I have about five minutes to upload this video and then go meet Nick, who has changed plans about five times in the past hour but the main thing is that today we are leaving Vancouver.

This video is from when A/V and The Crimson Tides travelled to Ye Olde Skinnin Shack just outside Kelowna, BC for an outdoor punk rock show. There was a lot of testosterone and alcohol floating around at the show. Overall I felt weird there and slightly unwelcome at one point.

A band called “Whiskey Dick” played and did a song about getting their dicks sucked. Crimson Tides played. I was told A/V could play last, but was not told there was a fast-approaching curfew for music. Taberfucks played and I was about to set up when I was told abruptly that the show was over. So A/V didn’t get to play at all. I’d been a bit stressed out about how the macho man-moshers might respond to electronic new wave, so I suppose I was actually a bit relieved.

I shat in the woods and slept in the van. In the morning Adam got a hair cut and then we split for Chilliwack.

I’ve been hanging out in Vancouver all week and I miss being on the road. Heading to Kamloops on Saturday with Mr. The Kettle Black.

Here’s a video from Day 13 of the tour with the Crimson Tides. Those boys are probably halfway back across the country by now and I hope they’re doing well.

The chronology is a little messed up but this is a simple video that didn’t need much editing and I wanted to upload it now because who knows what internet access I’ll have in the next couple days. The story is, we drove from Regina to Calgary only to find there was no show for us and no sure place to sleep. We voted to keep driving and head to Nelson, BC. I took the wheel and piloted us through the Rocky Mountains on a foggy rainy night.

Supposedly a drive through the Rockies offers some of the most dramatic sightseeing in the country but we didn’t see shit. Bowes was in the passenger seat watching for deer, which we saw roughly every fifteen minutes. I ate some Mars bars and drank a bunch of Full Throttle and kept my eyes glued to the road all night. It was low-visibility, bad weather on a wildlife-clogged twisty mountain road and I would say that was some of the most challenging driving I’ve ever done in my life. Crow’s Nest Pass. At times we were barely aware of some dark shapes that must have been mountains on the horizon of the night.

I vowed that if I yawned once I would give up the wheel but my eyelids did not grow heavy until we ran out of road. Google Maps misled us and we wound up at a ferry crossing instead of on the main road to Nelson. The road just ended. Ferries sink in BC, don’t they?

I didn’t see any of the ferry ride. I lay down on one of the back seats of the van and conked out. At one point Dave said “Lookathat, the surface of the lake is like a mirror! Hey A/V, you’ve gotta shoot some footage of this,” whereupon I apparently cracked one eye open and said: “Fuck the lake.”

Astute Observation Dept.: “I’m tall, but that shit’s fuckin huge.”

You can check out some tour pictures on this Facebook photo album. Don’t even think of adding me if we’ve never hung out in real life, you creepy bastards, that’s what MySpace is for.
http://myspace.com/avhotaction

Downtown Ottawa. Parliament Hill. Rideau Canal.

“Holy shit, take a picture of that,” said Mike. “I guess if you have $150,000 worth of pleasure craft you might as well have $10,000 worth of breasts to go with it.”

Damn I wish I hadn’t accidentally taped over all the footage from that Ottawa basement show. Oh well, I traded it in for some clips of The Sleepless Nights as well as a metal-goth band in Peterborough and I guess some of that will be showing up here.

We sat around the Dis House eating samosas while Budget worked away at fixing the van window. There was some consternation when we thought they might want us to trade in the van for another one. That would be tricky since we left part of the van in Saint John, NB (i.e., the back seat). But the Budget girl was super perky and really really wanted to help us out in any way possible in order to make sure that everything is going to turn out just fine.

The Crimson Tides play Colt 45 rock’n’roll and drink a lot of 40’s everywhere they go. They are proving to be a bad influence on me, although this works both ways, as I am turning them into a bunch of dancing fools who will throw down and do “The Squid” any chance they get.

I started composing a song in GarageBand on my iBook. It’s entitled “The 40’s Never Stop.” We’ve started chanting this at all the shows.
THE FORTIES
THE FORTIES
THE FORTIES NEVER STOP

Coming soon to a punk rock show near you.

On Day 3 we stopped in Hartland right across the highway from where I crashed my car that time. Someone found a bluebag full of day-old donuts and bagels. Woo hoo, we are eating like kings. I knew we were on the road to Montreal because Arcade Fire was playing in the convenience store.

Dave was driving on the way into Montreal and he scared the shit out of everyone because he couldn’t stop sightseeing. Whenever Dave’s driving, he seems to start off every sentence with “Lookathat!” which is usually a preface for sheer terror on the part of the passengers as the van veers into the wrong lane. Finally he clipped someone’s rear view mirror and that seemed to mellow him out a little bit.

The van stayed overnight on Clark Street Sketchy Crackhead Alley and the plan was, two guys would sleep in the van and in the morning we’d move it to a safer neighbourhood. But instead the boys got up and got drunk at 11AM and headed off to the anarchist bookfair, so Adam scooted downtown and by the time he got there the side window was already smashed out. Later on I heard that Windom Earle got to play at a wicked house party but I spent most of my Saturday evening being sober and babysitting a van with a hole in it.