Szcz??liwy Dzie? Niezale?no?ci!

That’s how you say “Happy Independence Day” in Polish. At least, that’s how we think you say it. Nobody in New York seems to know, or care, that tonight marks the 87th anniversary of Jozef Pilsudski‘s ascension from incarcerated Brigadier General to free-standing Commander in Chief of the once and future Poland.

Between our combined bloodlines and strategic political allegiances, Misha and I consider ourselves to be at least 30% Polish, out of a possible 200%. As a result, Misha’s been on the phone with every halfway Slavic public house from Green Point to White Plains, and I’ve been scouring the internets with a ziemniak comb, all in a futile attempt to find someone outside of this band to celebrate the holiday with.

We have so far found Lisa Toff.

This is a sad state of affairs. Don’t get me wrong – we love Lisa to death and treasure every golden moment spent basking in her love light, but she does not a Mazovian diaspora make. The official explanation we’ve been getting is that the holiday went underground during the Cold War, so nobody really knows how to celebrate it. We as a band are calling bullshit on this. IT’S INDEPENDENCE DAY. YOU’RE EASTERN EUROPEANS. At the risk of perpetuating unfair ethnic stereotypes, FUCKING HAVE SOMETHING TO DRINK, AND MAYBE ENGAGE IN SOME LIGHT, GOOD-NATURED PROPERTY DAMAGE. I mean, it’s November, guys. It’s cold. You kicked out the Germans. Let’s have us a pilsner and talk ‘stache maintenance, what do you say? Maybe light a trash can on fire? I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Dobranoc,
Dilnius

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.

Once, when I was a young and punk kid, I got into a fight with my parents and ran away. I only made it across the street and three branches into a tree. My sister was sent out as the diplomat (to negotiate and allow me to maintain my dignity). After being reassured that my family would miss me if I decided to live in the tree permanently, which was, in my mind, a realistic option, I climbed down, cried a little, and came back in for dinner.

We’re sorry America. We had a little blog freak out. We climbed a few branches into an internetless tree and refused to get down. As soon as we got up there, we were lonely and missed you. We hoped that a diplomat might come and tell us we were missed too.

We checked our email today and found this:

“Why don’t you blog? First you leave your fans for months at a time, then you
don’t write in detail about what you’re doing. Are you cheating on us with East
Coast fans?? I can’t believe we trusted you. It’s so over. Wait, no, I’m
sorry baby, I only said that cause I was angry. I take it all back. Except
that you should blog”

Thank you, anonymous fan, for getting us through our freak out. America, we’re back, and we’ll be with you till the turkey hits the table.