Groundhogs Day

 

It's Groundhogs Day today

So somewhere a young black man will be 

                     getting his teeth kicked in by cops

                     protecting and serving

It's Groundhogs Day today

So the desk clerk pretends not to notice

            the girl is too young to be his daughter

            the man is too old to be her father

            he looks mean and doesn't speak english

            so he pretends not to notice

It's Groundhogs Day today

So the pain doctor opens for business

           he suspects he's seen this man before

           he hurt his back how

           he was smith now he's o'brien

                    but he is open for business

                    after all it's Groundhogs Day

It's Groundhogs Day today

So somewhere a sick man counts the minutes

                         he's just trying to make it through today

                         his wife holds his hand

                                 she counts the minutes too

It's Groundhogs Day today

So a polluter gets millions

        while the local suits

                        who get thousands

         pretend not to notice all the sick kids

It's Groundhogs Day today

So the lying congressman ducks down a back hallway

           he's got no comment

           he's got no comment

It's Groundhogs Day today

So pop a quarter in a slot

            they're everywhere now

            because gambling will fix 

            what machine-gun ownership couldn't

It's Groundhogs Day today

      football manifesto

      modern Byzantine chariot wars

      divide

      control

It's Groundhogs Day today

                                   don't read

                                   absorb

                                   don't think

                                   react

                                   it's groundhogs day today

It's Groundhogs Day today

So we'll attend another funeral

                         he was too too young

                         he was a skateboarder too

                                      then we'll all go back home

                                      and get a good nights sleep

Because it's Groundhogs Day tomorrow, too.

2-1-2023

Watch out for the Murder Berries, though…

Cassandra and I were hiking on a lush trail in Glacier National Park when it happened. Now, ‘hiking’ is also known as a walk in the woods , just with sticks added.  This is our second year in a row of ‘hiking’ in GNP, so we’re definitely seasoned woodspersons at this point and our days of making stupid rookie mistakes are way behind us. For example, last year on our first trip up here to the crown of the continent, we stumbled upon this pipe that runs glacial water right out of a cliff face on the side of the road which is of some local notoriety apparently, and we saw some people filling up water jugs as we pulled up. Now, I don’t wanna sound like Donny Don’t, but drinking water coming out of a rock in the middle of a pandemic seems like not the best of ideas-which is pretty much what I was hollering to Cassandra as she trotted up to the rock faucet and took a huge gulp. She pshawed away my clucks of disapproval and was right as usual, since she’s sitting right here next to me now, not even so much as blinded by the cliff water. Now, I’m obviously glad she’s not blind but I am also kinda bummed to have missed out on the cliff water.

Today, we found what we thought were Huckleberries growing on the side of the trail. In case you didn’t know, yes Huckleberries are a real thing and taste amazing and grow seemingly everywhere up here in northern Montana, unlike Boysenberries which were created in a lab to boost flagging attendance at the lame-ass Knotts Berry Farm amusement park. “Huckleberries!” we exclaimed like delighted idiots. 

And, perhaps in a subliminal attempt to make up for the cliff water mistake, I popped a couple of the purplest ones right into my mouth before we even inspected them.  Cassandra was taking pictures of the ‘huckleberry’ bush and asked how they tasted. Now, by now I’ve had huckleberry candy, huckleberry iced tea, huckleberry pie, huckleberry cheesecake, huckleberry lemonade, and huckleberry barbecue sauce. But, the thing is, this didn’t taste like ANY of those. It tasted more like battery acid and melon rind.  I spit out most of it but had swallowed some already. 

Holy shit! 

Did I just eat poison berries??? 

I mean, I know I am a hypochondriac but that tasted nasty. And did my tongue feel numb? Or was that just the lingering terrible acid taste? I thought of Winston Groom choking down his Victory gin. Cassandra delicately chewed one and immediately spit it out, too. Not reassuring. 

Just then, a large group of teenagers jogged up. “Huckleberries!!” they shrieked. 

“These are huckleberries, right?” an earnest young man asked me, plucking a few.

“I don’t know…” I said meekly.

Good enough for him apparently, because he popped em right in his mouth. 
Immediately he spit them out, retching “those aren’t huckleberries!!” as he gasped and spit his way on down the trail.

Fuck, man; I thought to myself, that was a really REALLY stupid thing to do, eating that mystery murder berry. And usually my keenly-tuned senses of paranoia and hypochondria keep me outta fixes like this. 

Shitshitshit. 

I looked up at the alpine peaks all around, then down at my useless cell phone. The nearest hospital was hundreds of miles away, the nearest berry  poisoning experts might as well have been on the moon. 

Shit.

Cassandra laughed at me, reminding me that she also ate the murder berries (AND drank the cliff water, in her defense) and was completely fine. I grumbled that she was probably right, all the while silently knowing that her hearty Finnish/Sconsin DNA would power her through most obstacles that my candy-ass Sicilian/Suburban DNA would find fatal. I was doomed.

We pulled into our new favorite restaurant, Johnson’s of St Mary, a family-owned cafe nestled so quaintly in the mountainside that you expect Bob Newhart to come wandering out of the kitchen. If you ever find yourself up these ways, hit em up-tell them the berry-poisoning guy sent you. 

We went in and got a table, the waitress and cook/owner guy both remembering us and giving us a sweet table in the back. We compliment the owner/cook on his bear skin he has and he told us how that bear had been rummaging through the trash and scaring people and generally being too beary for a restaurant and how he had killed that bear himself. We asked how something like this goes down. He told us how he had to go to the Tribal game commission (he’s a Native and we were on Blackfeet land) and get permission from them. How long did it take after that? 

“Same day.” he said, grinning 

“Tracking is my superpower.” Anyone who saw this bear, or the next, scarier, blacker one he killed for similar reasons a month ago would readily agree with that statement. As we shared our Thimbleberry cheesecake,  he told us he had picked the berries himself.

Now, up to this point I had been able to allay my fear of impending berry-related anaphylaxis with unbelievably tasty food, but I whipped out my phone and showed him a picture I had taken of the murder berry bush and asked him what they were. 

Now this can go one of two ways, as I saw it. Option 1, those are just huckleberries but maybe you gotta wash em or boil em or some shit to make em taste so delectable, or option two-those are definitely Murder Berries and it’s all over now baby blue. 

Luckily for me, and by extension, you: option 1. 

Now there’s a moral kicking around in there somewhere and I hope I figure it out before I need Cassandra to save me from the next batch of murder berries or murder water or whatever other weapons Mother Nature has in her endless arsenal to use in the war she is waging against me. 

Good Luck and God Speed.

YOU’RE GOING TO DIE SOON

This hippie dude was holding my sweaty head in his hands and staring so hard into my eyes it felt like he was reading a grocery list off my retinas.  Plus, I had literally JUST finished playing a show-well, in this instance a livestream performance with a limited in-person audience; which counts as a show here in Our Pandemic Year and I don’t know about you, but I’m usually pretty mentally fuzzy for a minutes after playing a loud, sweaty rock and roll show, so this serious guy’s serious comment seemed like a scream from beneath ice.  

I tried to center my brain.

“Wait...what???” I stammered, hopefully politely.

He let go and stared at me with the kind of ferocious earnestness that only a genuine hippie can muster and repeated himself.

“YOU’RE GOING TO DIE SOON.”

I felt weird and violated a bit and thought that that was a weird fucken thing to say to someone, but people say weird shit to me all the time so I just tried to brush him off and turned to put away my guitar.  I looked at our bass player Roberto who is, generally speaking, one of the more stoic dudes I’ve ever known and the single raised eyebrow was also a bit alarming as he took this all in.

“Jeez, dude, alright...thanks...” I said and tried to turn my back to him but he parried my flanking move. 

“No, man, it’s cool-I’ve just never met one like you.” He said, unreassuringly, studying me as I tried to maneuver the stage area to put away my gear like I was the last condor on Earth or something.  Apparently sensing my trepidation, he tried to make me feel better by saying, “You ARE gonna die soon, but don’t worry. We all are.” 

Rob’s eyes widened a bit. 

This obviously didn’t make either one of us feel better.  Plus, this guy wasn’t some half-stepping mall hippie who lives in his mom’s basement-this guy was a for-real hippie who’s whole house (even the kitchen!) smelled like patchouli and he owned several of those metal bowl things that you rub with those metal pins to make ringing bell music and he definitely looked like the kind of dude who would know how to play them.  Having someone of his apparent metaphysical credentials tell you that your time on this mortal coil is drawing neigh carries a certain amount of weight, ya know??? 

Shit, I thought to myself, this hippie guy is a major bummer, I need to split before he starts reading my auras or trying to do phrenology on me. 

As I drove home, the weight of what this guy had said started really sinking in. Every passing car was only a lazy, mirrorless lane change from running me off the road, each semi truck I drove near could barely be more than a loose lug nut away from squashing me like a bug.  I’m admittedly, a little hypochondriackey anyway, so telling someone like me something like that is like giving a pyromaniac an unlimited gas card.  Obviously, I got home that night without fulfilling the hippie prophecy but it’s not like the story ends there...

PART TWO...???

Some time passes but I’m able for the most part, to shove my lingering unease with the hippiepunk guru’s prognosis for me to the rear of my mind.  Which is no easy task, believe me.  Not only do us hypochondriacs have to live through this pandemic and pretend it’s all fine and that we’re not completely mortified about every single thing every single day, NOW this dude is giving me a timeline??? Lame. 

But, like I said, some time passes and one afternoon I find myself in Chinatown.  I am in a mask, and it’s chilly so I gave a hat and jacket on, plus I’m wearing sunglasses.  I’m not intentionally in disguise, but this would do nicely.  I’m standing in front of a Chinese grocery store, amidst many Chinese people, when I SWEAR I hear someone call my name. My wife is in the store and it was a male voice and i don’t know anyone in this neighborhood, it was probably just the wind or something but I scan down the street in the general direction anyway.  In the crowd walking towards me on the sidewalk is a well-dressed, elderly Chinese man and his eyes are locked on me, as if he’d been looking for me as he walked down the street. I saw him from about half a block away and we stared at each other as he walked right up to me and stopped.

“You speak excellent English, correct?” The man said to me, in excellent English.

Why was he asking me this? How did he know I wasn’t Chinese? I’m completely covered, I could be anybody.  I didn’t want to say too much until I had a feel on where this was going.

“Ok, I guess.” I stammered. 

He grunted approvingly.

“I’ll see you soon, then.” He said with a clipping finality and turned on his heel and marched away with purpose. 

I stood there and watched him until he was out of sight, just to be sure. 

EPILOGUE...???????

I wasn’t sure if I was going to write these, how or why I would tell these two perhaps unconnected stories that have weighed heavily on my mind lately.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t still nervous about this (and a few other more minor incidents that seemed to portend ill towards my mortality) but what can ya do? 

I asked Sack, my buddy who’s also friends with the hippie guy if he could find out what that was all about and so he did and said that the hippie guy just wanted to “warn” me and THAT certainly didn’t make me feel any better. I was hoping he would say that he hippie dude was sorry and that he had gotten me confused with someone else and that my aura looked great and not to worry about anything.  

But he didn’t, so c’est la vie, I guess. 

Either way, I did quit smoking and that should make me feel better but it doesn’t.  I mean, why quit smoking if I’m about to drop dead anyway, right?  But I did it anyway.  52 days today and I don’t feel any better.  Fantastic. 

Ugh. 

Listen. 

If I do drop dead suddenly somewhere please know this: know that I had an incredible run, that I lived a FAR better life than a schmuck like me deserved, I was incredibly blessed with a wife I adore and a great family whom I love and got to watch expand, that I had amazing friends whom I was lucky enough to have countless mad adventures with, and that I wouldn’t trade a second of any of it for anything. 

And that that south side hippie guy with the bell bowls might know more than he’s letting on. 

The first time I ever ate a Krispy Kreme doughnut was out of a dumpster.  If they ever put out a checklist of Signs That You’re Really Punk, I’d like to make that my submission.  We were on tour in Gainesville, Florida; and I was wandering around the town with Ron in the middle of the night when we happened upon the Krispy Kreme shop.  They were open and we could have just gone in and mustered up the change to buy a couple, but when we saw the doughnut guy throw an entire garbage bag of donughts into the dumpster right in front of us, paying for them seemed kinda stupid. We snatched the whole bag of still-warm doughnuts (although, in Gainesville in August pretty much everything is warm and moist) and scooted back to the punkhouse we were crashing at. 

For the next few months, this became a thing for us. We were always broke, always hungry, always had a sweet tooth, and there were doughnut shops everywhere.  So, whether we were having a party or had no money for dinner-trips to the doughnut dumpster became an unfortunately semi-regular thing.  

Of course, when you are bringing home doughnuts by the garbage bag-full, you end up with an abundance of them laying around, getting gross in your already gross apartment (a quick note on the general hygiene angle of what I’m talking about here-usually the doughnut shops would just empty the racks right into a bag and you’d just have a bag of mixed-up, few hours-old, perfectly good doughnuts. But sometimes, they’d get sick of us lurking and would empty the coffee grounds or actual garbage into the same bag and we’d have to be careful.) so, we started finding other ways to use the extra doughnuts.  We’d give em to our friends, fellow dirtballs, local homeless types (like the ones squatting in the basement-but that’s a story for another time) but then we discovered the best usage of stale doughnuts-projectiles.

Believe me when I tell you that there are few things in life that fly as true, or splat as satisfyingly as a stale cake doughnut.  It started with winging them at each other or at stop signs or whatever, but it escalated pretty quickly to where when people came to our shitty punkhouse they were being greeted by barrages of doughnuts fired out the second floor window as they scurried to the relative safety of the porch.  It was like the scumbag storming of Omaha Beach.  

We were (are) really into 90’s gangster rap and probably because of that, and the fact that our band van had a sliding side door, the drive-by donughting was born.  We’d spend hours rolling around Wildwood with the headlights off, The Iceberg blaring on the boom box on the floor, waiting for some unlucky soul to be out.  It started with our friends, but after a while no one was safe.  We’d roll up next to the victim, throw open the van door and open fire.  Now, none of us are fucken Rollie Fingers over here, and they WERE just doughnuts, so on the off-chance one of you did once get hit by a flying doughnut thrown from a ‘77 Econoline, I do sincerely apologize. But that shit was HILARIOUS.  

We knew eventually we were gonna get into trouble for this whole drive-by doughnuting thing, and the events that had went down at Big Daddy’s party (which are DEFINITELY a story for another time) made me feel like we were pressing our luck with what had become a common way to spend the evening. (It became so common, I remember pulling up on a friend of ours who was out doing the same thing and getting into a full-on intersection food fight with him and his crew.)  But, just like in the movies, our crew wanted to go out with one last score.

There was this other group of local kids in our neighborhood who were kinda new-wavey and sorta ‘alternative’ but also, you know, kinda lame. Like, for example, a friend of ours used to break into cars and steal tapes all the time and he said that one time he broke into one of their cars and stole the whole shoebox full of cassette tapes but that they were all so terrible, he went back the next night, broke into their car AGAIN, and threw the tapes back into the front seat. 

We’d caught wind that they were having a party at one of their houses, and although we were pre-declined invitation, we decided to make an appearance anyway.

The album OG by Ice-T had just come out and had really, uh, blown fresh wind into the sails of our delusions.  As such, we knew it was time to let those suckas know whose (suburban) hood this was! 

We all were wearing all-black, had a fresh three bucks worth of gas in the van, and Midnight was blaring on repeat and we were most definitely in hats and hoods and in attack mode.  The dude whose house was hosting the party lived on a farm and they had a long U-shaped driveway, which as all you gangsters assuredly know, are optimal for drive-bys.  

We posted up on the corner and eyed it up.  There was a porch at the apex of the curve in the driveway with about 15 people hanging out on it.  We had three bags of doughnuts and malice on our minds.  It was time to move.

The whole thing happened kind of at half-speed.  We rolled up slow with the lights off and the porch people all kinda turned to see who this was and I threw the door open.

Never before or since have more doughnuts been thrown-in volume or velocity-at unsuspecting victims than right there that night.  It was like one of those Vietnam battle cams, everything in slo-mo, doughnuts flying, tables being overturned, girls screaming and everyone scattering as doughnuts exploded all around them like flak in the skies over London.  A pastry Valentine’s Day Massacre.  

We hurled empty all three bags in lightning speed, if these were guns we woulda melted the barrels-then threw the empty bags out the door onto their cars and peeled out of there as the new wavers screamed at us and I have never seen a single one of those people since. 

The End, motherfuckers. 

It’s not an Astrovan, Sir.

I wear a lot of hats in my life, we all do-but several of the hats I wear (delivery guy, street skateboarder, traveling musician) mean I probably have more contact with homeless folks than most people.  I’ve been homeless and it sucks. Even half-ass punk rock crash-on-friends-floors-or-at-worst-sleep-in-the-band-van homelessness totally sucks after a while, and being for real sleep-on-the-ground homeless is terrifying.  So, you know-be nice, right?  Pretty simple.  So, I always try to be nice to the homeless folks.  That said, nice or not-the last place I wanna ever find myself is getting beaten up by one of them. Which was precisely the situation Schatzie and I somehow found ourselves in one night on the streets of Denver...

Hanging out on the streets of Denver holds a special place in my heart.  I’m really into Kerouac and he started the majority of his road trips in Denver, picking up Sal and rampaging around on the same streets I’ve found myself rampaging around on on several occasions.  So, me and Schatzie are hanging out on the streets of Denver outside the club the Fastplants are playing that night, ruminating about hanging out on the streets of Denver and doing the type of things one does while ruminating and hanging out on the streets of Denver when this homeless guy approached.  He was sauntering slowly past the club giving everyone outside a nice, long, glare as he passed them.  And he was drooling.  He reached me and Schatz, who were leaned up against the band van and approached us purposefully, immediately getting waaay too close.  And, seriously drooling.  A lot.  

He then gave me the smelliest stink eye I’ve ever been on the receiving end of, and leaned in even a little closer and said, “That’s a nice Astrovan.” in the most accusatory fashion you can imagine.  Our band van is a clearly marked Ford Econoline and looks nothing like an Astrovan.  

“Thanks, but it’s an Econoline.” I said.

“WHAT?!?!” He yelled.

I looked over at Schatzie and he looked frozen.  Schatzie’s a great dude and one of my favorite people ever to travel with, but because of his charming, accommodating nature he’s not the type of guy whose likely gonna end up in a street brawl with a random homeless guy.  Nor am I, but suddenly-here we were.

“It’s an Econoline. Look.” I said pointing at the nameplate on the side.

“No, No, NO!” He howled, saliva spraying, “That’s an ASTROVAN!! My sister has one!!” 

Me and Schatzie looked at each other and did that shrug-with-your-eyes thing.  He moved in closer.  We backed up further.

Have I mentioned that this guy was drooling like crazy?  Because by now it was POURING out of his mouth.  I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.  It was like he had a faucet running through the back of his head that someone had left turned on.  

Ill be honest.  By now, I was super scared I was gonna have to fight this guy.  Like, he wasn’t leaving me much choice.  He kept stepping in closer, stammering and sputtering, fucken homeless guy spit flying everywhere.  And I’m a total germophobe.  Like, I use my own mic not because I give two shits about the sound of that mic but because I’m horrified by the notion of all the spit left behind on other mics before me.  So, this homeless guy is getting super aggressive and weird and me and Schatzie are kinda backpedaling around the van (which Marc was sleeping inside of at the time) and I’m thinking fuck, dude, I do NOT want EITHER this dude’s saliva NOR his blood anywhere near me but he won’t back off and it’s getting serious.   I started to do that mental thing when you know you’re gonna have to fight and it’s probably not gonna be go well but you start to think yourself into it.  Because, this particular homeless guy, in addition to being SUPER gross, was no withering daisy.  He was a good sized, stockily built dude who had a jaw that looked like it knew how to take a punch.  Shit.  Ok.  Well, here we go...

Right then, one of the homeless guy’s’ buddies appeared.  He heard the commotion from down the street and came to defuse the situation.  He distracted his buddy by offering him a dollar, which the guy refused.  Both things about that seemed odd to me, but me and Schatzie saw our opportunity and beelined into the club.   After a minute we peeked outside to make sure the guy hadn’t started to mess with the van or our slumbering Marc, but by then-literally less than two minutes-there were a bunch of cops and firemen surrounding a person in the middle of the street a little further down the block.  I couldn’t see who it was because of the cars, but when I saw all the cops put on rubber gloves, I had a good idea.  

So, long story short-I still hate dodgeball. 

Last Run

 I’m not a superstitious guy, generally speaking, but I also don’t like to flout that shit either-because you just never know. Like, when I see a penny I do pick it up in the often vain hopes that I will all that day have good luck. That said, have you ever heard about that whole ‘last run’ jinx? If you’re a skateboarder you know exactly what I’m talking about, but in case you’re still among the great unwashed who haven’t yet converted (and seriously, what are you waiting for? Skateboarding is the BEST.), there exists in our shared subculture a superstition that one should never say that they are taking their last run, because that is the run they will inevitably get injured on. True? I don’t know, but I do not remember finding any pennies on the ground on the day in question...

 I’m in Las Vegas on the first Fastplants tour out west. Me and Joel were hanging out with our friend Rob, who had relocated out there a couple years previously. It was the night after a killer show at The Dive Bar with Agent Orange and a skate contest-one of those shows you play that you know while you’re still playing it that you’re gonna remember this show for a long-ass time and we’d separated from the other dudes and gone out for lunch or something and we’re going to meet back up with the van for the next grueling death march of a drive (seriously the drives when touring out west are nuts, how the fuck did Lewis and Clark do it??) when Rob mentioned that there was a rad ditch along the way to the rendezvous point. Sounds great, I say, we’ve got time for one run.

If I had an echo effect that I could somehow put on those previous two words to truly impart their importance I would’ve turned it to eleven. Because, as I’m sure you’ve surmised, saying ‘one run’ is essentially the same thing as saying ‘last run’.

 So, we park and walk up to this ditch and I’m on tour with my band and things are going great and I’m skating this ditch in the desert with literally two of my best, oldest friends and it just can’t get no righter.

 It’s not just the distances that are bigger out west, it’s everything. When we crested the hill and this ditch came into view, it seemed to stretch out forever. It was big, steep, long, and scary as fuck, but also glassy smooth and had tons of flat to power slide yourself back under control, if ya start going too fast, so I was cautious but not intimidated, I’ve skated tons of ditches, man, I’m from the fucken Midwest! The land of serious water drainage issues. Plus, we don’t really have too many skateable backyard pools, so ditches are sort of our thing, right?

 Yeah, well, our Midwest ditches don’t go down the sides of mountains and send you hurtling along at literally eye-watering speed within two walls. I was headed into my third wall, a backside hit, and I was fucking FLYING but backside is super easy even at high speeds so I figured I’d carve this wall and power slide these fucken wheels down to the bearings and get shit back under control.

 I saw the rock for a split second before I hit it. A nice, round, little white one. Perfectly placed about a foot from the wall. My front heel wheel hit it and screamed and stopped and I didn’t and I hit that wall seemingly instantly. I had no time to react or prepare for the slam, it was like getting blindsided by a car. I went sideways into the wall and my body hitting the pavement made an unfortunate flopping, thuddy, slapping sound that I will never forget.

  I hit on my left side, knocking the wind out of myself, and immediately lost all feeling in my left side, and slid down the wall, unable to move. I could barely even breathe at first and tried to pull myself up but things were kinda misfiring all over my body. My head, left elbow, left knee, and left hip we’re on fire but the scariest thing I found as I was taking that post-slam injury inventory we all do was that it felt like I’d somehow broken my whole chest. I caught my breath as I stumbled around and my limbs regained feeling (dude, I slammed myself NUMB), but my chest HURT. Bad. Like, hospital bad. But, I’m on tour! And, fuck, I gotta meet the van and get back on the road, in like TWENTY MINUTES! FUCK!!

 I’d felt the ribs on my left side pop and I knew they were broken. I’ve always been super terrified about my appendix bursting (are there any superstitions to avoid this?), and it happened to a friend of mine and when I asked how he knew his appendix was gonna burst he said, ‘you’ll know’ and it was exactly the same with my ribs. There was no questioning that they were broken but since I could breathe relatively ok, they likely hadn’t popped my lungs, so it wasn’t gonna be life threatening. We did a little more phone research and realized that unless your broken ribs had pierced your lung, there’s not much a hospital is gonna do for you. We had seven shows left on this tour, I had two broken ribs and zero choice. We went to meet the van.

 Our drummer, Marc, is an EMT and all-around lifesaving kinda dude, so I knew I was in good hands. He said i should ‘tape up those ribs’ but i didn’t really know what he meant and figured he was just being overly cautious, so I just took a bunch of ibuprofen and tried to get somewhat comfortable for the long drive to Tempe. I was miserable but no longer worried about dying. That show in Tempe was this weird all-ages thing in this super dingy basement of a super dingy club with no air conditioning. In Tempe. In August. We all pounded as much water as we could to prepare but we knew this one was gonna be rough. The dudes helped me set my guitar stuff up and got me ready to rock and we were about to start when Marc looked at me across the top of his drums and said, “Did you tape up your ribs?” I’ll be fine, I told him, I’m just sore. He looked at me quizzically, like he didn’t understand what I was saying.

 And I did think I’d be fine. Soreness is no biggie, I’ve played shows in way worse shape than this. I had neglected to take into account the impact doing things that involve taking deep breathes has on broken ribs. Things like singing in a rock band.  I literally inhaled to start the first song and knew I was screwed. Pain TORE through my left side and I swooned and the edges of my vision got black and fuzzy. I tried to squeak out some lyrics as I looked at Abe, he saw the panic on my face, and immediately took over lead vocals-it was a totes pro move on his part.

 We finished the set. Abe sang every song by himself and tore it up but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him more gassed after a set. We all were spent. But-the show did go on.

 And, following Marc’s advice, we wrapped Ace bandages around my chest super tight every night backstage before we played and you’re goddamned right that show went on-that show went on six more fucken times and we all got home in one piece.  More or less. Fuck yeah.


 (I’ve been skateboarding since I was 12 and that injury at that time at that age should be my worst skate injury story, but THAT story wouldn’t happen for another seven or so months-right around the time my ribs finally felt healed. But that’s a blog post for another time.)

9-10-19

Johnny Sampson’s mom was our unofficial authority on Wildwood history as well as all things spiritual/spooky, so when she told us about the Indian meeting spot on Old Gages Lake Road and how it was haunted around there we believed her implicitly. Still do, to this day. So, when I saw the garbage can morph into a deer on the side of the road there, and almost hit it all the while thinking ‘wouldn’t it be weird if that garbage can was really a deer?’ and it turns out it was and I almost hit it with my 89 Renault Alliance that had neither a key ignition, drivers side floor, or fourth gear and which would’ve really cashed that car out, I just chalked it up to the haunted corner. It was pretty weird, but kinda bush-league weird. Like, whatever-you couldn’t tell that thing was a deer. Big whoop. Big whoop, indeed. After a few weeks of my haunted corner (it’s not really a corner, more of a bend in the road, but for brevity’s sake...) garbage can/deer story falling with a thud amongst the various Wildwood party aficionado crowds, I was going home one night in the aforementioned Appliance and it was super duper late and spooky, kinda cool and foggy, real Camp Crystal Lake weather, and I was thinking to myself, ‘wow, what a spooky night’ when my headlight which pointed down the road (the other pointed at the sky due to a fender bender and general lack of knowledge regarding the role of those screws that surrounded headlights back then) caught something in the distance. NOW. This, THIS, is the point of this story where I have to assure you that what followed is in no way made up, embellished, or a hallucination-this shit really happened. Like I said, it was kinda cool and foggy that night, and it was one of those nights where it’s cool enough to make that weird windshield condensation thing happen that you can’t defeat, especially when your car defroster has never ever worked even for one fucking second especially when you really need it to and instead you have to keep the wipers on and kinda keep looking out the drivers side window? It was that kinda cool and foggy. In the distance, on the outer edge of the opposite lane was what appeared to be a person shuffling along. Wearing all white. I slowed way down, initially thinking that no one but a complete weirdo hoodlum would be wandering around on the side of Old Gages Lake Road at 4 in the morning and since I’m friends with all the local weirdo hoodlums, I figured I must know him and would offer him a ride back to his mom’s house. As I coasted up with my head out the window, about to holler at them, I realized it was a dude. A big dude with long, black hair. Wearing what appeared to be white hospital scrubs. And no shoes. I was a bit taken aback and as I coasted up next to him and could see his face I saw that he kinda resembled both Andrew W.K. and/or Kevin (Big Daddy) Kane, but he was neither. I had come to almost a complete stop and was just about to offer a lift when the turned suddenly-in total horror movie lurching turning the whole shoulders and not the just the head way-spun to face me and-I SWEAR TO GOD-growled like a tiger and started to run towards me hanging out the window! Now, I don’t know if you’re a motorhead or a car aficionado, but in case you’re not, Renault Alliances were not revered for their acceleration but I floored it anyway, shrieking like a ten year old girl as this wandering lunatic charged me and ACTUALLY GOT HIS HANDS ON THE DOOR HANDLE. I lurched the car to right and his hands slipped off the handle and the whole time he was GROWLING AT ME. I lurched the now actually moving car back off the opposite shoulder and onto Old Gages Lake Road and took the hell off as he stumbled and fell. I keep the foot to the floor and literally never looked back. So, I don’t know... Escaped mental patient? Local, oddly-dressed eccentric? Drunk doctor? I really don’t know. But, I DO know that all this happened EXACTLY at the spot where the two angled trees meet-the fabled old Indian meeting ground that Jonny Sampson’s mom told us about and that we called the haunted corner. I also had a really weird run-in with a tow truck driver in that exact spot but that was less likely to lingering malevolent Indian spirits than it is my having been a teenaged schmuck and either way that’s a story for another time.