Tour End (for me)

Jackson was a very cool place, although it was the last night of the tour for me. The trip didn't end up being worth it for me, so I got off in Memphis under somewhat urgent of conditions. The business was supposed to be alright without me being there for a while -which it wasn't, and the cracked rib that I got in Seattle didn't seem to be healing, I pretty much needed to get back ASAP. Luckily my traveler's insurance is supposedly going to pay for the hospital and the plane ride back. But, as Joe pointed out, Memphis hospitals are not the place to be. It took eight hours before I was seen by the doctor, and there were people with head-wounds who bled for at least that long in the waiting room -some homeboy whose eye had been shot or stabbed out, some girl whose head just didn't seem to want to stop bleeding.

So here are some more photos from the part of the tour I was on. Austin was a good time, it was the first of two nights with the same lineup -Dark Skies, Amplified Heat, and Lions. The second was Jackson.

Jackson Mississippi

I only have a few minutes to type at a little computer station inside a grocery store, so I'll add photos and more details later. I'm going to have to work backwards to some degree here, and fill things in.

That being said, we're in Jackson Mississippi, my first time to this part of the country. It feels more like a different country than Australia felt. In the past several days we've been through Tucson AZ, Albuquerque NM, and Amarillo, Austin and Dallas TX.

Tucson was a pool hall, Albequerque -a tiki lounge, Amarillo -What appeared to be a squatter village. This may sound like a negative interpretation of things, but really we've been having an intensely interesting time and I wouldn't change a thing. We've met kick ass people from all around the world, partied, had hard core temptations, and there's still a month left of this tour.

It has been a crazy time, and there is no way to have any kind of expectations as to what we are going to find when we pull into town.

Last night in Dallas the big scruffy sound guy put his big wet lips on my neck as he said he wanted to spend the night with us -I'm cringing just thinking about. The club gave the band $24 dollars for playing the show, which means we didn't make enough to pay for gas let alone anything else.

We drove through the night; Joe and I sharing tunes to keep each other awake, stopping at motels along the way, only to find "no vacancy" everywhere we went until 8:00 this morning, at just about the worst motel I've ever seen. We didn't dare even turn down the covers of the beds -just threw our sleeping bags down on top of them.

The irony is killing me. Charlie woke up this morning to his 37th birthday in a shitty motel with a sticky floor in Minden Louisiana.

Tonight's club -WC Don's- turns out to be WC Don's Hot Dog House. Charlie's a vegan and it's his birthday, and here we are at a hot dog restaurant that feels like a basement.
One of the guys from Amplified Heat (another band playing tonight) swept the floor of the place himself. The guys working over there had to carry out all kinds of what appeared to be broken down large appliances out of the building.

I'll keep saying it -this is living. As Joe described it this trip has been a series of extremely high moments and extremely low moments. The deep south has maybe seemed somewhat depressing so far, but it's extremely exciting at the same time. this is the world we live in. Mississippi is the poorest state in the union, and as we drove into one of the closest neighborhoods down from the capital, it might as well be a third world country. But tonight might end up being the coolest night yet -who knows?

Gotta go -more later...