Its summertime and I'm mad as hell. Mad that I had to cut the second tour I was tagging along with short. Mad that I'm succumbing to being sick again. My joints are stiff and my fingers don't work right. I haven't been running in what seems like ages. I should be in a sweaty van with some of my dearest friends on yet another shitty fourteen hour drive sneaking sparks and laughing loud and dancing fervently. Instead when it started getting hard to walk I flew back, not to my home, but to my mom's. I don't know why. She isn't even here. Just my brothers are (well, actually they went to go see Sammy Hagar tonight in Tahoe..... let that sink in for a minute...I definitely can't drive 55 when they took the fucking car to see SAMMY HAGGAR). I've been reading lots of sci fi and knitting and playing with paint pens. Hopefully my arthritis and immune responses will seep back into the tender tendons and then I can go spend the rest of the summer at the beach. I miss the Atlantic Ocean. The day before I left tour, we went to the Jersey Shore and swam for six or seven hours. Bobbing around in the warm surf, avoiding the biting beach flies and passing the rum bottle around waiting for jaws. It was such a perfect day. So sunny and a Monday without too many assholes....my freckles got about five shades darker. My time on the east coast was the stuff of dreams. Especially the South. I'd never been there before. I wrote a long letter to a friend telling about my time there. Usually I feel the sharing private correspondences cheapens the meaning, but my fingers are so tired and aching and I'm sure he'd understand.

  Dear you,
Finally, a less humid, if not cooler day in Brooklyn, which is really good because despite the heat, my best girl insists on lighting about a million of those prayer candles at all times. I am still definitely missing that perfect summer climate back home but I can't remember the last time I had quite so much fun as I have in these past weeks. Everything feels new and good and beautiful again. After unsucessfully foraging craigslist for rideshares to the very dirty south we were able to procure a vehicle (one the still only costs thirty bucks to fill up!!! what a miracle... guess those prayer candles could be good for something).

I spent a lot of time in Chattanooga, a city that ended up far exceeding my expectations and being so fucking awesome I'm still reeling. But let me tell you, those punks down there are some of the coolest people I've ever met plus they are total wildasses, putting all others to shame in their endless dedication to constant partying. This is made so much more impessive by the fact that they all work really, really hard, all the time, usually at two or more jobs, where they make four or five bucks an hour. While I was jokingly called out on my non boozin' they were working doubles, drinking heavily from the moment they left their places of employment (o.k. o.k. sometimes long before they left) up until an hour or two before having to work another two back to back shifts, then taking a forty five minute power nap before doing it all over again. I SAW ONE KID DO THIS LIKE FOUR DAYS IN A ROW!!!! My favorite band that can still be seen playing shows is from Chattanooga and they have this awesome song about being a punk in that town and just hanging out at the 24 hour laundrymat playing records on the player they hid in the ceiling panels, and I had never realized how applicable it was to the whole scene: it goes "we drink too much, we smoke too much, we don't do much, cuz we work too much, I go outside and feel my heart die, excess is the most efficient form of suicide". I know that doesn't sound very optimistic, but despite the nonstop inebriation (I wish I had the stamina and good health for that shit!), they were a pretty well organized group. Everyone seems to be in at least one band, making sure all their housemates make it to work on time, setting up shows for those who are touring, and in the rest of the time, having bbqs, swimming hole outtings, building a deck for their giant kiddie pools and even just taking a few minutes to enjoy a lightning storm from the shelter of their big, sprawling, gone with the wind-ish Southern porches. Also, a big plus for the town is that they have the easiest movie theater (and aquarium) to sneak into EVER... very important when its a million degrees out and no one has air conditioning. Oh... also if you're ever there, they have free popcorn refills so dumpster a bag and get endless free snacks, yo!

I got to go to Atlanta, rural Tennessee, Richmond and Asheville as well, but none of the cities cultivated the memories that will tug at my heart strings like Chatt-town did, and none of the people in other cities tried even half as hard to make sure I had the best time possible, 25 hours a day, even if they jokingly never let me forget that my one beer maximum and need for things like "sleep" and "food" is the stuff of shrimpy west-coast pussies. Rural Tennesse was pretty awesome though. We drove three hours to see our friends' band play in a barn.  There was a bonfire and I caught a fucking awesome toad, which then peed on Rudi. The cymbals and drums sticks were accidentally left hundreds of miles away so they played with wooden spoons and trash can lids. It sounded funny and everyone was having such a good time, dancing with twenty other sweaty, grinning punks and the giant moths at this cool queer punk commune farm in the middle of nowhere that it made it almost better somehow. The stuff of punk legends and stories of yesteryear. Plus I guess this time, no one got bit by any copperheads.

So now here I am, back in brooklyn, getting ready to get on the road again. By the time I make it back to rain city, I will have been on tour with three bands, driving an estimated six thousand plus miles, probably done a hundred cross word puzzles and been to a show almost every night. At least these next few days will be slow and lazy. My best friend and I are trying to get into this fancy molecular gastronomy style restaurant for my birthday on Saturday and hopefully the most stressful thing I'll have to do in the next week is call and harrass the maitre de for reservations, thus ensuring that we will have the opportunity to eat such edible oddities as "stretchy foie gras knots". Then I'm seriously going to start working on moving to the South.

          Love, Me 

 My birthday ended up pretty awesome. my best girl and I stayed up all night long and watched the immensely thick, heavy rain wash everything clean, beating back the humidity while the lightning cracked the skies and the thunder drummed down on us. We read to each other and laughed and when the heavens finally cleared for us, we took the subway to coney island and rode the wonder wheel and visited her friend, the youngest sword swallower, and watched the sunset on the boardwalk eating skewered meat and drinking lemonade. I ate beer ice cream with candles on it in Sunset Park (the only place I have found in NY so far with a halfway decent mexican restaurant) and we went to a good show, one where our friends convened from the bay, the ones we'd been running around with in the south and the ones I'd be going back with, in the funny punk tenements with scary crooked stairs and a questionable roof ladder. 

 I've been reading alot these days. I always have, but more so when I'm sick or on tour, both of which I've been expiriencing quite a lot of these days. Many of these books have been chock full of great stories and fascinating bits of information but there is one in particular I would like to encourage anyone with a lick of taste and a curiousity to learn through the well written and compelling stories of a great punk author to purchase. Particularly anyone interested in the part of San Francisco's past that is routinely left out of the history books and off the news should buy Erick Lyle's "On The Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of The City." Though this is his first 'published' book, he has been writing, editing and self publishing several underground zines and newpapers, including SCAM and the Turd Filled Donut for a really long time. This book is a beautifully and honestly written history of so much, of police brutality and harassment and the stories of Willie Brown and then Gavin Newsom's sickening policies against San Francisco's Homeless, including the ever disheartening "care not cash" campaign (which was championed by some of the most offensive billboards I have ever seen that were basically affluent, white dot commers holding up cardboard signs saying shit like "I'm sick of stepping over the homeless people who sleep in front of my door." I'm pretty sure they were trying to make it sound as if they cared about the well being of the homeless but it was crystal clear what their agenda really is). This book is a story of the punks and activists fighting for social change and justice in our immediate  and larger communities, the tales of a quickly gentrifying city and the dot come boom and bust, of the dreams and then careful planning of squats, 'liberated' abandoned spaces used for community planning, art, shows, housing and to serve free food. It chronicles victories like the the legalization and support of Haight Streets Needle Exchange and harm reduction programs (as the book states, the only punk founded  and run N/E in the county), of the day we took San Francisco at the very start of the war (and how crushing it was to see it go back to normal after one day of shutting san fransico the fuck down in protest), of successful generator shows and beer scavenger hunts and the aquittal of a group of hispanic teenagers accused of murdering  a notoriously fucked up cop when his gun was accidentally discharged while they were championing for justice for their community. It also talks of many of the sad and disheartening losses. Of Matty Luv's death and the growing frustration at much of the city's seeming apathy about fucked up social policies (it seems like all people care about these days is keeping their property values high) and the shutdowns of many amazing community spaces by the police and of so, so, sooooo much more that I wish I could tell you about but you should just go buy the book and support small time and self publishing authors who work really hard to not let their work be destroyed by editors and the like. You can get this book at WWW.SOFTSKULL.COM My shittily written review doesn't do it justice. Its a damn good book and you should find it and read it.