Stressed. Headachey. Flustered. Feel like screamin.

Trying to get everything together for the tour. I’ll tell you, I don’t think most people realize the preparation it takes to haul your dumb ass around the world with the expressed purpose of getting drunk and breaking shit with all your best friends. The irony is dense here: mounting gauntlets of stress in both the familiar (meaningless dayjobs – I’m at one as I write this; powerbills; rehearsals) and alien (corporate tax forms? press corps? manufacturing deadlines?) realms of panic, all endured in order to initiate what amounts to the closest thing to a fantasy life. Tour-world is a weird dream world. All you’ve got to do is play music, hang with your comrades, subsist on the most barebones level, find the nearest swimminghole and make the next gig. Victory.

I'm reading Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles and Flying High the Spud Webb autobiography. Makes for a queasy collision of tones, I’ll tell you. If you sense in this prose an acute desolation and emotional disenfranchisement as made metaphorically palpable by the empty dangerous spans of Saharan desert leavened but slightly by the plucky enthusiasm of an airborne overachiever, I applaud your intuition. I’ll have to switch to something brighter by the time I step on the bus. Maybe I’ll reread the Nathaniel West novellas: the perfect satisfying blend of psychedelia and realworld pain. Listening to a lot of the Boredoms, too, to whom that Nathaniel West description could apply perfectly, as well.

Tonight we play a benefit for our buddy Gus Ramos. We’re doing the Soft Meat thing: all acoustic. I feel this is a bit delinquent as far as Gus’ spirit goes. He’s such an indefatigable wildman; I know if he was ambulatory, he’d want us to SHRED, and he’d be climbing the curtains. Regardless, we are doing a Fugs song I know he’d love: “DO YOU LIKE BOOBS A LOT?” it’s called. I can just see him clapping along and busting over laughing. I miss old Gus. His accident messed us up a lot. I was impressed at how everyone jumped so quickly to attention in the name of helping him, even amid all the other stresses. Not to sound cheesy, but it reminds us all how lucky we are to be stressed about something we all love to do, as opposed to, say, walking again or opening our eyes again. Here’s to Gus.

See y'all tonight.

Jim McHugh