Dusted Features In this extensive diary, Oakland's craziest MC shares the intimate details of life on the road with Dusted readers. Tweet

Cex's Tour Diary

05/07/03 "crazy randoms"

At the beginning of the tour, Nick and Rob were super-stoked about having a "crazy book" competition, and the day after our second show we bought six composition notebooks and most everyone got to work. The idea was to use downtime over the four weeks of tour to make a "crazy book," the kind of book that serial killers and other crazy people have. Like in Seven, the movie, when they find Kevin Spacey's house and you see all those composition notebooks and Morgan Freeman reads a little of one of them.

Nick's book was a "classic" crazy book in a lot of senses. There was a lot of really pain-staking cutting and pasting from tabloids and porno mags, and I think he cut up some hotel bibles, too. He put a lot of references to apocalypse and death and stuff like that. Lots of little disturbing words and phrases cut out and pasted together. Also, I think he did some pages where he wrote vague Latin phrases over and over... you know, classic style crazy book.

Rob's was more of a modern, urban kind of crazy book. A lot of dark drawings, in a graf-type style, with some cut-and-paste collage parts from magazines, with pictures of skulls and planes and stuff. He put a lot of work into shading and coloring on each page.

Jimmy's crazy book got lost and then found a few times, and he was very secretive about its contents. It started out as a story being written in "the wizard tense," which is a new verb tense we invented in the van on the first day's drive. I don't remember the rules exactly because we never really brought it up after the first two or three days of tour, but it was something about constructing sentences that have past, present, future, conditional, and all that shit in the same sentence, and kind of switching them up arbitrarily. The story was really disturbing, too-- mostly because Jimmy is kind of a quiet dude and the vaguely creepy stuff he was writing ("You were mad at me, I could tell. I didn't mean to but I ruined dinner," etc) seemed like maybe it could be based on something real and we wouldn't know, because Jimmy's kind of quiet.



At some point in the tour, he started drawing these hilarious comics in the back of his crazy book, and Jenny liked them a lot, and would make me look at them while she laughed. They were really funny. At a few of the clubs, he drew comics on the dressing rooms' walls. This is a picture of one of them.

My strategy was to just keep a detailed journal about the tour and my actual thoughts during the tour. Since 2000 I've had a diary on my web site that I update in fits and starts. I've never figured out exactly quite what the concept or purpose of the diary is, but I feel like it sometimes helps me get my thoughts in order to pretend that other people might be reading them. Also, I sometimes like to pretend I am shattering somebody's illusions about the music biz world by telling them unpleasant or mundane things about my own specific experiences with touring, albums, labels, etc.

BUT, despite the fact that I've toured more and more frequently since the website's beginning (last year, I did six tours) and the fact that these tours have always played pivotal roles in my personal and musical life, I have barely documented these tours. I have an album of almost 200 Polaroids taken during my totally bananas six-week outing with Numbers and Stars as Eyes, and I think I'd still like to try and get some of them published somewhere fancy one day, because I think they tell the story of that tour really well.

BUT, this would be the first time I would try and tell the story with words. And maybe my plan of complete and total sincerity wouldn't end up winning the crazy book competition, but I knew if my crazy book was just a crazy ruse about fake craziness, I'd probably do like three pages and then get bored. I guess that's the kind of pervasive and insidious thing about my vanity--- one day, my brain and body just stopped understanding why I would put any work or effort into something that wasn't "real" (see: abrupt end of college, resistance to government jobs, intense aversion to any musician with press-release powered "mystique," etc.) and since the "realest" things tend to be the details clinging to the underside of my own life... like I said, it's vanity. On the other hand, I figure if I could pick up other people's lives like rocks in a creek and scrape the ugly mollusks and moss and lichen off them, I might do that instead... I don't know, I'm not gonna try and figure this shit out here. It's the year 5000 (2000+3) and it's definitely time for some movement away from brain-hurting speculation on abstract concepts.

To my knowledge, Ben and Jenny never even started either of their crazy books.

We never actually judged them at the end, either. Or even look through each others' work. The end of the tour was rushed and weird, so it makes sense, but looking back now it was kind of weird that nobody brought it up. Also, I still have an outstanding bet of 10$ with Nick as to what the official religion of Japan is.

(He said Shinto. I said Athiesm. I think I'm right, but I haven't checked yet.)

05/08/03 mission statement/cast of characters

From April 4th to May 5th of 2003, I went on tour as the opening act for my friends' band, The Postal Service. Ben, the singer of the Postal Service, asked me to do this tour while I was opening for his other band, which is called Death Cab for Cutie, in March of 2002. He told me about this electronic side project he was doing with Jimmy DNTEL, and how Sub Pop was going to put out their record and make them to do at least four weeks of touring for it. For reasons still not clear to me, he thought I'd be a good opening act. At that time-- and really, up until the night of the first show--- we had no idea how this tour would go down. We talked on the phone every two or three weeks after we met in March, and as this tour grew closer and became more and more of a real thing that was about to really happen, we would ask each other, "Who is going to come to these shows?" The only thing really similar about the music I make and the music of the Postal Service is that we both use laptops. Mine just sits on the floor of the stage running off beats while I do power karaoke over top, while Jimmy uses his to run a bunch of samplers and keyboards and things while Ben and Jenny played guitars and keyboards and drums and voices on top. They're really good. I'm kind of still working on it-- the music part at least. I have all the other parts kind of down--- the fear, for instance. I'm not so afraid of the audience like all the other bands in the world are. It's hard to explain, maybe you'll see it one day.

Anyway, it turned out that a lot a lot of people liked the Postal Service's album, including MTV who showed up to film a "You Hear It First!" news segment about them in LA. Last summer I watched MTV almost every day and I remember the night I saw a "You Hear It First!" news segment about El-P and it made me feel weird and excited, like the different worlds of modern music were suddenly rubbing up against each other in a way that might mean earthquakes soon. Also, a "You Hear It First!" is where I first learned about tATu, after which I rushed out and tracked down a promo copy of their album so I could get the tATu boner months before Maxim or Jimmy Kimmel or anybody else was riding that train. And the Postal Service got to go on "Morning Becomes Eclectic," which is a radio show in Los Angeles that is pretty big. I remember my best friend Andy once found this promo cassette of Beck playing live on Morning Becomes Eclectic when we were in middle school. We were absolutely certain we were the only people on earth who had this tape. I hope Andy still has it.

So, we toured, the Postal Service and I. And the tour turned out to be kind of mind-blowing in the "holy shit, all these shows are sold out" department. Which translates to even more mind-pieces on the floor and wall behind you when you get into the fiscal aspects, which we will get into, but later. I made more money on this tour than I think I probably made from all the other tours I've ever done put together. I've never kept really good records of these types of things, but I'm pretty sure.

For one thing, I'm debt-free now, as long as you don't count my student loans, which I'm not because I'll start getting depressed if I do. But my credit card balance, and some medical bills I figured I would just avoid until I saw lawyers, and the health insurance and the outstanding money owed to my father-- all that is signed, sealed, and delivered, and sugar. I can barely believe it. I'm pretty sure Ben and Jimmy are OK with the amount of money I walked away with, but even still, I feel like I just got away with the scam of the century. At the beginning of 2003, six month's worth of pre-hatched chicken counting imploded inside the engine of my parents' station wagon, which was holding all my worldly possessions and my body while I tried to scurry across the continent to go live in a new city on another coast. When I finally made it to Oakland, California and to my new (teal and silver) house, I had to get a job for the first time in like two years, and I worked at a record three days a week. My bank balance stayed in the negative, my fatigue and panic levels stayed bubbling up in the high, but I did somehow manage to squeeze out a few songs that I'm into. (esp "Kill Me")

Before I get carried away, let me just try and figure out the point I was trying to make: this tour... it was good. However, it was not so eventful as far as producing neat anecdotes like "How Mike Got Shot" or "How We Got All Those Colonial Girls to Take Off Their Shirts and Kiss" or "Fences In Stranger's Yards Near Which Sex Kind of Occurred." On the other hand, it really did change my year and I guess probably my life, at least insomuch that I'm going to buy a bunch of stuff I never thought I could afford, and I'm going to shoot my BB gun instead of working that government job I had before the tour.

What I'm saying is that this diary, it's no "The Dirt." Which is probably fine, because (with all respect) it might be a shame to put the few great stories I have now, like the shooting or the fences, on a website (no matter how awesome that website might be) when maybe I could try and make them into something slightly more permanent or at least tangible -- like an album or song or "The Dirt 2."

This diary was an experiment and here are the results. It started one way and finished a complete different way, as usual with things I try to do. First of all, though, you need to be introduced to the cast. These are secret pictures of everybody doing "the Cross-Eyed Crooner."



This is Ben. He sings and plays guitar and keyboards in the Postal Service. I love him to death. I really love him. I've done two tours with this guy now and I still can't tell how aware he is of the fact that he's totally a bona fide heart-throb in the eyes of a large number of music fans across the country. With the screaming and the swooning and the HUNDREDS, if not THOUSANDS, of crushes than he'll never conceive of or know about... I don't know how aware of it he is, and I would like to get inside of his head one day and check out what's going on in there, but I know that won't happen. Hopefully, though, I will get to hang out with him a lot more before my own head calls it quits. Ben is using a Red Bull can for a microphone.



This is Jimmy. He does the programming and the electronic stuff for Postal Service. I had met him twice before this tour-- once when we played a show together in Los Angeles in February of 2002 and one other time when I was wondering the streets of Barcelona, lost, and recognized him standing in front of some hotel playing soccer with some other Americans. Jimmy is using an umbrella for a microphone, and there's a blanket over there on his right because he didn't want anyone else seeing his Cross-Eyed Crooner. I think this is probably the only time Jimmy ever did the Cross-Eyed Crooner.



This is Jenny. I don't know if she'd be offended by me saying this, but she is really normal for someone who has been in a bunch of movies and on TV shows. I mean, I'm from Baltimore and I buy magazines for the pictures of famous people, and she's from LA and gets phone calls from famous people, so my brain kind of assumed at first that her brain would probably work completely differently than mine. But my brain was kind of wrong, I think. She plays keyboards and guitars and sings for Postal Service and also has another band called Rilo Kiley. If you're reading this, you've probably heard of them because they're a couple times bigger than Cex (which is my band.) Jenny's got a water bottle for a microphone.



This is Li'l Rob, who did merch for the tour. He's a very unique person and definitely has the most disturbing Cross-Eyed Crooner. Rob and I clocked a lot of time sitting behind tables and counters selling kids CDs together, and I must say that doing the merch thing is a lot less boring with Rob around. He lets kids have it in a way that they don't really know they're being let have it, but also in a way that makes me crack up every time. It's kind of mean but that's OK, because Rob is just one of those guys who can pull it off. I don't know if you know one of those guys, but it's not weird when he's a little mean, because he's always in control and can polish off his surliness with this touch of humanity that shows that he really cares and is just having some fun with you, and that it's not your fault you're being fucked with, it's the state of the whole retarded world in general. He is using an invisible microphone.



So here is Nick, the man who invented the Cross-Eyed Crooner, and who really did the best one. But this isn't a picture of it. He was driving almost all the time so I never really got a chance to capture his Cross-Eyed Crooner on my digital camera, like these other pictures. You probably noticed that all the other pictures were taken in the van, which is where you could find us for most of the lit-up hours each day. Nick was our tour manager, which means he went and got the money and made sure everybody was in the van when the rest of us were completely not qualified to do either of those things (or anything else, which was the case after a lot of the shows.) Also, he worked the projections for the Postal Service's visuals. And, yeah, this is not his Cross-Eyed Crooner, this is some other guy he invented in the basement of the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis. He did this dance that made me LITERALLY piss in my pants it was so funny. He jacked up his pants and wriggled around and man, you should have been there.



This is me, my name is Rjyan. All of these other pictures are of people goofing around and looking gross on purpose, but this is how I look normally, like when I'm resting. It takes a huge amount of concentration to keep my face from doing this on its own, and I usually exert that effort when a camera is aimed at me, but this picture was taken oh whatever. etc, etc, etc.

Now that I look at this, I realize I'm about to pull some serious bait-and-switch on you here, because you may get the impression that this diary is about those pleasant-looking people in the Postal Service, but it's mostly about me. I hope that doesn't ruin it. If it does, email me and tell me. I won't reply to you, but you can rest assured I will feel real bad about it for a lot longer than I should. Mean or disappointed emails have a tendency to do that to me, which probably means I'm insecure. I'm working on it.

(oh man am I gonna get in trouble for these pics)

05/11/03 the cross-eyed crooner

So obviously I was in love with Cross-Eyed Crooner from the moment it was unveiled to me in the van, and I made Rob and Nick and Ben do it all the time and I laughed every time. Somewhere on the east coast I realized that it was inevitable that I was going to put Ben on blast and tell the audience to make him share the glory of the Cross-Eyed Crooner with the rest of the world. Because a thing like that... you can't keep it locked up, you can't keep it all for yourself. It's a beautiful thing and I wanted to share it.

I mean, but that's just me. At first I was like, "New York City: it will be big. I will make the show very memorable. I will unleash the Cross-Eyed Crooner and no one shall ever forget the day that Postal Service and Cex played in New York City."

But I didn't do it. I don't remember why. I think I was just generally not feeling either of the New York City shows too much. The first was too afternoon-y, and the second was just weird. And I had a migraine. But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.

So a few days after that I thought, "OH wait, I'll do it in Seattle. Ben's hometown. It will be good there because everyone will feel this sense of closeness and I will seal our closeness by cracking this inside joke open and letting everyone feast on the delicious goo inside."

And then we got to Seattle and I was sitting in a booth with Ben and Nick and all these Sub Pop dudes, and somehow the Cross-Eyed Crooner came up and Ben and Nick started doing it for the Sub Pop heads, and I was peeing my pants and I told Ben about my plan. I was like, "I wanna put you on blast." And he laughed.

So I did it, during the show I told the audience to make him do it somewhere in the middle of their set.

And they did. A few songs in, some kids started yelling for it. And the Postal Service dudes just laughed it off and kept going. And after the next song some kids asked again. They yelled out, "Cross-Eyed Crooner!"

04/05/03 when we went to tuscon

The night of April 5th, we stayed at the Hotel Congress in Tuscon after playing a sold-out show at a magical art gallery. Some kind of frat mixer was going on in the hotel's bar, and after our team watched two episodes of Hee Haw and finished the Smirnoff's left over from the show, we caught the final few seconds of party music before the frat DJ closed up shop and yelled about the last call. There were all these college kids dressed up in their underwear, and some of the girls had bunny ears on. Some very non-threatening looking guy in his underwear and a tie asked me where my territory was.

"Territory?"

"You know--- where do you pimp?"

It sounded like he was talking to me in secret code.

We were bummed about missing the frat mixer, but we moved on, taking it to the streets to look for snacks. Some girls from the show were staying at the same hotel--- they'd driven from some other town and got the room just to be able to see our show, which kind of blew my mind. Rob and I recognized them across the lobby so as we were leaving I motioned for them to follow and they did. Rob found out what their deal was while the rest of us got amped about the Cheetoes and microwavable cheeseburgers at this woefully under-stocked convenience store/internet cafe near the hotel. My brain almost exploded while I was standing in line to pay for my cheeseburger because I saw this Magic: The Gathering card taped to the glass in front of the cash register guy. I think he had taped it there because he was obviously conscious of me staring at the card and having my mind blown by it but he did that thing where he kind of ignored that it was happening even though he was obviously noticing. The reason my mind was being blown is because it was A) a Magic: The Gathering card that was being displayed in public, and not hidden. Hidden, because of the... you know, the shame. And part B) is because there was this quote on the card that said, "One wizard is a suspect. Two wizards are a conspiracy." Luckily no tattoo shops were open or close by because if they had been, there was a small but very real chance that I might have gotten that tattooed on me somewhere, that quote about the wizards. Wizards!!

After cooling off my brain, we stood around outside of the convenience store wondering what to do. An amazing idea came to me: we should get the new friends in on the slap game.



I think Lil Rob invented the slap game. In any case, after the Tuscon show, while Nick went in to check us into the Congress, the rest of us were out front in the van being totally amped because our second show was FULL of kids and completely awesome. Much better than the first. So Ben is in the front seat with "Carrot Rope" cranked up all the way, dancing like a spazz, while Rob, Jenny, Jimmy, and I are in the back seats counting to five and slapping each other in the face, hard, and trying to capture it on digital cameras.



I was totally stoked when I realized the next level of the slap game meant slapping & getting slapped by strangers. However, we accidentally ditched the strangers at hand--- the girls from the show. There was some thing where they told Rob that they wanted to show us a "secret" and Rob and I had a quick, whispered meeting and decided that it wasn't evil for us to at least find out what the "secret" was, and that if it turned out to be one of the things that we thought it might be in our heads, we could just bail and still not be evil. When we found out that the "secret" was a tater-tot hidden in one of the hotel's potted plants, that's right about the time that the accidental ditching occurred, I think.



On April 5th I ate two donuts (buttermilk and bavarian creme), a hot chocolate, home-cooked pasta, asparagus, a piece of blueberry pie, microwavable all-star jumbo cheeseburger. The songs I played at the show were called: Drive Off, Stop Eating, Ghost Rider, Kill Me, You Kiss Like, Stillnaut, Wayback, Bad Acne. I slept on the floor.

04/04/03 when we went to san diego

On April 4th, we laughed so much in the van. It was the first day of tour and I couldn't stop thinking this: "Everyone on tour in one vehicle is such a good idea!" Actually everything really about this tour seemed like a good idea. When I toured the midwest in the fall of 2000 with Kid606 and Gold Chains and the Blectums, and we were all in one minivan, and when Stars as Eyes and I toured the US in the summer of 3000 we both went in Steve Ferrari's Nissan, but since then every tour I've done has involved multiple vehicles. It was immediately comforting to think that over the next four weeks everyone on our team was going to be right there physically beside me every day. That sounds like a weird sissy thing to say but I felt really happy thinking about it on the first day of tour.

That night, at our first show in San Diego, the Postal Service blew me off the stage. I'm sure a lot people, especially those who have maybe never even seen me before or paid attention when they saw me before, will go "Duh," but still. I had what I thought was a good set despite an audience that seemed unusually intimidated by my confidence weapon (better that than unconscious of my confidence weapon, I guess?) but then the headliners rolled up and made me feel like the most amateur shit ever. There was just so much going on on the stage-- instruments! every instrument! I don't know how good I thought they were going to be but they were amazing, so amazing, and it made me feel megabehind on my hustle. But also happy that I was touring with a good band who I wouldn't mind seeing a few nights in a row.

The next day I sat on the curb outside of the motel while Ben talked on his cell phone and everyone else finished waking up. I wrote in my crazy book. I wrote: "Will I get the loneliness on this tour? I had bad thoughts, some panic, in my sleeping bag last night... but only briefly. I want to do a tour that doesn't have to be a life-changing experience. Just work. This is my work, I need to just work."

On April 4th I ate two and a half pieces of pizza, a salad, another salad, a shirley temple, some rolls, some trail mix, a Nestea, two Cape Cods, a shot of Skyy vodka, a lot of water. I slept on the floor and did not shower.

In San Diego I played: Wayback, Stop Eating, Ghost Rider, Kill Me, Wrist Elbow 2, Orgasm Headache.

04/05/03 already did this

04/06/03 when we drove through the southwest

I always have stressful dreams where I either lose my shoes or find myself suddenly without them, in bare feet.

On the morning of the sixth, we had a great breakfast at the cafe at the Hotel Congress-- the third great meal I've had at that cafe so far in my twenty-one years of life. Our waitress was this adorable blonde girl who had moved to Tuscon recently and I felt very patriotic looking at her. She had lived in Gaithersburg, MD and England. Before leaving town we hit up a Wallgreen's and I bought some black eye makeup and really tight red cheerleader shorts that say "Let's Roll" across the ass.

We had been invited the night before to go to a BIOSPHERE!, but it was an hour away from Tuscon so we didn't go. I made a note to myself to try and go to the biosphere next time I was in Tuscon.

I put on the red shorts and my red sleeveless muscle tee and rocked them at every rest stop we hit that day, including this famous rest stop in Arizona or New Mexico where they have a secret mummy called "The Thing" and you have to pay a dollar to walk through these long halls of mismatched wax exhibits about weapons and old cars-- you have to go through all this weird shit just to get to the very end and find out what "The Thing" is and it's a mummy. Well, it's a mummy holding a mummy baby, so I guess it's technically two mummies, but it's very weird and you have no idea when you pay the dollar that you have to walk through all these other exhibits behind the rest stop in order to see "The Thing," and when you finally do see "The Thing," it's really easy to walk right past it because it's not marked really well, even though that's the whole reason you paid the dollar.

Also at "The Thing," there was a pretty stocked knick-knack store, and Jimmy bought a realistic looking chicken sitting in a nest. I named it Henster McCluckcluck in tribute to the many animals who had graced the dashboard of Steve Ferrari's car on my tour last fall with Numbers and Stars as Eyes. Oh, how I miss Ratty White, Al E. Gator, and Robert Bobby Brown Jay Foxy Poo Brown (the dog). I miss Steve, too, who I've toured with twice, and visited a few other times.

Anyway, a couple people giggled but nobody talked shit about my skimpy red getup at any of the rest stops, which felt great.

I had showered the night before but my shoes smelled kind of bad in the van, and I felt embarrassed. When we finished driving and stopped at a hotel, I took a shower, MB'd in the shower, and then went to sleep on the floor. These are the things I ate on the sixth: saltines, Munchies (that's the name of some snack), Nutter Butter cookies, Wendy's Triple Decker burger, fries, an avocado/squash/Portobello omelet, toast, Chinese breakfast tea, orange Gatorade, a 32 oz can of Miller High Life, and some nuts.

04/07/03 when we went to austin

Part of the reason I guess I've never done a comprehensive (or even mildly adequate) tour diary on my own website is because tours are really fucked-up stories. (I know a bunch of you reading this could be people who go on tours in vans all the time yourselves, and I feel like I'm feeling you roll your eyes at me talking all "tour is weird!" because it sounds cheesy or whatever... but I guess I'm still under the impression that 90-some% (maybe 99%?) of people in the universe don't go on tours in vans all the time themselves, and in fact, up until 1999, the year I graduate high school, I didn't go on tours in vans ever myself, and since taking up this career path I've tried to find a pamphlet or handbook or something so that this crazy bullshit wouldn't seem so weird to me, but it seems like everybody just assumes that this crazy bullshit is just normal for us blessed musicianfolk and thus they kind of shrug it off like it's no big deal. Um, so my point is... put your eyes back in the front of your head, I guess.)

Sorry. So touring is a fucked-up story: it begins RIGHT AWAY, there's no build up, no rising action. I think there's a literary term for this... in medias res? That sounds like it might be right. Anyway, it's more like in CRAZIAS res because it starts right away, then it changes into something different -- TOTALLY different, with different people and place and scenery, everything but you is different. And you start being different, too, but it doesn't make any sense because usually you're doing pretty much the same thing every night: drive, go to a club, play a set, get paid. And even on a t-a-m-e tame tour like this one I'm writing about now, it's still sensory overload. We lit up about 0 afterparties, there was approximately 0 inter-band conflicts, and 0 people got scabies or had to get a emergency vd test, nobody broke an arm or threw meat at a naked lady, etc. And still, it's too much. It's too much. Last tour I did, last fall, I tried to deal with the "too much" factor as if it were a cold pool. I jumped right in all the way, dove down to the bottom, came up, wiped my eyes and told everyone else how awesome the water was. And I stayed in there, swimming around in the cold, cold water, smiling with chattering teeth.

This time, under the mature guidance of my friend Ben, we did the tour like where the pool is still really cold, and maybe everyone is kind of wordlessly expecting you to do the cannonball, but you just sit down and put your feet in the water and smoke a cigarette, and other people might get in the pool but you're just chilling, and nobody calls you on it--- nobody's calling you a pussy or telling you to get in, even though you think some of them are thinking it's weird that you're not jumping in. And then when you're done smoking the cigarette you just stand up, kick some water off your feet, and move towards the car.



On April 7th, after we arrived in Austin, I got new tattoos on my wrists-- male/female handcuffs I had drawn out in my crazy book the day before. Not a super big deal but I really like them. I also tried looking at some porn magazines that were in the van but it felt kind of like having a lit cigar at the gas station. I decided not to look at porn anymore on the tour.

On the way to dinner, Ben told me I smelled like a gutter punk.

Here is what I ate on the seventh: radishes, some beer, a shot of jaeger, a bowl of Thai pho seafood soup, two tofu egg rolls, a frozen ice cream snickers bar, gatorade, two Whataburgers, four chicken strips, and a chocolate malt. Would I believe someone if they sat me down and explained to me that I could never be great?

See, this is a super fucked-up story. It's day four and I already started freaking out a little. I mean, I didn't really DO anything, I just freaked out in my head and went to town in my crazy book. On day four, jesucristo. And there's nothing really in the other days so far that would lead into a freak-out, it was just me sitting there at the back of the Mercury, next to Steve Ferrari, who lives in Austin, and we're watching the tour's third sold-out show, with him asking me and me asking him, "Why does nothing about music make sense to me?"

Seriously-- what is it that's not working? What specifically is not working? All of it? The whole thing? Is there just a square peg in my hand that I don't know how to put down? Is this just out of my reach? Why does it feel so out of my reach...? I want to talk to just one person feels like they might have went through this -- this (mostly) politely ignored STENCH, this self-evident handicapped limping deformed fucking burning plumetting atrocious fuck FUCK FUCK FUCK

I make songs to try and say it but I feel like I'm still talking to myself
I figured it out, I'm never going to get rid of this doubt
Music doesn't need me I am the smallest sound
You tried what would anyone else have done was there anything you didn't do was there some way to turn your insides to english and you just missed it and never knew
and on and ON AND ON
my head is spinning, etc.

[I wrote some other crap about "my last album ever" here but I'm omitting it because it's retarded.]

Set list in Austin: Wayback, Stop Eating, Ghost Rider, Kill Me, Marriage Acapella, Wrist Elbow 2, Orgasm Headache.

If I were to think I could come through a magic hole for some kind of Beck ending, I'd be insane. I'd need pills. To know that there could be some end -- ANY end at all, just a place where my body stops moving and my organs aren't churning 1000 mph -- --- ----

So then later that night, after Steve and I got a bunch of Whataburgers and met back up with the Postal Service at the Motel 6, we were sitting around after Hee Haw and there was a commercial for water on TV. Jenny made a comment about how she hates drinking water and I was like,

"Oh my god! I hate drinking water, too! Everyone is always on my case about drinking soda and I just hate water. I mean, I like it for swimming and showering in, but--"

And then Rob cuts me off like, "Wait, you like showering?"

And I was all, "Yeah... what?"

And Rob was like, "No disrespect, you know I love you, Rjyan, but--- I really couldn't tell. Maybe you should..."

So I'm: "Are you saying I smell?" And I looked around the room for some help from somebody else, or at least a puzzled look or something, but it was a solemn scene. Everybody had Rob's back in a way that was a little bit more serious than I was really prepared for. I think somebody used the phrase, "Smelling up the van." I think. It kind of didn't seem real, but I guess it was.

It was freezing cold outside for some reason. I sat on the steps in front of the pool and called Indra Numbers on my cell phone. After we talked I went into "the loud room" and Ben and Rob were already asleep. I went to sleep on the floor again.

(Pretty much every night we divided up into "The loud room" and "The quiet room." Loud room was always Ben, Lil Rob, and I, and the quiet room was always Jimmy, Jenny, and Nick. Nick would usually count the money and do the figures in the quiet room while the rest of us kicked it in the loud room for a minute, and then Jimmy and Jenny would defect back to the quiet side and go to sleep. At some point on the tour --I think it was after Boston?-- Lil Rob and I figured out that the quiet room actually stayed up chatting later than the loud room did, and we started to think that "Loud" and "Quiet" were really euphemisms for "Chumps" and "Not chumps," respectively. We were jealous, we wanted to bond with the Not chumps.

But it wasn't really a big deal or anything. I don't think we were actually upset at all, we were just playing.)

04/08/03 when we went to dallas

I showered the morning of the eighth (obviously) and rubbed bacitracin on my wrists. I also took my money to a post office and bought a money order in order to pay the rent for March, April, and May. I scribbled out some financial projections for the tour and guessed I'm come out with something between four and five thousand dollars profit if the shows kept being sold out. It was a kind of wild guess, though, with very little fact-based number-crunching being done, so I decided to assume four thousand tops. Every tour I've ever done ends with a million more expenses being a million more expensive than you mentally accounted for, even though you mentally account very conservatively because you don't want to be shocked and disappointed yet again. But you always are, always. So this time I was assuming low but even still, "Four thousand! That's almost twice as much as I've ever made before on any of the other dozen or so tours I've been on!"



I still have the ratty pieces of paper that I did the final accounting for my fall tour on. Mike D, our tour manager, Miguel606, Indra Numbers, both Stars as Eyeses, and I all sat in a crepe place on the Piedmont while I worked the books over and over again, trying to find us some more money to take home.

Back to Crazy Randoms, though. Ideally, though, I was hoping I could come out with six thousand ---> two thousand to pay off my credit card (which had been buying me groceries for a few months), two thousand to pay off emergency tragedy loans from my father, and the last two to squirrel away for rent and pay for my share of the van we rented. I started making a dream list of gear I would buy if I had six thousand dollars just to spend on anything I wanted, just for fun though, because I knew there was absolutely no reason to get my hopes up higher than maybe paying off all my debt after this tour.

Sitting in the green room of the club in Dallas I doodled a stupid drawing of myself with bat wings that looked shitty. I also came up with idea for a tattoo of an odometer that I think I might try to actually get some time. I also wrote down the lyric to a Lync song, but I'm not sure why.

Stuff I ate in on the eighth: a strawberry lemonade, a vegan cookie, some kind of Odwalla shake, chips and salsa from the rider, baby carrots, soybeans, some sushi.

Set list in Dallas: Drive Off, Stop Eating, Ghost Rider, Kill Me, New Maps, Wrist Elbow 2, My Head, Cut Wrists.

The show itself had this highlight: this guy Chris rolled up and bought an armload of merch because he said he had been downloading my stuff for years and wanted a chance to directly support me. We talked for a while and he bought me two shots of goldshlager. I had already had one and a half Asahis before the show, a Smirnoff Ice (shut up, I like them), two or three Heinekens from backstage, and a Cape Cod that some other excited dudes bought me. Chris was great, though. He had a really good attitude about music, and about talking to strangers, which are both super important but surprisingly uncommon among kids that go to underground rock shows sometimes.