorize the police? i suppose it is a social contract of sorts, but still, it’s awful to think of a flawed system that could put you in captivity even if you hadn’t done anything wrong..

it reminds me of the fryeburg county fair, where that concept didn’t seem to apply so strictly (it was like that in montana too).. i can suddenly start to understand the libertarian concept of limited government.. we are free people.. we can rule ourselves.. we don’t need police officers or federal goverments to regulate our actions.. it’s our life..