6/27 - a few days ago, someone left me a text message that said: watching blueshammer. they are killing me. i still have no idea who it is. pat? arun? randy? went to cracker barrel for the first time today (it wasn’t awful) and then made my way westward to fort wayne, indiana. met kellee at her & matt’s new place, got the nickel tour and it is really nice! the houses in the development aren’t unlike what you’d find in parts of haddonfield nj. we met up with matt for lunch, then later we drove over to the coffeeshop.
upon arrival, the counter girl asked if i wanted to play outside and despite the fact that an area had been cordoned off, i flatly said, ‘no’. i’ve played enough shows to know that the outdoors are not my friend. another counter person had to pick up the pylons in the parking lot that i assume were going to keep the rabid crowd at bay. yeah right, the coffeeshop was dead. super dead. if matt & kellee’s friends hadn’t been there, it would have been completely empty, save for the odd take out customer. the most lively audience member may have been the deaf woman who hassled patrons who sat outside the shop. matt played a good six or seven songs with me and while it was fun, it bummed me out because that was probably the last time we’ll play together, at least until i put together a huge apple of discord ten year anniversary extravaganza show.
(on that note, it really doesn’t feel like AOD has been around that long. and maybe it’s a bit misleading since for the first seven years we were only playing a few months out of the year since we were all still trying to get out of school. it certainly doesn’t feel like any kind of achievement; it just feels like i didn’t know when to quit. when you look at what this band has accomplished in that time, or more accurately, what we haven’t accomplished, with the end result being a solo show to four people in an indiana strip mall, it’s quite depressing.)
they paid me what we agreed upon even though it was at least twice what they made that night. i wasn’t going to complain. after loading up, we went back to M & K’s, where i cooked up some chicken parmagiana for everyone. i did all the prep work earlier in the afternoon so all i had to do was cook up the pasta and heat the sauce & chicken. it went over great. i love cooking for friends and eating around the table, it’s so much nicer than sitting in a restaurant.
6/28 - did some much-needed laundry, caught up on some emails and other internet stuff. at night i drove out to play at a cd store in rochester, which is as small as a small town gets. everything’s laid out tightly on a main street, just a few doors down from the municipal building / police station. the store was pretty bare but they sold cds, dvds and videogames and it made me lament the unnecessary demise of similar minded stores throughout the country. thanks wal-mart and best buy! anyway, the owners of the store were really cool, a bunch of kids and their parents came in (i guess there really IS nothing else to do out there) and i played a decent if not unremarkable set. at one point i asked if they wanted to hear a sad song or a really sad song and a two year old piped up, ‘oooh, oooh, a weawwy saad song!’ after hearing a few laughs following the first line of my cover of prince’s ‘i would die 4 U’ (’i'm not a woman, i’m not a man), i stopped playing and explained who prince was and what the song was about: ‘prince was this short guy in the 80s who wore a lot of purple and wrote a lot of hits. this is one of his songs and it’s about the mysterious nature of god’. the parents in attendance were laughing, the kids were unimpressed. story of my life.
afterwards i signed cds and posters, which in itself was pretty ridiculous. then one of the kids asked if i would jam with him. not knowing any AFI, i followed his lead on a pearl jam song (the real 50s sounding one) for a few minutes until the store closed and we got kicked out. i noticed the theater next door was playing superman returns but it was getting late and i wanted to head back; rochester was a good deal further out than i’d originally thought.
by the time i got back to fort wayne, matt & kellee were hanging out in the living room as matt had just picked up tomb raider: legend and was just finishing the first level. i ate some leftover salad and then fixed their wireless network before going to bed. i did a hard reset and cleared everything on the router, moved it to the top of their entertainment center (instead of in one of the shelves), put a new SSID and WEP key on and reinstalled the USB wireless software on matt’s PC. aside from a hiccup the next morning it seemed to work fine. no more 75 ft. cable for matt’s downstairs PC and it was nice to do a little tech stuff. i was starting to miss it!
as much as i am a fan, howard stern on demand is freaking gross.
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