Meron akong pera: Work is so boring, that I'm forcing my co-workers to teach me Tagalog in our spare time. These days, we have a lot of spare time. The ladies here teach me how to compliment them on how they look, as well as teaching me how to say "I will take you to lunch today." The hardest part is that I keep getting the words confused with my meager Spanish vocabulary, so I'm really making a new language in my head: Spanagalog.

Yesterday we celebrated America by having another porch-b-que: lean hamburgers, chicken, corn, some cheese sandwiches, and bottles of Samuel Adams on the porch. Afterwards we decided that a little bit of bad romantic comedy therapy was needed, so the Oakland homestead hosted the world's first-ever Jennifer Aniston Film Festival. We struggled through the torture, but somehow made it through both Picture Perfect and The Object Of My Affection. Afterwards, while I was doing the dishes, I seriously felt high, or drugged, or both. Neither of them made much sense, but only one of them featured dancing human mustard bottles.

I'm going to Los Angeles on October 4th to visit my brother, drive around town, see an exhibition hockey game (even though I hate both the teams involved...I wonder if it's possible to heckle both the home and visiting fans), and take some pictures. It's going to be a super-fun good time.

Oh, if I haven't already invited you to my birthday party next week, let me know that I left you out. If I don't email you back, it's because I'm ignoring you.

It might suck, but I'll still get the new George Harrison record. I wonder how many records they'd sell if a kid from each of the Beatles got together and made a band.

MP3 of the week: 1970s British punk/pub rock will always sound better than the new, younger breed of garage bands. Just a humble opinion, sir.

kansas. 9/2001

Lightning Storms and Playing Cards In The Dark: A year ago tonight, I played a rock show in Green Bay, Wisconsin to an audience of teenagers. While I was rocking out on the floor, the two kids who were standing about ten inches from me were playing air-keyboards. It was because they were having a good time and not because they were making fun of me, which I initially thought. Times were good then, it was before the buildings came down and the economy sunk into the shitter. 365 days ago.

So I've been thinking about that tour a lot the past couple of days. Today is also my mother's birthday, I talked with her this morning before she headed out on errands. Last year I called her from a payphone across the street from the all-ages venue, we talked until my quarters ran out and then I was on my way again.

I went back tonight and read my archived posts from the road, and really quite liked what I found. I hadn't read them since the time I wrote them, and they're more honest and direct than I had believed. Here are the links to those pages, read from the bottom up:

Week One.
Week Two.
Week Three.
Week Four.

There are a lot of holes in the stories, especially the last couple of weeks when we drove two days at a time between shows. I plan to fix that soon, now that hindsight is my friend and I've had time to think about what happened on and around September 11th. It's really a feeling I'll never forget.

In other news, Atlanta is the new Toronto. Pass it on.