I love Jagermeister SO MUCH. It’s the taste of happiness. Mike and I were talking about Hell’s Kitchen, the Marquee days, how he’s tried to recreate those days and never succeeded and now all I can picture is Robin standing off in the corner holding a gin and tonic and being the hottest person in the room without even trying.

I never planned on getting drunk tonight but I didn’t figure on the awesome force that is Mike Boudreau. He showed me all around Ottawa and we proceeded to get looped on a Monday night at a place called Aloha.

I’m not writing on my blog now, am I? It’s 3am and I need to pass out. So anyway, our van got broken into in Montreal. They smashed a window right out and stole some shit. But none of the A/V gear was touched, fuckers, because my gear generates a giant force field that repels assholes, god damn right. Enjoy your backpacks full of dirty laundry and your new iPod Shuffles. Assholes.

We taped cardboard boxes and trash bags over the window and drove the fuck to Ottawa.

Last night I played a crusty punk show in a basement that reminded me so much of Bloomfield House. Low ceiling with xmas lights all entwined. That guy who just got busted by the RCMP for leaking state secrets was the drummer for one of the bands. Circle fuckin’ A.

I thought, I wonder if I could fit through that little basement window. So I squeezed through and hauled the mic cord up and out and through the window and sang on the sidewalk. And the Ottawa police station was directly across the street, and this song is dedicated to the fucking pigs.

:::: http://ct-death.com/ ::::

I am on a cross-Canada tour. A/V is travelling with The Crimson Tides.

Day Four: Montreal. I’m hungover to the point of destruction. That’s the price of free vodka.

Ups and downs. Downs and ups. Yesterday afternoon I was eating from a bag of donuts that the Tides found outside a Tim Hortons. And then last night I found myself having delicious Vietnamese food courtesy of a rock’n’roll meal buyout.

My show in Montreal was cancelled. I ran into Mike Bigelow on St. Catherine street. I wound up doing sound for Holy Fuck at this place called Saints. They were opening for !!!. So doing sound over a big system was fun and then I got to see !!! in Montreal and dance around and hang out with friends and drink a lot of free band booze. I saw some friends, Sebastien from the French band, Rob Sixtoo, Scoops Dujour, Da Ros. Scoops just left for New Orleans. I have a funny video of him. Mike is weed.

Crashed at the Palais Da Ros. Yeah my head hurts. Soon I’m gonna head over to O Patro Vys near St. Denis, possibly I’ll be doing sound for some improvisational evening of dope Montreal musicians. Maybe afterwards I’ll head over to Sixtoo’s party at Zoobizarre. Maybe I’ll fall in a hole.

I’m worried about our van full of gear which is currently sitting undefended in a crack alley somewhere. Van van van. Gear gear gear. Shows shows shows. Tomorrow is 61 Argyle in Ottawa. Come out and party. I’ll be sober probably. What’s the point of drinking? It hurts. Plus nobody can even tell when I’m wasted. I’m always the same.

May 18 is the worst day of the year for me. But that was the best worst day I’ve had in a few years. The secret is just to keep moving. We went from Halifax to Saint John to Fredericton to Montreal. Keep moving. No time to think about anything.

No time to think means no time to write, so bye.

Dog Day, A/V and Husband & Knife are playing a show at my country home tonight. There will be much merriment and mayhem. If you want to throw together a carload of revellers and head out to the sugar shack, email me for directions.

Dog Day
Husband & Knife
A/V
Dog Day in Chartattack

It’s 4AM and we just got home. Potrick Weedartz didn’t come to Cinco de Mayo. He stayed home to look at some West African mud architecture. There’s a TV show on right now about fake breasts. Women are doing all these weird things with their fake breasts that you can’t do with normal breasts.

At the bar I put a dollar in the video lottery terminal and magically turned it into seven bucks. I was ridiculed for choosing to play a game called “The Leopard’s Spots.” But I chose this game deliberately because I believe it teaches an important lesson about human nature. This lesson may be summed up in the form of a proverb:

The Leopard Does Not Change Its Spots.

Remember this when you’re dealing with people, trying to figure out their motives. The leopard does not change its spots. Hold this truth close to your heart.

The woman at the machine beside us put in I don’t know how much and cashed out with six hundred bucks. She showed us the ticket. $603. Consider the possibilities.

If I had six hundred bucks I would put it into buying a new prosthetic schlong. I already have one but it never hurts to have a spare.

What happened to my real schlong was, I was attacked by a drunk French man with an antique bayonet on Main Street in Moncton. Right there on the sidewalk outside The Paramount Club.

Tonight we thought it would be funny to invite some French people to the Cinco de Mayo party and when they got here, make them leave. That’s a joke. But I digress. This French man told me in French he was going to cut my leg off. And he swung his weapon at me but he missed and chopped off my noodle instead.

Have you heard of phantom limb syndrome? I experience phantom member syndrome. I imagine that I still have feelings down in my pants where there is now nothing.

I had a prosthetic cock made to replace the one that got chopped off. I couldn’t afford a realistic, lifelike silicone penis so I had to get the wooden model instead. It’s very important to me to keep my wooden cock sanded down and as smooth as possible. After a while I had trouble finding sandpaper of a fine enough grade, so I started using a Bounce sheet instead. Now every night I sand down my wooden prosthetic penis with a Bounce sheet and it feels just great.

On Thursday night I spent ten hours hooked up to a misanthropic, malfunctioning machine. On Friday morning I dropped off the machine at the clinic and went to a giant book sale at Market Square in Saint John. They had plenty of chess books and plenty of Danielle Steel. Plus they had about four hundred copies of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, which were being snatched up left and right by those who enjoy a cute little science-fiction fairy-tale.

I am drunk, goodnight. May the 5th be with you.

On Tuesday I was in Halifax, celebrating the cash I’d won at the open mic night.

On Wednesday I pulled over to take a leak and noticed my car had decided to take a leak as well. I was standing at the edge of the highway just past Norton, NB. I watched as that cash prize flowed straight out the bottom of my car in the form of a fountain of green coolant.

My Cobramobile is an immortal chariot that descended from the height of Mt. Olympus some ten thousand years ago. This steed cannot be killed but he can be wounded and when you stab him, he bleeds money.

I roared up the Mackay Highway and came to rest at the holy shrine known as Grove Auto Service. I was hoping the problem would be something simple like a loose hose. But the water pump was toast. Plus the belt had gotten chewed up in the process so it had to be replaced as well.

Easy come, easy go is what the tombstone will say and at my funeral a dozen widows will cry antifreeze tears.

“If you stop moving, you will die.” Of course I don’t literally believe this, but it’s a helpful guideline to keep in mind. Thursday I’m going to a sleep clinic in Saint John to get hooked up to some machinery. Two weeks from now I leave on a cross-Canada tour, and I’m trying to get myself in in good psychic shape, trying to build up some momentum. Gotta keep moving…

Tomorrow I’m leaving Halifax. I’ve been housesitting for the past couple weeks at Gerry and Holly’s pad, AKA “Mario’s Media Palace.” Come out to Charlie’s tonight to say goodbye unless you have a better plan.

When I feel the shutters coming down I need to get up and out. Being around people energizes me, at first anyway, and after a while I need to retreat into my anti-social bubble.

Last night was a night of ups and downs. I could feel the darkness closing in so I went downtown in the rain, stopped into Reflections to see what was up at Rockin For Dollars.

I stepped into the room and immediately wished I’d stayed at home. The music onstage was pretty hard to listen to. Craig, gracious host of the open mic, is normally generous to a fault but he got onstage after the band had finished and said “Let’s hear it for those guys. Wasn’t that the best band you’ve ever heard.”

It was a slow night at R4$. Craig told me there were a couple time slots left and asked if I wanted to play. I hadn’t brought any of my A/V gear, but I thought about it and yeah why not, I wound up driving back home to the Palace to pick it all up.

I humped all my gear into the club and set it up and plugged it in. Onstage there was a lot of stuff plugged into one power bar… amps and gadgets and whatnot.

I flicked on my sequencer. The display glowed and faded and went blank. Sometimes bad power screws up the science. I turned the unit off and back on again. Only to find that all the pattern memory had been erased. Uh oh…

I have everything backed up on my iBook, but I hadn’t bothered to bring it, because it’s “only Rockin For Dollars.” So I suddenly found myself up onstage in front of everybody without a set of music to play. It was a tough scene.

Craig offered me his electric guitar. I asked if there were any drummers in the house but couldn’t come up with anyone on 20 seconds notice.

“Craig, you wanna jam? Are there any songs we both know?”

“Um, probably… Joy Division?”

So I looped a beat on the drum machine and we attempted to make our way through a cover of “Shadowplay.” I sang and Craig backed me up by sitting at the drum kit strumming on an unamplified acoustic guitar. We hadn’t checked the sound so I couldn’t hear the vocals, just this pounding 808 beat in the monitors. Tough scene, is right. Then I sped up the tempo on the same drum loop and performed a searing version of “Breakin’ The Law” by Judas Priest.

After that golden musical moment I had the sense to stop. Oh god. The old show biz rule states “always leave ’em wanting more.” The applicable corollary in this case is: if you have to leave ’em wanting less, leave ’em wanting less of less.

I was bummed. My sets at R4$ are usually pretty good. But all I could think was, “Now I know what it’s like to be a shitty Rockin For Dollars band.”

I was grateful that it was a slow night and none of my ladies were around to witness the debacle. My own show biz rule states that musicians who suck at open mic night do not deserve to get laid. Harsh but fair. That’s just the natural order of things.

What’s weird is that a couple of people told me they enjoyed the set. What’s even weirder is that at the end of the night I spun the wheel and wound up winning $400.

Luck of the draw I guess. Here’s a video that Colleen shot on her cellphone featuring the winning spin, helped along by my lucky squid dance:

The Money Shot

I’ll take any cash I can get from Reflections, considering that’s the bar where my video camera was stolen last year.

Beside the Reflections dancefloor I met a smiling woman who smelled really, really good. We wound up back at my place. I put my arms around her. I did not feel the deep connection, I did not feel the unstoppable mutual lust. So we watched a movie and hung out for a while and then I drove her home at 5am. The End.