projects

On the way to Austin, we get the band rooms in a Day’s Inn on the highway and park the bus in the empty lot behind it. That night we are all too tired to notice much about the place other than the fact that they have two empty rooms and they’ll give them to us for less than $50. In the morning, though, I look out the bus window and see that the swimming pool is full of mud, the parking lot is full of garbage and our bus is surrounded by the rotting carcasses of former vehicles. Pieces of dead cars, trucks and buses are stacked all around us; the effect is creepy. “What’s the matter?” Billy calls from the back bedroom, seeing me peering out the window suspiciously.

“This place looks stab-stab.” A stab-stab motel is one you’ll probably die in. We’ve stayed in lots of them, but we like to think we’ve outgrown them.

“Is there a body floating in the pool?” he asks.

“No.”

“Then it’s just shitty.”

“There could be a body in the pool; I just don’t think anything would float in there.”

Billy sighs. “Why don’t you go out and look for snakes?”

I do this because it does look like good snake hunting and, it being the south, I have high hopes for pretty ones, but all I see are some robins poking around in the dirt and my dogs scare those away. I wander back to the bus to make coffee and see Martin and Kim walking out of the hotel carrying pillows. They are both walking crooked, their heads tilted to one side.

“We have stiff necks,” Martin declares, stepping onto the bus and tossing a pillow on the couch. “We didn’t sleep. Good night.” He lies down and folds his arms across his chest. Kim does the same on the opposite couch.

“You want some coffee?” I ask, but neither one answers. Then Bernie and Rob appear, armed with cell phone pictures of their room. “Evidence,” Rob calls it. There is a shot of crumbling plaster, half a bathtub (“Where’s the other half?” “We don’t know!”) and best of all — the bloodstained carpet. “Ew!” I squeal appreciatively.

“Yeah!” says Rob, “That was cool.”

Bernie looks angry. “I couldn’t sleep, there were so many bugs walking around.”

“You can’t hear bugs walking.”

“I can.”

Billy takes the evidence to Roy and Dale at the front desk and tells them he was “disappointed” because, as a business traveler, half a bathtub isn’t what he’s come to expect from Day’s Inn. This approach never fails. Roy and Dale begin writhing in professional hara-kiri. They will do anything to make good on this deal, but all Billy asks is that they not disappoint him again. Oh and also comp him the rooms. His will is done (as usual) and he somehow makes friends in the process (as usual). Martin and Kim wake up just long enough to cheer as we pull out of the parking lot.

We meet up with Dolorean again in Austin where a beautiful, beautiful rain is dumping. Hippie chicks dance in the fountain outside the Cactus Café, but the rest of us just stand under the eaves and watch. Then the club bartendress makes me my first Texas margarita in a year. I decide I never want to leave Austin.

The stage is picturesque: small and well-lit. The Dolorean guys look great, like they’re shooting a video. Of course, my band barely fits on the stage. Bernie isn’t even technically on the stage. Before the first song, I lean over to ask Martin how he’s doing. The McCarricks are squished into the corner, Martin’s cello shoved up under his chin. “I feel like a peanut,” says Martin.

“What the hell does that mean?” I ask Kim. She shrugs and smiles, her violin crushed against her chest, her tiny feet jammed under my amp.

Best signage on the way to Albuquerque: “Jesus Is Gay”.

Neil, the Albuquerque promoter, just bought a house and inherited an apiary with it. This interests me — I’ve wanted to be a Bee Guy ever since our New Orleans Bee Guy showed up to deliver honey and bee pollen in the full suit (the mask was under his arm, but he modeled it for me), so I pummel poor Neil with questions about bee care. He is somewhat taken aback though, and doesn’t seem to really know anything about bees. “The guy I bought my house from just left them behind the garage and they won’t leave. I was scared to go back there, ‘cause, well, it’s full of bees.”

“You’re not a Bee Guy?” I ask, disappointed.

“Well, I am now…I’ve got bees.”

“But you got honey from ‘em, right? Did you buy a bee suit?”

“No, I just wore long sleeves. They got really mad and stung me. I’m gonna have to get a hockey mask or something.”

“Wow. They stung your face?”

“Oh yeah. They’re not pet bees, they’re just regular bees.”

Then he thrusts 3 honey bears into my hands to take back to the kids. Bernie walks up as he’s doing this. “Look at this!” I say, showing Bernie the bears. “Neil’s a Bee Guy!” Bernie spins on his heels and leaves the room. He had a bad experience with bee pollen once in New Orleans. In fact, I almost killed him by giving him a few grains as he was heading out for a run. I was living on the stuff and loving it, but it made Bernie’s head blow up. So he keeps his distance from Neil for the rest of the night, waving politely from across the room, and retreating when approached. Nothing scares Bernie more than bee pollen.

There is a dusting of snow on the way to Phoenix. This whole tour’s been hot, so we all get out of the bus and run around with the dogs and kids by the side of the highway, taking pictures of snow on cactus. I used to love waking up to snow in Pioneertown — silver rock piles and frozen cactus flowers. This is similar, but flatter. Scrub desert. The dogs run and run, we run and run. We play for so long that we’re all frozen by the time we get back on the bus.

The show tonight is at Modified, an art space rather than a club. It feels clean and civilized. The promoter is a woman named Kimber who teaches a music business class to young adults. In this class, she plays hit songs from the 60’s and 70’s and shows the students pictures of the artists who performed them. She then plays music from this year’s Billboard Top 40 charts and shows the class pictures of the people who made that music. Apparently, it’s obvious to even the most brain washed junior high schooler that what is being marketed today in the music business is bimbo bodies, not music.

I tend to think this has always been true, but the music they sell these days *is* decidedly awful, the bimbo bodies awfully offensive. It’s about time somebody thought to point this out to the people who are being marketed to. By the time we leave Phoenix, Kimber is our new hero.

Tucson! I love Tucson. Our beloved Howe Gelb is away on tour, but his family takes us in. We park our fat-ass bus outside their house and play and eat and drink amazing coffee for 2 days. It feels like the old Kingsway studio in New Orleans, only here it cools off at night. Sophie Gelb even supplies my children and me with hand-me-downs. She knows it’s been a tough year for our family, but there’s no pity in the offering, only kindness.

It’s hard to leave for San Diego after all this coffee and love. We promise to come back again when Howe’s around, then we check out the Tucson night sky one last time and take off. Bodhi waves goodbye to his friend Tallulah out the bus window, then turns to me and asks, “Why do we live on a bus that always drives away?“

Week Two – In Philly — is saying “Philly” as lame as saying “‘Frisco”? — in Phillydelphia, we play World Café Live, a European style multi-purpose facility that includes a radio station, 2 venues and a restaurant. After sound check, I take Bernie and Rob to the radio station to show them the lovely studio space where I recorded an interview and session earlier this year.

They study a “collage de rock” on the wall at the entrance which includes a picture of me looking particularly goofy. “Not goofy, just friendly,” says Rob.

“Friendly and goofy,” says Bernie helpfully.

I take a cell phone picture of the two of them, secretly hoping it turns out goofy. It doesn’t. It turns out dark. They do look friendly, though.

For some reason there’s a huge barrel of ice water in the dressing room. We challenge each other to submerge various body parts in the ice water for as long as possible. Some Doloreans play, too, as their dressing room only holds two people at a time and they were bored anyway. Billy and Bernie win (they win everything) in a dramatic test of endurance, the rest of us hooting, cheering and writhing. Their skin turns upsettingly wacky colors afterwards.

We then play another show without the McCarricks, wondering how it sounds. People claim not to miss them, but, really, what are they gonna say? Sure wish you guys sounded better? Rob thinks we sound like an adorable indie band. I agree. The music sounds smaller and sweeter, maybe even more stylized, but without the string parts, the songs lack drama.

Success! The McCarricks get the call they were waiting for — from the USA of America! Fuckin’ A! — and race to the airport. They will actually make the New York show.

The next morning, we pick Martin and Kim up at an airport hotel in our Family Bus. They’ve never seen the Family Bus before, even though they’re in the Bus Family. They ooh and aah over our luscious faux maple paneling, stained carpets and torn seat covers. “It’s a comfortable bus,” they decide.

Martin is carefully led around all the parts of the Family Bus that might fall on him or break if he breaks them. Kim says over and over again, “Just let me do that for you, Martin.”

It rains during load-in at the Bowery Ballroom and my wet hands and face lead to a couple of pretty bad shocks during sound check. At one point, I’m thrown back from the mic and — I’m pretty sure — my lips fly across the stage. It felt like that happened, anyway. I’m the only person who laughs. The sound man (the same sweetheart guy who did the 50Foot/Muses show here last year) looks ill. “Did you want a towel?” he asks.

The show feels great. No better audience than a jam packed and hungry New York one. People sing along with the new songs! And Martin plays that goddamn cello like a rock star…so nice to have the strings back.

Our D.C. play is Iota in Arlington, VA. They have amazing food there; Bernie and I begin rhapsodizing over the grilled salmon salad long before we pull into town. By the time we get there, we’re starved. Unfortunately, they do still have amazing food, but only for real people. Now, one of the menu items is “Band Pasta”, which means if you’re in the band, they order for you and it’s pasta. This happens a lot. I never really understood why clubs had to feed musicians in the first place, but Band Pasta always makes me sad anyway.

Bernie walks out for something better and I go on a protein hunt for the kids, looking for a Vietnamese place where Ian McKaye took Vic Chesnutt and me once but I can’t find it. So I end up at Whole Foods, which I can’t afford, but I figure it’ll keep the kids from getting sick, which I also can’t afford, and sick hurts them.

Rob gets Band Pasta. “What’s wrong with it?” he asks, his fork in the air.

On the way to Chapel Hill, we put the band up in a (bizarre) hotel while my family sleeps on the bus, outside. The hotel looks like it was planned as a vacation getaway but then no one showed up. There are party patios and miniature golf courses and barbecue pits, theme rooms and tiki bars and jungle gyms. But it all looks empty and post-apocalyptic in the morning drizzle.

I do an interview on my cell phone for the Tucson show while the kids watch cops get driving lessons in Starsky and Hutch tactics. This is so wonderful to watch. The cop cars race through a huge, empty parking lot, screech their tires, skid across the wet pavement and spin around and around, then do it again. My children cheer. So do I. I keep interrupting the journalist to yell, “Yes!” and “Holy shit!”.

The best is when the cop loses his or her nerve, though, and just stops and sits while the driving instructor watches from afar. Sad cops.

The morning of the Chapel Hill show, Bodhi gets his first ever earache. My kids don’t get sick very often, so I don’t have the purse full of painkillers, fever reducers and kleenex I’ve seen so many other mothers carry. To be honest, I don’t even have a purse. And I’m not good in a crisis — not when the crisis concerns one of the kids. If they cry, I usually cry, too. This time, I panic.

So does Billy. We put Ryder in charge of the two little boys and Billy races off in one direction, looking for a drug store, while I race off in another. We run and run in the North Carolina heat.

When I finally find a drug store, I am at a loss as to which pills to buy. I don’t want to put any pills in perfect Bodhi, but then I remember him holding his ear and crying and begin to read labels. I don’t like the idea of reducing a fever; I think fevers play an important role in healing, but I can’t find a pain killer that isn’t also a fever reducer. And they all have saccharin in them, and dyes…I grab a fistful of brightly-colored, brightly-flavored candy drugs and hope Billy found something herbal.

Then I race past Bernie on the sidewalk, holding up the pill boxes in triumph. He cheers. Billy is already back at the bus with his boxes of candy drugs when I get there. Bodhi is pain free, happily chatting and laughing with his brothers. “Wow, that’s amazing,” I say. “What did you give him?”

“Nothing,” Billy says.

I get my first mosquito bite of the year in Atlanta. By a dumpster behind the club. It’s an ankle bite and it gets angry, red and swollen and looks very pretty. I think I was blabbing about being oh so southern and the evocative thickness in the air and the heartache of spanish moss, etc…In other words, I deserved it. I decide to embrace it anyway. Mosquito bites are a part of summer, it’s practically summer now and I am oh so southern.

“Hey, Gomer, ” Billy yells, “quit scratching and git yer ass on stage!”

During sound check, Barton, who is also from the south, tells me about the first time he ever swore in front of his mother. She told him that he wasn’t allowed to use grown up words, but that he was free to make up his own swears and use them freely. This just kills me. I laugh forever. “Razzmafrazz!” he says, grinning.

The show is hot and loud tonight, the audience is hot and loud, too. At the end of the night though, as we drive away, headed for Louisiana, we are hot and quiet. We listen to crickets, we watch the moon and the spanish moss go by, everyone but Billy falls asleep.

Week One – The McCarricks are still in London, waiting by the phone for permission to enter our fabulous country. Apparently, they haven’t impressed Bush quite enough to be allowed in. They were told to present U.S. immigration officials with press clippings and gold records in order to validate their status as musicians, but it isn’t working.

Maybe they’re terrorists.

So the tour begins without them. And it’s a good thing, too, ’cause they wouldn’t have fit on the first stage. This show is what our agent, Mike, refers to (euphemistically) as a “warm-up gig”, meaning, it will suck and no one will come.

Poor Delorean! They drive their asses all the way to New Haven from Portland, Oregon and the stage is too small to hold their equipment. They probably wanted to do this tour, too. They probably said “yes” when they were asked.

All that’s missing tonight is chicken wire for the audience to throw beer bottles at. I was standing in the club, looking at the stage and thinking this when Delorean’s guitar player, Barton, walked by and said that very thing, much to my delight. “Whaddya call this place?”, he muttered, “A honkey-tonk? In Connecticut?” It didn’t suck though — and people did come and didn’t throw beer bottles.

Our Providence show is actually in Fall River, Massachusetts, at a place called the Narrows Center. The club is a beautiful loft in an old factory building, so gear must be loaded in on a freight elevator. This all goes smoothly, but then Billy gets locked out of the room and bangs on a door a few feet away from where I’m reading a book I might have stolen (Bernie claims I stole it, I disagree). It’s an engaging book, so I don’t really notice the banging, though it goes on for a long time. Then he starts yelling (or so he says — I was reading).

Eventually, someone lets him in. I look up, smiling, “Oh, it’s you”.

“Ladies and gentlemen — my wife!” he announces to the room and then to me, “It’d be nice if you weren’t completely oblivious.”

A bunch of hometown friends show up that night, including Rizzo and Dave Narcizo. Rob moans, “I gotta play Dave’s parts”.

“But you always play Dave’s parts,” I say.

“Not in front of Dave!” Of course, he plays Dave’s parts like only Rob can. Hard and clear, with muscle and flourish. Dave is thrilled. “I didn’t know I was that good!” he says. Drummers.

I do an insane tap dance throughout the show, trying to stomp on all kinds of effects pedals at once. I’m frustrated with my American equipment and miss the rentals I’d gotten used to on the European leg, but in trying to get more out of these stomp boxes, I end up looking like a total spaz.

The next night in Northampton, I find the distortion pedal of my dreams in the music store next door to the club. I love Electro-Harmonix pedals anyway, but this pedal I found combines a beautiful humming tube sound with that funny fucked-up-ness that Electro-Harmonix is so good at. Plus, it looks beautiful — chunky and metallic — I wanna wear it — or drive it.

Our beloved friend/musician/super hero, Skeggy, lives in Northampton and offers us a place to stay. “I live in the old mill house,” he says, “ye old-ey mill-ey hous-ey. There are plenty of couches, plus french fries, vinyl, fishing and I’ll make breakfast.”

We’re sold on “plenty of couches” but an hour after the show, in the middle of the night, there are indeed french fries, made by Skeggy’s wife, Connie, the very definition of a perfect woman: one who will make you and your drunk friends french fries at 2 in the morning. Rob plays jazz piano for — and with — whomever is around. And after a vinyl listening party at 3 there’s a little bit of sleep.

By the time I’m up and walking the dogs, Skeggy is making breakfast. “You can’t spell Skeggs without eggs!” he cries gleefully, already on his second gin and tonic.

After an extended morning jam session in the living room (3 hours long, with rotating members) during which Skeggy teaches my children to fish in his river, we reluctantly pile back onto the bus and declare this the high point of the tour, all of us quietly concerned that this might actually turn out to be true.

Saturday night is the Regent theater in Boston. Good ol’ Boston. Everyone’s so…Boston there. I take my dogs for a walk to try and drum up some memories, but no specific ones come to mind. Just a montage of crooked streets, dirty snow, hot shows and kamikaze drivers. The kamikaze drivers are still there, actually. I risk my life trying to get back in time for sound check.

That night we have dinner at a Thai place with Echo and his sister, the motorcycle saleswoman (she can identify the make and model of a motorcycle by sound alone). Echo tries to pay. He always tries to pay. He bought us kangaroo meat in Iceland once. We don’t let him buy dinner anymore.

Then we drive to the Jersey shore and sleep Sunday morning away in an empty beach house that has been graciously offered us. When we wake up, we plan a barbecue for our night off. We take this barbecue very seriously, writing shopping lists and buying ingredients…chopping, marinating, grilling, drinking.

Afterwards, we’re pretty proud of ourselves, though we decide that it’s only a good barbecue, not a great one. “Next one’ll be great,” we agree.

Of course there is no next one. In the morning, we’re on the bus for good.

Week One – The European tour begins in a club in Bristol called Thekla, which is actually a boat. We figure, if we suck too bad, we can just sail away.

We don’t suck, though I do feel a little crazy, trying to contain the rhythmic and melodic chaos that results from combining 50FootWave, the McCarricks and myself. I feel less crazy the next night in Leicester and by Nottingham on the third night, I am actually sailing away in a good way. That night there is a lunar eclipse which we watch on the street with strangers.

Martin is then chased by a pantomime horse in Birmingham (or so he says — all he has for proof is a cellphone picture of it just standing there — I told him it’d be more convincing if the picture were taken from the ground with a big pantomime hoof in the foreground and an angry horse head in the back).

At the club that night, for one reason or another, Billy ends up telling some club employee to shove a veggie burger up his ass. This does not go over well. Billy is very New York and English people are very English, for the most part. He’s asked to say he’s sorry and he does — but he isn’t and they can tell.

In Portsmouth we park the bus near the ocean and I wash my hair in an aquarium. In a sink in a ladies room at an aquarium. We see otters (awful cute but they smell really bad — I no longer want one for a pet) and sharks. Bodhi, in his enthusiasm, tries to swim with the sharks. We grab him and explain that he’s allowed to reach in and pet them but only from dry land. Butterflies terrify Bodhi.

In London, we see dear friends and play Koko, a beautiful hall in Camden. The show feels great. Koko is not too cold or too polite and we take that opportunity to lose ourselves in what we are doing. I’ve often thought that I play more for my fellow musicians than the audience and tonight that is absolutely true. The audience is so perfect, I know they can take care of themselves as listeners and let us musicians concentrate on playing the best show we possibly can.

Best signage: “ENGLISH LAND APES”

Week Two – After the show in Sheffield, I whip a roll at Martin. It hits him square in the face which makes everyone happy but Martin, who seems confused. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” I say, “Americans are always whipping shit at each other. Especially food.” This cheers him up a little, but I make a mental note not to pitch any more food at Martin. He’s been through a lot on this tour already, what with the horse thing and all.

Bernie and I still shudder at the memory of the showers in Manchester University (pitch dark, down a rickety spiral staircase…and rats) it seems better to stay dirty. The show is swell, though: hot and loud. Makes us miss 50Foot a little less.

Glasgow is one of my favorite cities. Today we take the two little boys to the Botanical Garden which has a greenhouse with a room devoted entirely to carnivorous plants. Some of them are huge and otherwordly — really freaky. Then we walk to a grocery store and try to blend (we don’t). At the club, I wash my hair in a sink.

Ice cold showers in the club in Dublin, but showers none the less. We are clean for the time being. And for the third time on this tour, we get leeks on the rider. “What are we supposed to do with these?” we ask each other again, holding them up. I consider whipping them at somebody (not Martin) then decide against it, as energy reserves are low.

I have contracted a gorgeous flu, the likes of which I have never before experienced. It seems to have attacked my lungs, trachea and bones. I try to keep this from the band so as to avoid becoming the tour pariah, but they catch me lying on the floor staring at an electrical outlet, something I don’t usually do. “Are you okay?” someone asks me.

“I don’t know,” I answer.

“What do you think you have?”

“Death.”

This is when things begin to go downhill.

Week Three – Amsterdam is springlike and full of happy, high people. I fail to absorb their festive attitude though, as I am trying so hard just to breathe. I still don’t know what the hell is wrong with me (pleurisy? pneumonia? plague?). I never get sick — I’ve been quite smug about this in the past.

At dinner in beautiful Ghent (our theory is we never made it to Ghent; the bus crashed on the way and we are in heaven), I cough like my eyeballs are gonna fall out onto my plate. The bartender tells me later that he had an ambulance on the phone, waiting to see if I collapsed. I escape to the dressing room where I can swill cough syrup and collapse in peace.

I then cough through Paris, Madrid, Barcelona and Milan. The excessive energy that has haunted me through most of my adult life is a distant memory. I lie on the bus until show time, do the show and then I lie down again. Then I cough without breathing for a while, then I lie down. Now Kim has The Thing, as we refer to it. She is also lying down and coughing. We make a suicide pact.

Week Four – We are sitting in a restaurant in Basel, Switzerland, a place I’ve never even heard of, when my friends Jeff and Geoff walk through the door. They are painters from Providence — RISD friends whose floors I slept on when I was a homeless teenager. Jeff sits down next to me and just laughs. I am so deeply confused that I forget to cough for a minute. “What the hell?” is all I can think to say.

Apparently, Jeff and Geoff and some other friends of mine are painting a mural in Basel this month. They saw posters for the show and figured they’d just show up to, I don’t know, mess with my head. It works. They ask to be put on the guest list and then leave. I lean over and ask Billy if my friends were really just here, in Switzerland. “What friends?” he says.

That night, I start coughing in the middle of “Hook In Her Head” and can’t stop. Every night it is a serious battle, trying to sing without coughing, and tonight I lose it at the end of the show. I think because they were smoking some kind of fucked up clove cigarettes in the front row. We finish the song as an instrumental, then Billy takes me outside where I scare the children with choking, wheezing noises as I try to catch my breath.

In the dressing room, Jeff draws a “tattoo” on Bodhi, who treasures it for weeks. I am not allowed to wash his arm until every bit of it has faded.

Then we park the bus in an industrial part of Stuttgart for 2 days. It looks like war time out there: gray and bleak. It snows, the snow melts…we do nothing, as there is nothing to do. The band and bus driver get hotel rooms (it’s the bus driver’s birthday), but Billy and the kids and I elect to stay on the bus and watch the Simpsons for 2 whole days. We actually eat potatoes we found under a seat in the front lounge of the bus to complete the war time picture.

Rob’s pregnant wife, Amy, joins the tour and cheers us all up. As much as
I like Amy, though, I avoid her to keep her from catching The Thing.

Munich is a moneyed city and therefore beautiful. The rich own most of the beauty in this world, it seems, both natural and man-made, but we partake of the lovely Isar river front: Bodhi wades in while Wyatt makes designs out of rock piles. Billy and I talk in the sun. We feel lucky to be playing music all over the world after all these years, as physically difficult as it is.

In Berlin, we meet the lovely Didi, a kind of punk rock club chef who takes Bodhi under his wing and teaches him to cook for 12 people at a time. Bodhi wears an apron, stirs soup, sets the table — pretty much does nothing but cook and talk to Didi all day. He cries when we leave the club because he already misses Didi, so Billy runs back to take a picture of Didi with his cell phone.

Then Bodhi cries because he is “forgetting the sound of Didi’s voice”. This makes everyone in the Bus Family very sad. What a thing to identify. We all think of lost loved ones and take a minute to try and remember the sound of their voices.

In Aarhus we spend a day with Marie and Anders, friends we met through Howe Gelb. They take us to a playground with pet rabbits and goats! The kids just lose it with happiness. Danes love kids so much. Bodhi is chased out of the goat pen by a crazy baby goat. “That baby goat was crazy!” he says gleefully.

Week Five – Bergen, Norway is like Boulder-meets-Seattle. It’s really breathtaking. Bo tries cotton candy for the first time and Bernie tries whale. He describes it as “salt water reindeer”. The fisherman who gives it to him says, “It’s okay! A whale is a mammal!”. “So am I”, says Bernie, under his breath.

We do like the incredible black bread and smoked fish, brown cheese, herbs and vodka, though. I feel like this is soul food for blondes. I blend in Scandinavia (the only place on earth where I do, as far as I can tell) and wonder if this healthy place with clean air and great food will make me better.

That night, the crowd is so amazing that Bernie and Rob and I play a 50Foot set for the encore. We are immediately drenched in sweat. These songs are so fully engaging — now I know what’s going to make me better. The audience yells “More! More!” as we leave; I turn to Bernie and Rob and yell, “More! More!”.

Oslo and Stockholm are as lovely as always, but Gothenburg is a beautiful surprise. Smart, friendly and educated, the city reminds me of Hoboken, NJ (but really clean!). The club takes good care of us, looks out for the kids and invites me back. We look forward to going back, too, as the promoter is a dead ringer for our kids’ favorite babysitter and inspires a sort of “love stupor” in Bodhi and Wyatt which makes them easy to control.

Our friends in Reykjavik put us up in style. These are the first real beds any of us have seen in over a month. We take showers (with hot water!) and see our faces in mirrors again. Some of us have tiny fridges. Windows! Toilets! We are all high on this stuff.

There is a wooden bowl on the table in the little 3 bedroom apartment where my family lives for 3 days. We rush out to the store, buy a bag of apples (this costs about $15 in Iceland) and put them in the bowl. The four of us step back and look. “Beautiful,” we agree. “Like we live somewhere,” says Wyatt, heartbreakingly.

For 2 days we enjoy this beautiful city, walking through neighborhoods that remind us of New Zealand (of all things) and moss-covered cemeteries that remind us of nothing else. Then on the day we leave, our friend Thordis takes us to the famous Blue Lagoon, ice blue hot springs in black lava. Thordis has two wonderful children and is about 10 months pregnant with her third, but she spends the day with us anyway, floating around one of the craziest places I’ve ever been. We leave for the airport feeling fairly groovy. I am breathing again. I’m on my way home to America.

Life is good.

Feb. 15

In San Diego, we stay with my beloved uncles, Doot and True. We get in so late, though, that they are already asleep. When we step off the elevator and into their apartment, we see a note on a table which reads, “Hello, Possums! Macaroni and cheese in the kitchen, clean sheets on the beds — Wyatt, we would like some more origami pianos, please”.

Last time we visited, Wyatt was on an origami piano roll and left about 60 on display in their foyer. It was quite an installment — but it blew away the first time someone opened the door.

Feb. 16

Interview, photo shoot and an in-store at Lou’s in Encinitas. Then we have dinner at a Mexican place up the road with my old friend, Jane. Jane and I grew up together on the goofy little island where I come from. When we were teenagers, she tried to start a hockey helmet trend by wearing them to hardcore shows, but it never really caught on. Now she’s a fancy, grown up lawyer in San Diego, but she keeps me in the loop by including me in the email lunch pool in her office. I always vote for the Little Fish Market.

After dinner, Jane hands me an envelope. “I found this and thought you might want it,” she says. Inside is a picture of our friend, Mark, who killed himself back home a few months ago. His death made Jane and I feel very far away. Mark is smiling in the picture; he looks beautiful and happy. I stare and stare, can’t look away. I don’t realize it for a minute, but I’m crying.

Feb. 17

It is 98 degrees today. I will not whine about this after complaining so bitchily about the cold in other parts of the country, but let me just say that it feels weird. We race around Los Angeles before the Amoeba in-store, trying to see all of our friends. Then Fletch and her Significant Debbie meet us at the store and rescue the kids, who desperately miss their aunties.

I do an interview in the green room with a woman named Brandi who really looks like a Brandi, but she is nice and does a pretty decent interview. Afterwards, the film crew and I look for vodka mixers. “Red Bull!” one of them keeps saying, but I just can’t be that guy. I go with the dregs of a pineapple “snack cup” intended for toddlers and immediately feel intense remorse. Not because of the toddler thing, but because it is sickly sweet with a gel-like consistency — like a half-done Jell-O shot. I choke it down, then play for a big, friendly crowd who keeps saying, “whooo!” (Fletcher: “Is that an American thing? Do Europeans say whooo?” — I make a note to myself to look into it on the European tour).

Feb. 18

Aaahhh…San Francisco. You forget how beautiful it is here. We take the kids and dogs hiking by the ocean and don’t find any snakes, but we feel woods-y anyway.

Another Amoeba in-store this afternoon, another good stage and professional PA, more nice people. Then friends feed us excellent barbecue in their beautiful home. We watch the sun set from their deck while Wyatt waters their plants and Bo breaks their stuff. A perfect day.

Feb. 21

It’s strange to be back in Portland. We don’t live here anymore, but our stuff is in a big box somewhere in this city. Staying with my brother and his family, we are visitors, not locals.

My neices are already different: Ella, the toddler, calls her drawings “abstract” and the baby crawls, sits in chairs and eats food. I feel betrayed.

A sweet evening in-store at Music Millenium on 23rd and then KBOO with Brandon Lieberman. “Show up any time,” he says, “but if you want to swear, come after 10 o’clock”. I don’t particularly want to swear, so I show up early and wait in the rain for someone to notice me outside and let me in. They do — and I stay for more than an hour. Brandon is such a nice man — we crack each other up and forget to end the interview.

“Don’t leave!” he cries when I stand up to go, “In 10 minutes, you’ll be able to swear!”

Feb. 22

Seattle always breaks our hearts. We miss the city and our friends who live there. We’re pathetic. The lovelier a visit to Seattle is, the sadder we get about having left in ’02.

After an afternoon KEXP session, we drive around the city showing the kids places we used to go when we lived there. Ryder and Wyatt remember most of them, but Bo feels defensive about not having been born. “Before you guys were born?” he says, “I used to go scuba diving and also? My friends you don’t know would let me ride in their blimp. Yeah…it was great before you guys were born.”

We do a perfect Easy Street in-store — Bob and his people are special. Our pals give us care packages to help us through our cross-country drive — fruit, water, raw veggies and a gas card. We take pictures and kiss people we love until dark — we have to leave.

Feb. 23-27

We have to get from Seattle to Boston in 4 days — or we miss our flight for the European tour. Ugh. Highlights of the cross country drive include:

Washing my hair in Starbucks’ sink after Starbucks’ sink after Starbucks’ sink; an enormous sign advertising a glassblower’s establishment on which someone has (repeatedly) blacked out the first two letters; a trip to the “zoo” (grocery store) to see lobsters swimming in a tank; being mistaken for a teenage bowler by other teenage bowlers at a Comfort Inn outside Boise (“Hey girl! What school do you go to?”); the Home Movies audio CD (I’m a big Brendon Small fan); spending the night in our car by the side of the highway during a blizzard near Laramie when they shut down I-80, dreaming of the desert…