the 'Noog part III

Alright, so far we've gone through the first two visits to Chattanooga. The first two being surprisingly amazing in their own different ways. After the second visit when Paul and Nick decided to call it a night early and missed out on the topless punk rock girl party, i thought we all knew enough not to underestimate what Chattanooga, TN had in store for us.

This time through was with a different drummer, a fill in for our 6 week tour, and someone who'd never been to the 'Noog. We spent the whole ride their filling his head with the glory of what a Chattanooga bender could entail. This time we're playing a show at a Tex-Mex restaurant, the day's already starting out strange.

We get into town, all of our bladders are about to burst, whoever was driving decided that stopping a half hour outside of town wasn't an option and people better just hold it till we pull in. We drive up to the restaurant really early to find it closed.....oh well, we all hop out and run to different dark corners of the building and evacuate bladders, you know that kind of piss that rides the line of being a religious experience, that's what i'm talking about, thank you deity of urination.

After the pissing we check the front door for the hours of operation to see a flyer. This particular flyer lists a bunch of the bands we were supposedly playing with, only the show was for 2 days prior at the same restaurant. If you've ever booked your own tour, you know that reading a flyer like that can often mean that your show was forgot about, since there was a flyer for a show that had already happened on the door and no flyer for your show, you instinctively think, "fuck, again, really". Luckily this wasn't the case, the show was still on, there was a change in local bands playing, and there isn't a flyer, but don't worry, this is the 'Noog and kids will show.

Kids definitely showed, we were set to play 3rd out of 5 bands, perfect for the touring band, and the place was packed with drunken punkers, crusters, head bangers, and the uncategorizable. Amazingly there was a good amount of kids there who'd seen us in town before and were there and came out to see us. One of our friends, Mickey, the dude who traded us acid for fireworks and merch in our first visit, had just gotten out of jail and was stoked because he thought we were playing that show 2 days prior and thought he wasn't going to get out in time to catch us. Not only did our last shows there garner a little attention, but apparently so did our antics. Before we even played, we're sitting at the bar writing our set list and this kid we never met comes up and asks us, "so, are you guys gonna do acid this time?" We replied the only way you can, "Why, do you have some?". He said he did, and then like half the people i've ever met who claimed to be able to get us acid, he dissappeared. So we spend some time trying to track him down, we fail.

We had a great time at the show, great bands, good beer, good times. After the show we end up going to a party at this little house halfway up a rather steep hill. I can't recall who we went there with, who invited us, who the fuck drove us there, but the party was good times. We have enough beer at this house to flood New Orleans, which is a good sign. It's now a couple hours deep and Nick decides he's hitting up the comfy bench seat in the van for a good nights sleep (he has apparently learned nothing).

We're talking to these kids who lived in the house,a couple, talking about our visits to their fair city, talking about how this kid claimed he could get us acid at the show and failed us miserably. So the guy says, "Oh, you guys want acid, fuck we have acid." ..............YES............. We immidiately run down the driveway to wake Nick up, "Hey dude, we got acid, wake up, time to party, get your ass up....." to which he replied, "fucking liars, i'll believe it when i see it, bring it down here". We did, he saw it, and woke the fuck up. Mind you this is at maybe 4am now, which if you've ever took acid, you know what taking it at 4am means. It means you better have someone to drive your ass around the next day when you gotta hit the road. Luckily for us we did, her name's Kelly, and she was our tour mom and already sleeping in the van. We knew she didn't want any acid, so it all worked out.

The next 4 hours were spent watching half the band ride their skateboards down this giant hill that these kids lived on, while every hour or so having to go into the bathroom to "try" and take a shit. That's another thing that doesn't neet to be explained to anyone who's done acid a few times. The shit's basically poison, it's a lot of fun, but it can wreck your body, and make you feel like you have to shit every hour. A bathroom can also be quite the amusement park for someone with a head full of acid. You can get lost looking at yourself in a bathroom mirror for quite a while. Just ask Paul about a chat he had with his penis once while trying to take a shit on acid, ha. This bathroom though wasn't as much fun though and brought out some paranoia. First off, there was no lock on the door, and i don't know about you, but i definitely don't want to be barged in on while trying to eek out a shit on acid. Secondly, the bottom half of the door was chewed away by the couple who lived there's pit bull, which adds to the lack of privacy you feel. Thirdly, the entire floor of the bathroom was covered in a huge mound of dirtly clothes, towels, sheets, whatever. These people apparently kept a months amount of dirty laundry on their bathroom floor, at least i hope it was dirty, if it wasn't before it is now. With all these things interweaving in my head into paranoid delusions i had to get someone to watch the door at the very least and make sure everyone that looked like they were about to open the door knew that their was a kid in their trying to take a shit with a head full of acid.

My bandmates skateboarding was going alright, a couple tumbles into bushes on the side of the road and whatnot. The later it got in the night/morning though, the more cars started driving up and down this hill. I think i almost saw at least a couple of them get hit a few different times. At one point Paul falls off his board and flies into a bush, he comes out with a handful of berries.
Paul starts offering them to everyone as some sort of nutritious, organic, breakfast. There's no way in fucking hell that i'm gonna take random berries that someone on acid found in a bush and start eating them....apparently i was in the minority. "Don't worry, they're fuckin boisenberries" was his claim. About fifteen minutes after everyone else was munching on these berries, Jason, our drummer looks at his hands and then shoves them into my face and says, "do you see that too, or am i just tripping?" His hands were covered in these little bugs, crawling all over them, we later found out they were chiggers.....hilarity ensues. Now you've got 3 or 4 dudes trying their best to wash chiggers off their hands, our of their mouths, off their arms, all the while still tripping thier perverbial balls off.

At about 8 or 9 am we decide, like we usually do when we're tripping in Chattanooga, that we have to get out, run away, we can't stay in this town any longer or we're gonna go crazy. We sneak into the van, which our tour mom, Kelly, is still sleeping in and tell her we're gonna get out of town. She ponders out loud why we have to leave at 9am, when there's plenty of time to sleep some more. We tell her that we ate acid and we have to get out before we are swallowed up by the appalachian mist. She kicks one of us out of the driver's seat and proceeds to give us the dagger eyes that only a tour mom can give you......kelly is fairly dissapointed in our decision making.

We get on the highway, and all decide we have to take a shit.....of course. Kelly pulls into a WaWa, or something of that sort. At this point Ian is wearing an oversized bright orange cowboy hat with an outfit that bears a strong resemblance to something Baby Huey would wear. We all go into the store, take up 3 or 4 stalls next to each other and start laughing hysterically at any noise thats made. I'm pretty sure that everyone that walked into that bathroom was either freaked out or thought we were a bunch of special needs adults on a tour of the south. We all ran out of their, knowing that someone must've been able to pin us as some sort of drug abusers. We end up at a Waffle House, our breakfast joint of choice on the road. We are seated next to a couple touring the country on motorcycles. They took one look at us, and specifically Ian still in his Baby Huey outfit, and ask us if we mind if they take some photos. Here we are, still fucked up on acid, and looking the part fairly well, sitting in a waffle house, as a couple wearing biker outfits snaps 20 or 30 pictures of us.

That was about all i could take, i told the dudes there was no way i was eating anyway, and retired to the van where i layed down on a bench seat, put my feet up, and stared at the rather entertaining ceiling till the rest of the crew was done with breakfast. and that's the last time we visited the great city of Chattanooga