I'm Not Here

With a drive time of about 8 hours, the Portland to Sacramento leg was the longest yet. After stopping just outside of Portland for some Burger King, I took over the wheel in Lucas's car. I was never very good at stick shifts, and this skill left unpracticed for 6 years did not help the situation. I had not taken a shower at Nick's so when we stopped to get gas in south Oregon, I bought some shampoo and washed my hair in the sink. The man who pumped our gas was skinny and short with a salt and pepper Santa Claus beard. After our gas had been pumped and my hobo shower taken, he approached me. "I write to Obama every week, but he never writes back" he said. He went on to say that he wants Obama to make it illegal for anyone to pump their own gas in the entire country, thereby creating numerous jobs. I am not sure how this would have helped him. He already lives in a state with this stupid law and is already employed pumping gas. He told me that he was getting some traction by getting published in a local paper's letter to the editor column. At this point, he became more excited. "If a black limousine pulls up and a man named Guido asks for me, I'm not here".

With that I got back in the car with Lucas, Jared, and Brad and headed onto California. We met up with the rest of the group in Yreka at a Subway. There we found out about the movie game that the guys in the other van had been playing. It is a variant of 20 questions that you play with a group. You can keep asking questions as long as the answer is "yes". If the answer to your question is "no", then it is no longer your turn to ask questions. You can only use a negating phrase (not, other than, etc.) three times in the game. After I started to work around this rule by creating non-negating questions that were comprised of multiple "or" statements (is the first letter of the characters name A or B or C or D or ...), they added another rule where you can only have one "or" in a question. It was honestly difficult to not draw from Back to the Future and Star Wars. I spent a long time thinking about it and made my answer to be the whale from Pinocchio. Devon made my answer Buffalo Bill from Silence of the lambs. I would not have guessed it without employing a brute force algorithm.

The venue in Sacramento was coffee shop. Even compared to other coffee shops, this one was very colorful. The opener was a blond girl who played an open-mic quality set. She could not figure out how to turn on her amp and apologized several times during her set. Her lyrics made her seem even more vulnerable. The lyrics were simple and appeared to have no more depth than the literal interpretation. One lyric that may have deviated from this was "the back door is open and no one is watching". I have a feeling that she was actually talking about a literal door, but it may have been "open" to interpretation.

We decided to put a softer set together than we usually put on. It was difficult for us to keep it tight at this volume. Maybe the lack of sleep was catching up to us. Because the Town is Sleeping was a total disaster. We were playing it for about a minute with Scott in a different key than everyone else. The audience was bored with our set, we had not made a connection with them. By the time we were done, I was completely depressed.

Stencil fared far better. They are always very tight and their music translates well in this setting. Jared's banter was great.

We got a alcohol and a Motel 6 to hold up in for the night. By the end of the night Scott, Joe, and Devon had empty beer cases on their head singing "here comes Mr. Beer Head, he's got a case of Miller on his head".

I have not felt so terrible in a while.