If anyone’s compiling a list of things that sound like good ideas but aren’t actually good ideas when you wind up doing them, I would add the one where you take an adult dose of NyQuil, put a Stephen Hawking audiobook on the stereo, and then try to do anything other than stare at the ceiling and think about how small you are.

I’m sick with the plague this week, having just got back from a legitimately insane five days in Oregon with Jacky Maff and the P-Town Handsaw Massacre. There were hitched rides on private jets, days on end without sleep, the tying up and unraveling of a thousand loose ends and Gordian knots, and at least two counts of breaking and entering with the intent to steal back a disco kitchen, all of which succeeded, somewhat, and pretty effectively sucked the next week’s worth of life out of my body.

And yet, I somehow managed to find my wallet and get on a train in time to catch Kathleen Edwards at the Knitting Factory last night. I know, hold your applause. I was fully intending to challenge Colin Cripps to a duel, but my God, he’s so fucking cool:

He’s just so fucking cool. I hope he and Kathleen are still touring when my hearing starts to go, so I can just stand in the middle of the front row with my earplugs out and have that be the last thing I ever hear in my life. Further proof that Canada shoots cannonballs so big, the rest of us think they’re moons and laugh at them (Canadians) for not getting it. I apologize with wrung hands and wandering eyes to every Canadian I’ve ever wronged. I even forgive the one who stole the prescription sunglasses out of my car while completely ignoring the envelope full of twenties they were resting on, hog-stupid as his Canadian ass was.

I’m going to go curl up by the heater now and pretend that I don’t have to work for an insurance company in ten hours.

history is a crazy thing.. as i get further away from my college experience, i am realizing that studying the actions that people took before us is probably pretty worthwhile (which is silly, because when i was in school, i was all about current issues). to use a nautical metaphor, today, right now, is the surfacing edge of history’s iceberg and, as dicaprio and dion emotionally proved, bad things happen when all you see is surface.

did you know that when gorbachev instigated glasnost (which literally means “public voicing”, according to my google search) in the U.S.S.R. in the late 1980’s, all he was looking for was a breath of less stale air within the communist framework? let a few newspapers run opinon pages and that sort of thing. i feel like i was brought up on the idea that he was a revolutionay, when in fact he was a fairly conservative politician who unwittingly started the leak in the dam.. (amazing how dams break so well, how entropy rules atoms and empires and everything in between).. within a few years, the republic he had ruled was gone.. crazy shit.

i’m not sure that you can defy history, individually or collectively, try as you may

Today’s big news is that we are now officially a quartet.

We’ve sort of been a quartet before, but rarely for more than three or four days in a row. This time it’s for real. We have, from left to right:

MISHA CHELLAM – Guitars, vocals, menswear.
JACK MAHAFFY – Bass guitar, egg, band chef.
NITZAN LUMER – Drums, location, vertical game.
DAVE LOWENSOHN – Band stenographer.

We’re pretty excited about this. Nitzan in particular, as he’s the newest addition and we’re still sort of in that honeymoon stage where he can do no wrong. Jack feels spurned by this and keeps trying to kill him at practice. It’s a fun time for all of us.