book report

When you travel around the country in a van, exhausting so many miles that you need an oil change every week, I have one piece of advice: bring a book. Lots of them. Regrettedly, I did not recount what I read during the Aiden tour in my blog last time - I think I subconsciously avoided breaking rank with the anti-intellectualism prevalent in rock bands of the past, present, and certainly future.

However, Philip Kindred Dick's sci-fi masterpiece Man in the High Castle, which I finished last tour, raises the question, what if America lost WWII? And to my liking, Dick's dystopic vision of this alternate reality at least at least a couple Jungian references. And after reading about the making of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme record, I learned that you can learn more about God from Coltrane than you can the Bible. So far on this tour, I've read The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, a book that ingeniously inverts the idea of the detective fiction genre by creating characters that are writers of crime fiction themselves. The detectives then get obsessivly caught in a trail of mysterious, dark and absurd cases that seem to lead nowhere. Sounds like me when I get hungry. Next is a classic: The Crying of Lot 49.

I know my book report might seem irrelevent and nerdy beyond belief, but sometimes a good book is the only way to conquer the mind-numbing fatigue of staring down the mid-West landscape.

Livin' in America!

The end is the beginning...

We are back on tour - drudging across the country with post-hardcore band From First to Last. And that means the blog is back too! Which means more pictures of vandalized public restrooms (see Albuquerque), pictures of us stuffing our faces, and more pictures of our merch guy, Chazz, performing mixed martial arts (And see Steve, above, illustrating the sacred blossoming of the Golden Flower). However, I feel that in some way I disappointed on the last blog - not enough sci-fi! Not enough horror! And not enough revelations of what life is like being on tour! Well I promise to take the blog to the next level, starting now. Want a revelation of tour life? Google "ouroboros." Or just watch the movie Groundhog Day.


We are in Colorado Springs now, about to rock the Black Sheep! There are some killer fans here already!