It’s been a long week to begin with, for me at least, juggling simultaneous and often contradictory needs to generate income, prepare for half a month on the road, keep a number of key relationships in my life from falling apart, and somehow dig 40 or so hours out of what’s left to give fully to the LLC. Lots of airports, lots of hamburgers, lots of sunrises.

So by the time we got into JFK on Saturday, I was already exhausted. We were all kind of wandering around New York like zombies, and the question was, are we going to be fun, quirky Evil Dead / Shaun zombies, or are we going to be filthy, slavering, must-be-destroyed-at-all-costs Romero and Rob zombies?

History may call me a liar, but I think we were the former. Tribeca was like a shotgun blast of rock salt into the bare ass of a masochist. That’s a picture of Throwback joining us for our closing song, and damned if we don’t all look happy. Especially Nitzan.

We hung around the city for a day of recovery, then rolled Columbia-like up to Boston, where, thanks to the inimitable Paul D and Abbey P, we joined forces with The Alternate Routes and laid waste to four and a half blocks of Commonwealth Avenue. Jack managed to break a bass string, it was that intense. It was hype.

The next day, because we really can’t be bothered with playing a full week’s worth of shows in seven days, the four of us took a quick ferry to Martha’s Vineyard for some oysters and our very first celebrity yacht party, which was so exciting that Nitzan and I took a full day to realize how utterly chewed up we got by the mosquitoes of Edgartown, but at that point there was nothing we could do. We were already in Connecticut, rocking the infraburbs with E Hutch and A Rose, and the humidity had finally committed to that last percentage point between sticky and full-fledged monsoon, so we focused all of our attention on staying alive as we finished the show and headed back to New York for a second night with the Routes at Tribeca’s famed Knitting Factory.

This was the night that I picked to get drunk, so all I really know is that I woke up at a friend’s place in Chelsea and somehow made it back to the rendezvous point by eleven.

The band shed a collective tear as Crif Dog and Two Boots receded into the distance, but Capitol City USA was in dire need of our attentions, and as we rolled into Jammin’ Java’s now-familiar strip mall parking lot, we realized with a start that this was going to be our last show together until the end of the summer, what with our respective vacations and all, so there was zero margin for error. If any one of us so much as missed a note, he would lose a finger. (Management’s rules.)

Thankfully, The Great Hutch and Down Dexter set up us the bomb, whose shock waves we rode happily into the sunset, and by the time the house lights came back up at 11:15, we had somehow managed to navigate yet another dwarf tour to safety, and we were so happy that we chewed our new orange gum until it literally fell apart in our mouths, and then everybody went home and slept.