last night i saw the alphabets live.

seattle has much to offer. there is good coffee everywhere, there are branches of the public library that have bathrooms from the future, there are quirky music stores that let medicore bass players noodle around with expensive pedals that make medicore bass players sound less mediocre and more like powerhouses of virility and funkiness. there are omelettes with goat cheese and carmelized onions. there is a needle from space that bill gates uses to knit cosmic hand towels for the bathrooms from the future. seattle, to me (being from portland), is like the cool cousin that hooked you up with warm beers from your uncle’s garage when you were 14. seattle, the adopted home of the alphabets, is a fine last stand. seattle is our own hadrian’s wall. now we plunge into the abyss, like ed harris before us. this is, in fact, possibly the last time on this tour that any one of us will draw analogies to both the roman empire and pre-titanic james cameron films in the same breath. tonight we must pack the van with style and discipline, and make the first of many marathon drives eastward. bets are being made on individual freak-outs. i am seriously wondering whether or not my grand plan of cooking on the road will not result in some sort of awkward and humiliating disaster.

say what you will about the four men that make up the llc, but we are nothing if not a united front against absurd and baseless apprehensions about my abilities as highway chef, our collective inexperiance with the camping we have planned, dave’s sporadic explosions about internal politics regarding the hoodie situation, misha’s deteriorating mental health, and nitzan’s cabin fever when it comes to long stretches of driving without music or any real conversation. in spite of all this, we will continue to post rambling blogs while watching football and we will continue putting on the most potent live show we can.

the alphabets have lit a fire under our asses, and we must answer not with the water of shoe-gazing but with the gasoline of flailing-limbed rock.

and love songs.