ship me an apple for astringent

I'm in Muncie, Indiana.

I dreamed last night that I was resting on a rock in a remote country, and some cowboys arrived with horses and ponies. They gave me a horse and encouraged me to ride into this field of sunflowers. The sunflowers were adult, and their heads were starting to bow. I was about to ride into the field and get my face licked by the petals, but I guess I woke up then. At 9:30 am, when I needed far far more sleep. Instead I walked to a coffeeshop and asked this guy where the health food store was and he said, "What's that?"

I haven't been writing at all on this tour. My energy has been a bare trickle, I even have to almost force myself to jump and laugh at the shows. It's always worth it, but its strange not to have the magical calorie. I left Portland full of jubilee, with a glaze of sunshine on my skin, capable of climbing any mountain to lick the snow cap, but now I feel the tour vampire at my jugular. Pale from day after day in the craft ambling on the interstate, achy from inertia, sleep deprived, cranky from the friction of the most twisted repitition. I am in a waking coma, one loud dream. The details are flaking away. Let me remember this: In Columbus, in between two gas stations whose gallons were 30 cents priced different, a blind man stuttered his body on a 5 lane street until a lame-livered police man meekly rescued him. Maybe it's because I am hungry, maybe it's because I am in a room full of people having another conversation, but I can't really remember anything else. Montreal is great. New York was strong. We had the best pizza in the world, prepared by hand by a man who uses his arthritic hands to pluck the herbs from his windowsill and his bare palm even cradles the food straight from the oven. Olives from Sicily, dough mixed with water from an Italian tap. Really great. But I really desire is a meal with friends from a Portland farmers market. On this tour, we actually have stipends to spend at health food restaurants around the country, but even in that decadence, my body misses the little splendidness of routine. Oatmeal in the morning. Also, I am desperate to not speak for 24 hours.

Also in New York: Xiu Xiu sold out the Bowery Ballroom. I stood backstage behind Jamie and Caralee while they played this song in which Caralee gets the dark wheeze going on the harmonium and Jamie abuses a snare while breathlessly and sickly describing how he would rape George Bush to death. Jamie's intensity on the drum was so powerful that the snare just hopped off the stand. I looked at the audience, they were rapt, he continued a capella.

We are always driving and practicing constant and unintentional tardiness. Playing all-ages shows at big clubs means you have to arrive for soundchecks at around 5 or 6 pm. If you have a drive over 4 hours, that means sleep deprivation and rush and hustle. It is difficult.

I wrote this as we were rushing out of Toronto. I was very sour about it, we couldn't even eat our breakfast at the cafe. Of course we could, I was angry! Why couldn't we just enjoy our leisure for even 20 minutes in the early morning, just over a baguette? We left very very early and were still late! These are my thoughts as we departed:

At 8 am, all the pretty girls are waiting for buses or thudding like barelegged ponies down the sidewalks of the big cities. I wonder at that hour why there are so many of the prettiest girls, with pert nipples visible under rayon, with the erect calf muscles hoofing with grace in pumps, at that hour, when I think they all should be putting their lids into pillows of soft linens until at least 11. But I realize that not all the pretty girls are rich girls, though most of them act like it. What a perversion of nature and the fault of flu-like culture, when those endowed with the comely special symmetry to become taxidermied dummy of royalty, doing their shopping smugly. But the single beauties of the late nights are the account reps of the early mornings----the Visa bill becomes a guillotine when a ticket to see Coldplay costs $70 and brand-new, non-used Diesel jeans do cost a lot of money, and fuck frock bills from Forever 21 will add up, and up and up when your sculpted-polyester dresses are rubbish after an accident with a pomegranite martini or stubborn pesto or a simple blemish from a Marlboro Ultralightest.

Forgive my vinegar! GOOD NIGHT.