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Supposedly I can share these Facebook photo albums with everyone in the non-Facebook world. Here are a few snapshots from the West Coast portion of Sleepless Nights Cross-Canada Summer Rock Tour 2009.

~ Victoria, BC

~ Kelowna, BC

“It’s just a rock’n'roll show,” I said. “It’s not going to bring your family back from the dead.”

–
I just ate a bison steak in Lethbridge, Alberta.

Last night we slept on the floor of an Anglican church hall in Regina, Saskatchewan. Regina’s a nice town. I could live there, probably. I went for a stroll before our show at The Club, went to the library and a free art gallery. The streets were pretty quiet on a Monday evening. An Irish pub was playing The Notwist.

I walked through the Cancer Connections display in the Regina town square. I was thinking my problems right now are only financial in nature, for the most part. No one close to me has cancer at the moment. But inevitably it will happen. Maybe I’m existing right now in this curious window of time before a bunch of bad stuff happens.

At the show we rocked out really hard and everyone in the room was dancing.

And then this morning, I got a phone message.

 

 The Notwist - Pick Up The Phone: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Friday was a good day. I ate squid, got stoned on cough syrup and went to visit my grandmother. Then the Sleepless Nights played a nutty rock show at the Capital with Mt. Royal and Rah Rah. I’m loving those bands.

Benadryl gave way to tequila which gave way to energy drinks. What you call “six in the morning” I call “two in the afternoon.” Lately I’ve been on a quest to see just how much punishment my immune system can take.

Last winter I learned that the number-one contributing factor to getting sick is lack of sleep. I’ve been repeating this fact to people almost as though my awareness of it automatically gives me immunity. But as we learned from The Matrix, there is a world of difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

The van speeds up to overtake a big truck. I watch closely through the passenger window. The truck’s flatbed is loaded down with crushed cars, dozens of them in even stacks. I think about my own vehicle back in Halifax where it sits in the parking lot of a North End mechanic. The day will come when it too winds up on the back of a such a truck.

I wonder what it would be like to drive my car into the crusher, straight into the belly of the machine. To feel my body compressed and cubed, flesh forced through a sieve of warped metal.

 

 Rah Rah - Tentacles: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Aaron went to Taco Bell/KFC and ordered the Famous Last Bowl. What the Famous Last Bowl is, it’s a human skull in an obsidian bowl with french fries and gravy all over it and a bunch of cheese in the eye sockets and it comes with a candle on top in your choice of colours–red, black or purple.

Once you’re done eating the eye sockets will begin to glow with a hellish orange light until twin jets of flame shoot out of them to scorch all the skin off your face, and then your skull in turn is served to the next customer.

It looked good but not as good as a couple of beef burritos.

Route 1, New Brunswick, on our way to Saint John.

Down below the highway, just before the Hampton exit, there’s a junkyard with a big pile of discarded appliances fluorishing alongside an even bigger pile of wrecked cars. The sight of so many cars piled up on top of each other seems to suggest they were pushed one-by-one off the side of the overpass.

Wrecked cars in free-fall, airborne for a few moments, silhouetted against the sunset as they fall end-over-end onto the burial mound.

I was angry during our Paragon set for reasons I won’t even revisit. A musical set is an emotional eye-blink, and my mood tends to freeze into whatever emotional state I happen to be in when we drop the first chord.

Whenever I get pissed off I take it out on my gear and on myself. As I plugged in my patch cords I could feel the blood heating up in my arteries. The show was a whirlwind and by the end of the set I was bleeding from my fingers and from my forehead, and my forearm was covered with bruises, and it felt like something was fucked up in my wrist.

I headbutted a microphone and it fell forward and I followed it down onto the dancefloor, lying on my side like a wounded primordial snail, abusing my instrument and shouting backing vocals into the horizontal mic.

Afterwards I craved sedation but all Pinky had for cough syrup in his apartment was a couple swigs of alcohol-free Buckley’s.

Between Moncton and Salisbury the burnt-out shell of a car rests in the culvert beside the highway. It’s been there since January; no one seems to have made any attempt to remove it.

Back in the winter I came upon this wreckage while it was still smoking, presumably only a few hours after the accident happened. There was no one left at the scene by the time I arrived. Tire tracks in the roadside grass were the only evidence of the efforts of the rescue crew.

Sometimes when I’m making the trip alone I’ll pull over at this spot.

I walk around the ruined car, the wreck left on display as an analogy for the future destruction of my own vehicle.

The light changes at the corner of North and Agricola. A woman steps off the curb in the wrong direction before catching herself. She turns to me and laughs and says, “I almost committed suicide.”

I squint at a piece of faded graffiti on the sidewalk. A spraypainted stencil of red and yellow polygons resolves itself into the words: “Burn It Down.”

Two girls walked into my house and said “Your place smells like bacon.”
I said “No, that’s just my cologne.”

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