If this van's a'rockin', don't come a'knockin'::

Ahh....the eve of yet another journey bound to be fraught with awkward physical positions. Packing, trying out new toys that I plan to illicit much awe and envy with on the unbelieably long road to friggin' canada tomorrow.

Well not really friggin' canada, but I could just about spit on Ottawa from the stage. Or so I'm told.

Tomorrow The Blue Method embarks on a thing of beauty and wonder, but which has become pretty common in its life...a road trip. We're getting pretty good at them. We bought a spiffy new tour bus (by "spiffy new" I of course mean ten years old and stinking of geezer pee), we invested heavily in periodicals, and we're all learning a new language. It's called shouting.

Yeah, we've pretty much got the jist (gist?) of it, so here are some of the details.

The Funk Bus::

Yeah, that's right, we bought a bus. A tour bus. And we tour in it. You know....like bands do. It's what I might be strongly inclined to call "the shit". There were initially a few kinks; like how it overheated and broke down on the side of I-476 on the way to state college the very first time we attempted to use it, and how we had to subsequently install a new water pump, cooling system hoses, brakes and tires, and how while innocently idling in the toll booth line on the way to New York we were rear ended by an SUV, didn't have time to take down any information and then got stuck with the bill, and how it makes this disturbing growling noise when we go up hills or try to accelerate to fast, ....but these minor hiccups have all been more or less solved, fixed, glued, taped or painted over. And I'm feeling good about that. Very Secure. And not at all nervous.

Now it's not a bus in the traditional sense of long and yellow with whiny brats inside throwing poo at each other. It's more a bus in the sense of being too big to call a van and having once had the pleasure of carting around disabled, and, lucky for us, often incontinent senior citizens. So it has a bit of the aroma of pee about it, but that's being slowly replaced by dirty man gunk...accumulating after countless days of eating, sleeping, introducing foreign gas, and throwing poo at each other on it. And then there's Brian with his signature "Balboa" sandwich, which, as far as I can tell, is basically just a big chunk of garlic, which has been fryed in garlic oil, between two slices of garlic bread and then all dipped in sme kind of molten liquid garlic. Traditionally served with a healthy serving of heinous smelling, belly rippling garlic and bile belches. I hear it's good for the colon too.

Anyway, so the bus is getting a bit ripe, but it serves its purpose. Luckily, with the addition of a laptop to my family of superfluous gadgets, I will be able to provide much more frequent and accurate accounts of my life, given that I'll have about seven hours on my hands tomorrow alone. Then it's off to vermont for some other crazy show, and then back to cozy NJ for a big pile of going to work. Ain't life glorious.

But it's cool, man. I love a good road trip, and there's really almost nothing I'd rather be doing. The band is dominating, moving forward, becoming slowly profitable and looking to record a new CD soon which I will (a.) actually play on and (b.) actually have written or helped write the songs on.

So it looks like everything is working out for everybody. Except for, you know, the same old nostalgia. But hey, if you keep busy enough, most of the time you'll be too tired to think about anything but how much work you have to do and how much you'd rather be sleeping. And that's good for everybody.

So we've past a pretty important one year anniversary a few months ago, and now we're approaching another one. The one year anniversary of my tenure with the Blue Method. And, I'd like to say that we've come a hell of a ways in the past year. We've gone from playing little tiny dive bars in south jersey to playing colleges, outdoor ampitheaters, festivals and owning a tour bus. And to hiring a keyboard player who wound up taking a big shit in a flower bed at a rest stop on a highway after passing out in a ditch on the side of the road. But that's another story.

In the next year we should close the gap even further between my job and my band pay, which won't exactly satisfy my "full time musician making mad loot by age 25" goal, but it's pretty close, and nobody (or almost nobody) thought I could make anything happen at all anyway, so in a way, I'm ahead of the game.

"In a way, you're both winners. But in another, more accurate way, Barney is the Winner."