I don’t want Otto to die

May 31, 007
SF

We need an Otto when the shit hits the fan. He’s been in nine wars, he says. He’s seen more bad things than anyone you know. Done more, too.

As Michelle Burke told me the other night while peeling rutabagas — who eats rutabagas? — we are the Land of Broken Toys.

And Otto is one of the most broken. And he will tell you that himself.

Otto is a chain-smoking Viking warrior. A beat-to-shit, impossible-to-kill Marine with a thick veneer of caveman letchiness and excessive talkativity covering a missile-quick mind and an enormous bloody beating heart. He would literally snap someone’s throat if they ever dared hurt one of his friends.

Maybe that’s why I don’t want Otto to die. My own interest in self-preservation.

our Palindrome von Danger, sawing things and not people, which is good

Otto is fond of saying that if he hadn’t met all of us, all the BRC-DPW and the larger community of Burning Vacation-going art freaks in the Bay Area, he would have killed himself a long time ago. He likes to speak in hyperbole, but on this one, I believe him.

Saturday night, at Chicken John’s Lost Vegas at Ace Drunkyard in San Franpsycho, for the finale, Otto von Danger will jump a flaming ramp of death. On fire. Over cars? There are varying reports. I still can’t figure out if Otto will be the one on fire, or if the ramp will be on fire, or if there be a wall of fire through which Otto jumps the Harley. Or if they’ll pour gasoline on the ramp and all over Otto and start playing Black Sabbath and hand him a strike-anywhere match and see what happens.

All I know is I have to be there.

It’s probably just another one of Chicken’s bait-and-switch things, right? Some gag like the Bike Rodeo does in our “five cars on fire” skit? How we build a tiny ramp and douse it in lighter fluid and put five little Matchbox cars on a flaming paper plate in front of it? … Like how Chicken would get everybody in the tent at Cirkus Redickuless and talk up the “Man-Eating Chicken” and then Jarico would come out eating a bucket of chicken … right?

It’s Otto’s birthday today. The party tonight at American Steel might be his last.

But I really hope not. We need an Otto.

—–

P.S. Wheelgunner’s in Iraq right now, I think, so who’s bringing the flamethrowers?

P.S.S. I don’t even want to talk about the possibility that the drunkyard might be closing. Cyclecide has our headquarters there. Really — today, I just can’t think about it. Like Scarlett O’Hara, I’ll think about it tomorrow.

Not totally in love, but Gordon Lightfoot is… (sigh)

May 30, 007
SF/Oakland

So we’re sitting around the bar at N.I.M.B.Y., as I said, listening to butt-rock. Which was fine for a while until they played the third Jimi Hendrix song in as many hours, so someone changed it to K-PIG.

“Isn’t that the station all the old hippies in West Marin listen to while they’re farming wheatgrass and committing fashion crimes?” I said something like.

“Maybe,” the lawyer in the room said, “but ever other song is about drinking beer, so the station stays.”

Agreed. We commenced to chatting again, loudly over the songs about beer (he was right), and then a voice, a voice made of molasses and testosterone, sonorous, heavy with weariness and wisdom … we all shut our holes, quiet and still as church ladies, and cocked our ears to the preacher on the radio.

“Sundown, you better take care if I find you’ve been creepin’ round my back stairs… / Sometimes, I think it’s a sin, when I feel like I’m winnin’ when I’m losin’ again … ”

We looked at each other, deciphering. Who is this, we asked with eyes only. Nobody wanted to break the voice’s spell. Then the moment was over, and we all started chickenheading again — this time about who the hell that was. Englebert Humperdinck? No. Eddie Rabbitt? No way. Kris Kristofferson? Too smooth. Eric Clapton? Certainly not.

It was Gordon Lightfoot. I don’t know why I’ve never really focused my attention on him, but as a music nerd, I live for moments like this. Times when I find a new thing, and like love at first sight, I’ve got to have it and know everything about it. Times when a composition meant to be haunting actually haunts a room full of loud-ass clowns beerily squawking in a cavernous warehouse with heavy machinery clanging and buzzing in the background.

his middle name is Meredith — so you know he’s been through some shizz

I went home and looked Gordon Lightfoot up on Wikipedia, and studied up and listened to samples of his other stuff. Turns out he wrote a million hits for everyone you’ve heard of, and finally got his kudos in 1971 with his own voice and HIS band and HIS engineers. That must’ve felt good.

And then since he’s a baller, he attracted the attention of Cathy Smith, who previously had gained notoriety as a groupie for The Band. She got her some Gordon, and … well, did he love her, or was she stalking him? Did they get in a fight? Was he fed up with her antics? She, his? “Sundown” doesn’t really let us in on that.

She must’ve been a pistol, though, that’s for sure. I wondered if The Band’s “Cripple Creek” is about her. Or “The Weight (Take a Load Off).”

They sent her to prison for a year and a half. All for being a good groupie and doing just what John Belushi wanted. And what he wanted, in that bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, was another speedball. That’s heroin mixed with cocaine in a needle up your vein, for all those readers out there in blissful-ignorance-land.

I want to meet Cathy Smith. I bet she’s got some stories to tell. Her Wikipedia entry is even gnarlier than Gordon Lightfoot’s. What a resume.

Everyone calls her a groupie. I think that might be bullshit. Dismissive. Incomplete as a definition. I think she was more like a “flashlight holder,” which is my and Linda’s term for any girlfriend of a crazy mad scientist or artist who accidentally lets herself get caught up in their significant other’s psychic windstorm and forgets about her own art and her own life. We will never be flashlight holders, Linda and I vowed a long time ago. We’ll hold the flashlight for you while you work on the bus or pick the lock or do the thing, sure, because nothing is hotter and more of a turn-on than a guy who can and does do stuff … but we’ve got our own flashlights too, and sometimes, you’ve got to hold THEM for US.

I will now go out into the world today, no doubt thinking ceaselessly (again, just like yesterday too) of Cathy Smith, and of Gordon Lightfoot, and what happened in his bedroom (no doubt, or maybe some motel suite) the first time he sang that song for her.

Container? I don’t even know her

May 28, 007

So yesterday, Memorial Day, I’m riding around with Snook and the boys in the Deuce, which is a giant decommissioned military vehicle meant for carrying around tons of weapons and marines and shit. But Snook uses the Deuce to camp out and barbecue in the Desert and hand out beers to dirtbags in. We’re going through Oakland, from the N.I.M.B.Y. warehouse to the Shipyard to see the destruction, and random pedestrians and fellow petroleum vampires are waving hello despite all their best efforts to look cool and over it.

Apparently, at the Shipyard, there were a couple containers welded together on the top layer, above 2 other free-standing containers on the bottom, and the top layer needed to come down in order for Jim Mason and company to comply and play nice with the City of Berkeley. So instead of cutting the welded containers apart with a plasma cutter or something (which is reasonable, in all my experience welding which I learned how to do this weekend with Che at American Steel for Dann das Mann and Karen das Womann’s big heavy artmetal project for the dirt rave in the desert this year) … they were going to do some double-forklift synchronized-swimming thing where they lifted up the top containers and took the bottom ones out and put the top ones on the cement. Except from what I heard, there were no vehicles to drag the bottom ones out after the top ones got lifted, because the only 2 forklifts at the Shipyard — one which is run by a generator bungee-corded to the back of the chair — would be busy doing the top-thing one.

But when we get there in the Deuce, N.I.M.B.Y.-vs.-Shipyard container-rumble style, where our plan is to get in their sight line and drink beers and tell them you’re doing it wrong, we’re managers today, and is there anything we can say to help … there’s no stunt. Not yet. Not for a while, anyway. Steve Valdez is manhandling the forklift and moving pallet racks without taking them apart. Kimric and his dad are there in a managerial capacity as well, and dozens of people are moving heavy things around. So I pull weeds with some chicks on the “Lipstick Job” — which is the fence outside which needs to be painted so it looks like we’re not dirtbags. At which point I feel compelled to quote fellow Cacophonist Chuck Palahniuk about polishing the brass on the Titanic. Pulling weeds with the world falling apart inside the unpainted fence.

Don’t know if the big dumb heavy forklift dance ever happened, because after a while, we said sayonara and went back to N.I.M.B.Y. and listened to butt-rock and looked at the steam engines and watched some dude drive a Cushman with flamethrowers around. Snook made meat on the grill. The grill, not the Dead Hooker Cooker — he’s selling that. He doesn’t need TWO Deuces, he decided. If the Dead Hooker Cooker had an apartment on the back of it like the Deuce does, I’d be in. But it’s just got a grill in a coffin and a big-ass Dr. Strangelove rideable bomb on it.

Anyway, so we’re sitting at N.I.M.B.Y. reminiscing about the Thunderdome party, and I realize why it’s taken me so long to get my head around the Maker Faire last weekend: It’s possibly one of the biggest notches in our collective scene’s lipstick case so far. We’re above-board now. Last year I heard the Maker Faire was about 1/4 the size of this year’s, and this year it was the straight-up Superfriends of Bay Area freak-art and science-ology scenes. Everyone’s coming out of the woodwork, making connections, and blending together. And doing political activism, even. I’d say within a couple years, those of us who don’t die of alcohol poisoning or get crushed by a container on a janky forklift are going to take this show on the road. Won’t be long til someone’s going to be flown to New York to get interviewed and talk about this shit on VH-1 or something. Mark my words.

Yep. (Sound of beer opening)

Wondertwin powers, activate…

Mark proposed to Rose!!

Imagine what the wedding’s going to be like. CRAZY.

Thrillpeddlers’ Grand Guignol nightmare

Wed. May 16, 007
SF

The wind howled like God blowing on an empty beer bottle tonight. I gripped the wheel and navigated the Pacific Coast Highway in Blinky’s “boat with two couches,” trying like hell to keep to the right of the double yellow line. I’d just visited a friend’s house, nestled quite literally on the shore of the ocean, in the sand on a rocky cove in the shadow of mountains. Earlier, we’d watched an old guy push a limp and lifeless seal carcass from the hard-packed shore back into the roiling waves. When the body hit — sploosh! — blood and salt water spewed everywhere.

Turns out it was Ray Bandar, that dude who works for the California Academy of Sciences who they just featured in the Chronicle a couple weeks ago — he’s got a house full of animal skulls from all over the planet. He’d just beheaded the seal to harvest the cranium.

Landlocked fog rested atop green peaks like tinsel; yellow and white lights from houses and shopping centers wrapped the roads, twinkling in the clear-atmosphere layer below the mist. And I thought: What a wonderfully spooky region we live in. Whether hugging the craggy oceanside or blanketing the redwoods, the fog makes everything rather … Tolkeinsian, don‘t you think?

Take any such mystical aura of uncertainty, and add the spectre of murder. Or rape, or torture, or incest, or blood-spattered mad scientists beheading and re-animating (seal?) corpses. Good times, right?

That’s why, in Paris from 1897 to 1962, the rubes couldn’t get enough of Grand Guignol theatre. It scared the crap out of them, and they loved it. The Thrillpeddlers are arguably the premiere torch-bearers for Grand Guignol in the world — the only company who regularly resurrects Grand Guignol plays from the dead (ba-dump, chink) and crafts new pieces in tribute to the style. And they’re based here in San Francisco. Their current show, now playing at the Hypnodrome Thursdays through Saturdays, ends on June 2 — and that’s it. No extensions.

Also! The Thrillpeddlers have just been voted by the Weekly’s readers to be the best theater company in the Bay. I saw the show last weekend, and I’ve got to say, I’m’a’ tell Big Daddy he’s got to go see it — and I usually only tell him he’s got to go see something if it involves zombies. The latest critical review of the Thrillpeddlers’ new show, Hypnodrome Head Trips, sits online here (second listing down) …

… it’s pretty right-on, so I won’t bother writing what’s already been well-written about them. I’ll just say the show made me clap like an undead seal, and then I’ll quote Silent but Violent, who accompanied me to the play.

“That was rad,” she whispered into my ear after the show. “And I HATE theater.”

Flora Grubb Gardens: Not a parking lot any more

May 12-13, 007
Flora Grubb Gardens, BayviewSF

“It’s so weird to see white people walking around on the street out there,” Linda said on Saturday. “I mean really. We used to be the only ones. It’s like the day we filmed the [soda company name redacted] commercial outside the clubhouse. White kids everywhere. WEIRD.”

She’s right. Here in “Mo’s Alley,” so called by Cyclecide because Moses’ sister rented the lot to put her plants on, it’s a completely different scenario on the block. Before, it was a shithole in the larger shithole of the Bayview. Now it’s the fancy and beautiful Flora Grubb Gardens, with a new Ritual Coffee Roasters inside of it. The pimps who used to park their cars in front of it and yell at their bitches at all hours of the day and night must be bummed. But I’m happy, because the only other coffee near me is up Bernal Hill. Bikes and that hill and a non-caffeinated Dilettante are NOT friends.

This is Mo. ….. Um, yep, I know. I know. (photo by Scott Beale)

Mo’s Alley was a thoroughfare for crack dealers and hookers, right in the shadow of the City’s sewage treatment plant, in the ghetto behind the abominable KFC/Taco Bell combination “restaurant” where the customers scream at the beleaguered staff more often than not. The lot used to be Peninsula Oil, then it was a bus depot, then it was a plain slice of tore-up pavement and asphalt with a couple run-down buildings left over.

Cyclecide HQ, until recently, was located right across the street … and they evicted us and now the combination house and shop and yard still sits empty. Don’t get me started.

Flora Grubb has had Cyclecide’s back for a while now, letting us and the Mousetrap store stuff on her ex-parking lot, pre-construction, in exchange for us keeping an eye on it …. so when she asked us to set up the rides for her opening party this weekend, of course we said YES MA’AM. We brought the Cyclofuge, the Ferris Wheel, the Kiddie Carousel, the Spanking Bike, the Dizzy Toy, and the Whirl ‘n’ Hurl. Scott Beale showed up and took photos.

Anyway, two years ago this Fourth of July, we hosted the first annual PEDAL MONSTER at Mo’s Alley, which kicked ass. Carloads of Dead Baby Bike Club members drove down from Seattle, ditto C.H.U.N.K. 666ers from Portland, and Black Label members from Reno, Nowhere, and the couch at headquarters. The 999 Eyes ov Infinite Dream circus brought their live act and their museum of curiosities, and Replicator and A.P.E. rocked us with some blistering dance-metal (RIP A.P.E.’s drummer, killed on his bike by a hit-and-run driver in Seattle). One dude ate a Madagascar hissing cockroach, a band of trolls and ogres played, many MANY fireworks were shot off, and we built a tiny tallbike for the dwarf chick in the 999 Eyes freakshow. She never can find bikes in her size, much less tallbikes. She was stoked. Of course it got stolen a couple towns down the road.

Bike thieves suck.

To put it mildly, we’ve partied hard at Mo’s Alley. We got kinda misty when we saw what Flora’s done with the place.

Dukey made a clown face for the Dizzy Toy (this pitcher also by Scott Beale)

The Life-Size Mousetrap lived here on the lot for a while, all set up with some Cyclecide rides a couple Octobers ago, when we did a special Critical Mass show and some Halloween gigs. Jarico took the old Edsel from the junkyard and Haggis smashed it into the lot’s chicken-shack looking wooden structure we turned into a bar. Victoria shot out the RV window with her BB gun, and we generally blew a pile of BMXers’ and spandex bikers’ minds.

The Edsel is all that remains. Plopped in a corner of Flora’s new building among potted, carbon-eating creatures that look like they’re from outer space.

It’s a beautiful place to buy plants and get coffee. Yall check it out. Those people are NERDS about plants and coffee.

We’ll be at the Maker Faire next weekend. Classes in “backyard ballistics?” A rumored appearance by SRL? Yeesh. It’s going to be AWESOME.

Also! Linda’s note at Atlas made it into SFist. Gotta love her Mexican hot-headedness. Seriously though, bike thieves suck.

I’ll try to shut up about the flies

May 9, 007
post-Stagecoach Music Festival
HOME, finally

For two days, I’ve been trying to think of good things to say. So far I’m having trouble recapping the post-Coachella country-music adventures at Stagecoach in a concise and entertaining fashion. Even though WILLIE NELSON IS THE CLOSEST THING TO GOD WALKING THIS EARTH. And this one guy in the Riders in the Sky can do the hambone on his face. That was awesome.

To sum up: Cyclecide wowed hundreds of kids and their parents at Stagecoach, this 20,000+ country music festival in the Mojave Desert. We tried our best to be the scary, dirty, heavy-metal ride-running, funnel-cake-eating, county-fair carnival workers that we ourselves feared and awed in our collective youth. And I think we succeeded. And sold lots of T-shirts.

not as ‘ardcore as dem

I realize if I’m to start this blog thing, not only do I need to learn the daunting technology involved in putting up links and photos too — I’m also supposed to post frequently as hell to prevent losing my audience. But:

1) I’m still overstimulated from 2 months of constant adrenaline rushes… and I’ve got kind of a poor attitude at the moment. I still can’t get over the flies. So many flies everywhere at that god-forsaken hellhole called Artists’ Camping. Flies covering the bus ceiling, flies dotting the tent ceiling, flies in the kitchen, flies in the bathroom. Flies flies flies. I still itch when I think about it. Two epsom salt baths and a shower have yet not been enough.

2) This line of thinking/ranting leads to me not being able to get over how “artists” are treated in general in America. At Coachella, even the opening-opening bands who play right when the gates open get styled way more than we do. Consistently. We’re talking shade, and their own bar, and air-conditioned trailers and ornate communal areas and crafts-service meals and handmade gifts from the promoters … and they’re not even there for one whole day most of the time. They’ve got hotels and whatnot. Us, we could probably be consultants when the U.S. government decides to privatize refugee camps in Darfur.

if only I wasn’t made of piss and vinegar, they’d land this frequently, instead of slightly less

Maybe the promoters assume we’re used to squalor because, well, we ARE used to it … but for an event that rumoredly makes a $23 million dollar profit, you’d think that we artists, providers of ALL the eye-candy on that giant field out there in Indio, could get our own shower trailer, or maybe a sink and a bar of soap. Whether because of cost-cutting or oversight, the promoters saved on portajohn-cleaning fees, and then spent more on the hospital bills for those who got treated for staph infections as a result of blah blah bitch bitch bitch. See? Not funny.

HOWEVER! I’m exceedingly proud that many of my good friends, and good friends once removed, were pretty much solely responsible for the visual entertainment at America’s biggest rock’n’roll festival. GO TEAM ART FAG!

Now. I’m going out to dinner in the misty California night and have someone else make me food and take care of the dishes.

And if there’s a fly in my soup, I’ll just eat it. Whatever.

Braaaaaaaains

May 5, 007
Stagecoach Music Festival
Cyclecide DJ / merch booth

None of us saw much music at Coachella. We had no time — and if we did, when we got our nightly second winds, we traveled in a pack, mostly. Saturday night we went as zombies.

I can’t remember if Spider or Doyle was the one to originally call Zombie Night, but then Doyle found this white 3-piece suit in the trash, and it actually fit him, so then we had to. After Cyclecide’s shows got more and more surreal throughout the day, with our collective heatstroke advancing at a steady clip, we re-appropriated the contents of our clown makeup case at dusk, piled on the fake blood, and went out strolling.

Helping run the Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo, after days and days of hard labor and hiking uphill both ways in the snow with no shoes on etc., it’s immensely relaxing to walk around Coachella like a zombie. Fuck trying to look attractive, fuck rushing to see this or that band, fuck posture — this is how we feel. UhhhUUUHHH.

Everyone invented different “character” zombies and got into it. Doyle was a player zombie, lifting his sunglasses and winking one drippy-bloody eye. Spider leaned more toward office-worker zombie with tie and everything. I played a curly-mustachioed, missing-toothed, undead carny who kept trying to sneak and eat people’s brains when they weren’t looking. Lurching around with drink in hand, stopping in crowded pathways to stare into space with hips jutted out at unruly angles, jump-starting again as people gathered closer to see just what was wrong … Spider even drooled. A lot.

Crowds cut us a wide swath, and gawked and took photos — even as they walked like us, but not on purpose. We all swarmed Buffalo’s Fire Pod piece while it shot off big flames out of its eight-foot petals. We raided the Cut Chemist show in the Do-Lab dome and stunned the hip-hop heads in front. We took a special group ride on the Kinetic Steam Works’ black-and-white carousel. We zombie-ballroom-danced around Johnny Amerika’s Movement piece, too, while it belched fire clouds around us. Talk about a photo ops.

We ignored the Rage Against the Machine reunion and pooh-poohed the RHCPs. (“Remember when the Red Hot Chili Peppers used to be the Red Hot Chili Peppers?,” I kept saying, balefully.) But when Manu Chao took the main stage, all semblance of zombie-ness ceased and we ran toward the front and danced and moshed like 15-year-old punk kids. Then the Cauac Twins’ Tesla coils went off and Jesse Wack and company took over our sound system for an extended drunken jam that actually didn’t sound very bad, and we laid around on the Cyclecide stage on the pink carpet and told stories.

Then when they kicked us out of the field after the crowds had gone, some went back to camp and had another party in front of L.T.’s gorgeous Cyclecide fire barrel she made us. Others drifted off into the night, on their way to do who knows what with who knows whom. I fell asleep at a reasonable hour, but I hear Bjork eventually came back to our camp and partied with us, and someone in Cyclecide actually got to do coke off her tits.

Success. Also: exhaustion.

Next, a report from Stagecoach. Which is going on right now and I’m pretending to DJ in the shade. Hey, three carloads of fresh blood arrived last night and kept us up drinking. Let them do some of the work. Most of us still feel like zombies — just without the makeup now.

Plague?

May 4, 007
(now it’s the) Stagecoach Music Festival
Artists’ Parking Lot

For whatever reason, the Johnny on the Spot guys did NOT clean the Portajohns in Artists’ Camping after Coachella was over, though they serviced everything else. On Tuesday, as we broke down the rides for our Wednesday gig in Riverside, Laird said he went to try to go pee and couldn’t even see the toilet seat for all the flies swarming on it.

Ever smelled a bank of Portajohns that’s been baking for five days in 104-degree heat?

And would you think it smelled better or worse than post-Coachella DOG PUKE my Bruno tried to eat again after he threw it up and then we left and came back from the Riverside gig? … Apparently he learned the fine art of post-event groundscoring from his mother. He likes to dig through trash and conserve resources, just like me. YOU, OK? I LEARNED IT BY WATCHING YOU.

This whole Portajohn / flies / no-showers-for-artists fiasco has caused some health issues. I lost my voice long about Tuesday — whether from carnival-talk or total dehydration or something more ominous I’m still not sure — and so did a lot of other people. Folks who laid on the grass find themselves covered in red and white bumps. Chem trails form Xes above us in the sky on some mornings; on others, not a cloud up in the blue. Water trucks rumble by and planes fly over to spray the grass on the polo fields with Lord knows what chemicals and pesticides. Flies have multiplied exponentially since our arrival.

Now that the powers that be have finally decided to stop making the artists forage for interesting and unlikely places to go #2, as well as to bathe and locate enough electricity to charge our phones, the flies have all dispersed. And swarmed our camps. In the kitchen, in the bus, in my car, all over the dogs and food and people. They’re everywhere. Fly paper doesn’t work because of the new high winds and dust blowing around. The weather might be this way all weekend.

What’s worse, one artist just took a trip to the hospital this morning to treat a staph infection in his eye… which has now got us all washing our hands like Howard Hughes and trying not to panic. That shit’s contagious as hell. We’ve got 4 or 5 days left of this.

Roughing it is fun — but not for this long, in this heat, with this little shade, when someone else is in charge of hygeine. Cyclecide needs to invest in a generator.

no, not that kind of generator. Although it would be nice and I can’t figure out why nobody’s invented one yet

In other news, Monday’s woo-party-party at the Desert Springs hotel pretty much drained anything left in everyone’s batteries. Artists’ groups, friends of, and hangers-on converged on the place, an hour from the site, to celebrate a job well done. Some of the fancy magical Palm Springs spa-waters are located there at the hotel, and we all like to sit around in the many pools after Coachella and swap stories and drink beer and make “clown soup.” (Michelle Burke had to actually request that Cyclecide shower before entering the water — she said she’s seen the combination of greasepaint and dirt in a jacuzzi before, and it wasn’t pretty.)

Turns out that soaking in hot tubs for hours on end isn’t the best thing for sunburned skin on a sensitive Southern girl who’s used to humidity instead of oven-style weather. In addition to no voice, I’ve got a white five-o’clock shadow on my already-red face that makes me look like a burn-victim rodeo clown in reverse. I didn’t mean to jaunt to the Palm Desert in my fancy car for a chemical peel and hot tub soak at a hotel spa, but that’s what happened.

Our Wednesday gig 2 hours away at the barbecue for the UC-Riverside’s end-of-year festivities went off swimmingly. Setup and breakdown in “chilly” 70-80-degree weather. Rides only, no show, 3-hour start to finish with The Well-Behaved Kids (no alcohol or firearms on campus). After that, Conrad’s mom brought us all food (hero!) and we rented three rooms in a hotel and took showers.

SHOWERS, people. Life is good.

Gotta go. Someone’s sound-checking and I’m jumpy to see Willie Nelson … next post I’ll tell a bit about Coachella cuz I think I’m finally decompressed enough.

P.S. I heard George Strait is here camping all weekend — not hotel-ing it like all the other divas. He asked for a horse to ride around, and they gave him one. Champ.

uhhhhhUUUUUHHHHHH

we are delirious.

sitting by a pool at a hotel with air conditioning. For a minute. Going back into the hotness to break down the rides and take them to Riverside to set them up for a show at UCR tomorrow. Then re-breaking them down and re-taking them back to the polo fields in Indio to re-set them up for Stagecoach. Which judging by all the purple wristbands on the 60-year-old vendors and whatnot outside at the hotel pool right now …. it’s going to be Bizarro Coachella.

Two kinds of music next weekend: country and western. I need to go into town to buy a new set of Billy Bob teeth to plump up my accent and bark at the Cyclofuge or whatever ride I’m running this weekend — just to scare the kids. Hopefully I won’t get my ass kicked. I’m from Mississippi though so I’m allowed to talk like that.

But right now all I want to do is take a nap in the shade. Someday I’ll get a whole night’s sleep again.

Overheard in the bar by the pool just now:

“did you find my shorts in your room last night by the way?”

“No but I heard somebody lost their panties.”

“That might be the pair we sold.”

(All this said by a guy who’s got a nametag on his chinese coolie hat that reads “HELLO MY NAME IS GET OUT OF MY FACE”)

OK bye. Swimming