i'm kinda bored so i'll bring you down to speed

I realize that some of you may not be as well acquainted with our history of touring to appreciate the sheer depression and negativity expressed here. so here is a brief recap of the "What The Heck Are You Gonna Do...." Tour from June 2008.

Our adventures began, as most do in downtown Syracuse, NY. We were scheduled to play at the Taste of Syracuse. Once onstage, there was a homeless man screaming at us to "PLAAAAAY!!!! PLAY NOW!!!!!! like i got time to wait through this." I turned to matt and said, "seriously?? he's homeless. where is he going to go and what does he have to do?" and matt replied, "hey! be nice or he'll take his bag of trash and go somewhere else." we played to a decent crowd and everyone seemed to have fun with us.

The next memory i have is us leaving and driving to Buffalo, and once we get off the highway and on to city roads i see a beautiful white steam coming from the hood. Now this may be important to this and future stories: I AM NOT A CAR GUY. never have been, occasionally pretend to be. but i generally have no idea. so as far as i can understand, we should have gotten a preasure release top and instead burned through a shit load of coolant. So i get the the venue, and there's no flyers. and no promoters. and a couple of confused bands. I called our buffalo contact who arranged for us to be on this show, and he put me in touch with the promoter. When i asked where he was, he replied "yeah I'm not coming to the show tonight. i got things to do." Now for my non musician friends, this is bad. like real bad. So we played for the other bands and our friends who came. and one of the bands packed up and left during our set (before they played). So we went to mighty taco with our friend alex. (check out his blog: Nerd To The Core) and we went to get veggie oil from some local restaurant. While we were there scouting out good oil, a police woman came and asked us why were in this parking lot at midnight. We said we were having engine trouble, and she said she would return in like 15 minutes to check on us. we took what we could and went to our friend Ed's place to crash.

the next morning we woke up and went back to take the rest of the oil. and as we worked i noticed that the building next to the restaurant, was an m&t bank. Maybe 6 dudes outside of a bank in a big white van does look a little suspicious. So our next adventure took place in Bloomington IN. Now as some, most or all of you know, Bloomington is nowhere near Buffalo. Since non of us had ever been on tour before, and I have never booked a tour, i tried to plan everything around where were knew people so we would have somewhere to stay. so as we drove we stopped somewhere in OH for gas and Adam (our old guitar player) and Matt had a legendary tiff about money, taking oil, and general tour life. As we pressed on I remember seeing signs for Tom Rapper RV's and i remember thinking that that is the most horrible name for a company especially one that sells large enclosed vehicles, and driving through a rain storm.

When we arrive in Bloomington it is still raining and we called the venue on the way to say we were running late, and they said "we don't have a band playing tonight." to which i said "yes you do, and we're on our way." We get there and there's very few people there and we're like "fuuuuuuuuuuuck... is this even worth playing?" then i saw my friends jack and sarah who traveled pretty far for this. so i figured it was worth playing as a thank you for the effort to them. so we set up wicked fast, and the remaining bar people came up to the band area. we played and by the first song realized something weird and special was happening. We'd never met or seen most of these people before, and they were picking up everything we were putting out and loving it. So we played an awesome show and as we were loading up people weren't letting us get to our van. they were like "when are you coming back??!!" and we were like "we don't even know when we're getting home." so we crashed at Sarah's and the next day had veggie hunting and driving.


well that's it for now. After 2 shows of no promotion, and no one even knowing we were playing this, is where the story starts to get sad and depressing. but i'll catch you up on that in a few days...