do you remember popples? they were these stuffed animals that were seperated from your average stuffed animals by virtue of being able to fold them into themselves, making a sort of ball that inevitably got peanut butter stains on it. maybe it’s the new fully-loaded ipod, maybe it’s the 9 days in new york, maybe it’s the fact that i’ve been sick, but some combination of factors has caued me to fold inward and spend an unusual amount of time wandering around by myself, combing over street vendors wares that i will never buy and sipping cup after cup of coffee. whatever the hell that means, i’m not quite sure where i’m going with this. moving along, then…

we are in the twilight of the tour, and the potion of emotion that this reality is mixing up is bittersweet. Going out with a bang still entails going out, and the men of the llc are hard at work trying to come to terms with this. the best way invlolves belle and sebastian, smooshing cock-a-roaches, watching rome, talking to lisa, and digesting berber-style chicken in alphabet city. in all seriousness, it is very surreal being at this stage, sort of like being on the cusp between scorpio and sagittarius, i would imagine. i feel very much like i’m graduating high school again and getting ready to go to college and i feel sort of weird about that. the fact that i have been sick for the last three days and am currently pretty doped up on sudafed pm is clearly affecting my ability to post anything of any real merit, and bearing that in mind, i would ask you all to forgive me for serving up such a tedious journal entry. i promise to return when this whole mess has bled out of me and i am once again back to my normal witty and concise self. i hope you all sleep well.

robert, bless him, has left the last coat of paint and the finishing layer of polyurathane until tomorrow. the table will go unfinished this evening, but on the other hand, speechwriters llc will not choke to death in an apartment three floors above brooklyn’s famous soda bar.

we came back to new york from connecticut, and during that time i have had issues with my subway club card in the middle of nowhere, bantered with two canadians fresh from jamaican showers, eaten a fair amount of turkey and falafal, drank gallons of coffee, had a revelation that involves short story compilations by nabakov and saul bellow, turned 26 years old with a small (but cozy) amount of fanfare, fully committed to salsa lessons, and plundered the vaults of some branch library on 53nd street for a series of lectures on winston churchill. the cherry on top is, of course, the shows we played in long island for a sum total of six people and a dollar’s worth of ten cent buffalo wings, and at the aforementioned soda bar, where dave and misha got drunk and dusted of songs we haven’t played in a full nine months to the joy of a handful of people and the confusion of everyone else. it has been a marvelous couple of days, days where i have been able to start off with variations on my famed powerbowl breakfast. days where i have spent hours wandering around bookstores and, for the first time in a long time, restrained myself therein. days where the constant question that soul asks mind which in turn asks body, “is this what i’m doing with my life?”, has been answered with an authoratative “yup”.

misha has apologized about the blogging issue on behalf of all of us using his trademark method of both being very sincere and drawing sort of weird parallels to trees or something, so i won’t dwell on it here. i figure it’s best that we just move on.

that being said, i should like to mention that i lost the dice roll and had to go move the van this morning before the street cleaners came and ticketed us, and i am typing this as the band sleeps warm and safe and blissfully unaware, as yet, of how bloody cold it is outside. we are all, as men, at varying degrees off being unhinged at this point. i am drinking piping hot thera-flu out of a mug from the future in an attempt to beat back the advancing, swollen-throated army of sickness from the borders of my health. you should all be aware that futons are not see-saws, although they can be used as one in a pinch if you don’t mind accidentally dumping a snoring dave lowensohn onto the floor. it’s hard to beat good turkey sausage. the sox will be all right in spite of theo leaving(!), the bleak pitching situation, and the apparently imminent departure of manny ramirez, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not okay to wring your hands in and shed very masculine baseball tears, because it is, no matter what your bandmates say so fuck it, we still have varitek.

thank you everything, everyone. it was a wonderful birthday.

i’m composing this post on nitzan’s behalf by using the wireless capabilities and built in browser of our psp. this is both very cool and profoundly weird. we are spending the night apart – as has become the norm in beantown -and i hope that wherever they lay their head and wherever you lay yours on this cold, clear night, that we are the stronger now that dave has finally played a show while sporting a fake mustache.