Listening to the new Underworld album right now and really digging it. I mean, really digging it. You, the reader, should forget about us and get rabidly into Underworld as soon as you possibly can, because they’re really just uncomfortably good at what they do, which is breathing life into otherwise soulless machines and rocking you stupid using only four hands and a laptop.

Us three are driving through Missouri right now, where I just found out I’m kind of from, on our way from a noon show in Kansas to a maybe house party in Illinois before we redescend on Wisconsin and rock the hell out of a slightly different part of it.

The tour thus far has been everything we hoped for and then some. Twenty-six days in and we have still yet to pay out of pocket for a night’s lodging. Eighteen individual states as of this afternoon, and at least twice as many eerily solid friendships formed therein. Tales of reckless indulgence without number, most of them too bawdy by half for your collective virgin ear.

But every road has its toll, to horribly misquote Poison. Band literacy has taken a backseat to SportsCenter, and we haven’t done so much as a situp since Tulsa. I’m about as sick of Subway value meals as I am of this week’s shirt, and the van is developing its own heady and distinctive musk despite our repeated requests for it not to.

No real moral to be gleaned from this, just thought I’d share. Fall should be here in a matter of days. Hope you’re all well.

Just wrapped up the second of five regional NACA conferences in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Strange little parallel world they have out here. For those of you not in the know, NACA stands for National Association of Campus Activities and is a centralized organization through which college events (lectures, concerts and the like) get booked on a region-by-region basis.

It’s a weirdly festive meat market that has us going back and forth between loving ourselves and wanting to wash every inch of our being with the soap of Valhalla. We’re getting free shows from truly incredible entertainers and meeting new friends that we’re going to stay in touch with for the rest of our lives. We’re also whoring ourselves out to total strangers and standing around awkwardly at hotel parties while middle-aged bush league booking agents try to get in the pants of student activities commissioners young enough to be their daughters.

But the bilan seems positive on the whole. Hard to complain when you’re staying at the Doubletree, even if it’s only on the floor of some guy you barely know. Onward to Kansas and the land of “lamb fries”.

We just played a two hour show on the surface of the moon. The stage was technically inside Eastern Tennessee State University’s student union, but between the high-powered flood lights, the in-space-no-one-can-hear-you-scream acoustics and the still unexplained house-sized granite outcropping that occupied roughly 1/3 of the venue, we could practically taste the Tang.

The rest of Tennessee has been kind of a blur. There was a midday dip in Lake Boon, some sweet tea, some Cheerwine, Vernon’s forty-five minute lesson in southern rock history…now we’re all sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop, holed up in our ridiculously nice hotel rooms and debating how many towels we should steal.

“Hitchhiker’s Guide…to the Galaxy? Because what you want is the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, that’s the newer one with the Dr. No interior, that lets you travel through time.” ( – Vernon)