November 28

My eyes were heavy when I was jolted to consciousness by the vexing tenor of my phone alarm. I rapidly began to piece together my surroundings like a first detective at the scene of a crime. Bodies were littering the floor all around me, bound tightly in blankets and draped covers. I flipped on the light and witnessed the full pledged aftermath of a hotel party. There were bottles blotching every surface like a glassy rash and plastic cups caked with coagulated cheese sauce piled up from the impromptu easy mac feast we all had. I managed to make a batch of 14 easy mac packets in the plastic ice bucket the hotel room provided; a culinary accomplishment most worthy of stating. Dr. Manhattan and we had arrived back at the hotel and because of the lurid nature of our Thanksgiving house party night, decided to continue the calamity and have some drinks. I was up until the wee hours of the night fraternizing with them, thus making the necessary early morning of taking our van into the brake shop for repair a very daunting task. The brakes took almost 5 hours to be finished, so we wondered around the businesses clustered together at the intersection of our hotel. It was black Friday, so everything was busy and bustling, even the run down K-mart across the street. I spent many hours there just walking down the isles and people watching. Eventually we were able to leave for Savannah, GA, arriving to the show late and having to frantically load through a pizza parlor and down some creaky back steps into a low hung basement with chalky brick walls and sparse glowing light bulbs. The place looked like a dungeon and when the 200 kids showed up and crammed the quarters wall to wall with no room to move it felt like a mass killing that would have occurred in some grim German hostage camp in the mid 1940’s. The show ended up being a lot of fun, despite the chaos of the 8-band bill and the mountainous piles of equipment and guitars in the basement that would have given any fire marshal night terrors. The pizza parlor above the show gave us free pizza, which was delicious and hot, warming me up from the cold rain that had been drizzling on me the whole night. After the show we found a nice guy named Garreth that let us stay at his house and I was up late once again, playing video games watching TV. I fell asleep wrapped up in my weathered sleeping bag on the kitchen floor. Another day of life on the road.