So, through the inspiration of this week's particular douche, i've decided to write a new weekly blog about super-douches that stand out amongst the normal everyday douchery.
This particular douche was supposed to come work as an artist at our tattoo shop. He was coming from Arkansas. So this dude, let's call him John Mcclure, rolls into the shop around 8pm one night. He had spent two days driving here to VA from AR after talking to the owner here about coming to work. Our owner had already given him the details on what his cut would be, what the shop would provide for him, all that jazz. So anyway, he rolls in at 8pm one night, Leigh and I introduce ourselves, give him the tour, show him the portfolios, shoot the shit. We talk about how there's a lot of tattoo shops in town, few good ones, mostly shit ones. We talk about how this shop generally stays busy and has gotten busier every month we've been open. Tell him about what he should be expecting to make. Then i start talking to him about his percentage and tell him that he's going to be tipping me out at the end of the night, exactly what everyone else tip's me, 10% of their take home.
As a little background on what my job here at the shop entails, I come to work generally 2 hours before everyone else. I make the place sparkling clean, to the point where at least a couple times a week we get a, "wow, this is the cleanest tattoo shop i've been in", i take a bit of pride in that. I also handle all the paperwork, deal with most of the customers questions, tell them what can be done, what can't be done. I Line the artists up with work, Answer the phones, I check inventory, i order what we need, i scrub the tubes and autoclave them for the artists, I get the artists anything they need while they're tattooing whether it be paper towels, lunch, whatever. My job is basically to make sure all the artists have to do is tattoo, i do everything else for them so they can focus on their art. Not to toot my own horn, i've also been told i'm very good with the customers and keep them coming in. Don't get me wrong, the job is pretty easy if you're not half retarded. All it takes is some friendly conversation, knowing how to clean well, and being able to answer the kind of questions that after working at a tattoo shop for a few years, you should be able to answer.
It's an easy job, but nothing i can afford to do for free, and 10% of your daily net ain't bad. If you make $400 then you owe me $40 for running around for you all day making you and the customers happy.
So anyway, this particular douche starts bitching about having to tip me out at the end of the night, saying it's not fair that he only gets 40% (which is wrong, he's actually getting 45% because he's tipping me out of the net and not the gross, but i'm no accountant). a 50/50 split for someone starting at a shop isn't bad, it's not like you can't get a raise, you will get a raise, as long as you stay, do your work, and don't be a douche. Well it raised about 5 minutes of discussion and It was closing time by now, so we locked up the shop and left. I gave John directions to get to a hotel for the night with the expectations that he'd be back in the morning to start working.
The next day comes and dude never shows up. Apparently he was real pussy-hurt over the percentage discussion and, i don't know, figures he can do better somewhere else, whatever, we win and we don't have to work with the douche. We don't hear anything about it for a week or so. Then out of nowhere Leigh answers the phone and who is it, John Mcclure's mommy, she starts ripping into Leigh about how nice of a boy her son is and how she can't believe how we treated him and he's been tattooing for years and we can't treat him like that......yeah, his mommy called us to complain. Did i mention this guy is 41 YEARS OLD, and he has his fucking mom call up to bitch at us for not treating him the way she thinks he deserves.
So yeah, he wins the very first DOUCHE OF THE WEEK trophy, i honestly don't know if someone next week will top it, but we'll see. working at a tattoo shop, there's never a lack of douches to go around
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
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
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
latest pet peeve
I have a lot of pet peeves working here at the tattoo shop, and i feel like i gain more and more almost daily. Here's the latest in a long list
People who call and ask, "Where exactly are you located?" and mean the exact opposite. I get that question worded the same way a lot, and i always answer the same way, "We're located at exactly 6112 Jahnke Rd." Of course this isn't the information people actually want, they want to know where "about" we're located. They want to hear, "Oh, we're about half way down Jahnke, across the street from the 7-11, next to the Golden Skillet." It's a lot like the David Cross rant about the misuse of the word "literally".
You're thinking, wow, this dude gets peeved pretty easily, it's really not that big of a deal, and it's not, not really, in the grand scheme of things it really doesn't matter. But when you get asked the exact same question, worded the exact wrong way daily, it tends to get under your skin.
Anyway, i know no one reads this thing, in fact, i'm sure that no one has read this blog but me, but i still feel like i should be writing more, maybe i'm just more boring of a person than i thought i was, oh well.
People who call and ask, "Where exactly are you located?" and mean the exact opposite. I get that question worded the same way a lot, and i always answer the same way, "We're located at exactly 6112 Jahnke Rd." Of course this isn't the information people actually want, they want to know where "about" we're located. They want to hear, "Oh, we're about half way down Jahnke, across the street from the 7-11, next to the Golden Skillet." It's a lot like the David Cross rant about the misuse of the word "literally".
You're thinking, wow, this dude gets peeved pretty easily, it's really not that big of a deal, and it's not, not really, in the grand scheme of things it really doesn't matter. But when you get asked the exact same question, worded the exact wrong way daily, it tends to get under your skin.
Anyway, i know no one reads this thing, in fact, i'm sure that no one has read this blog but me, but i still feel like i should be writing more, maybe i'm just more boring of a person than i thought i was, oh well.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
studio times, good times
so here we are, in chicago. making a record, well an EP really. it's so nice to get out of town for a week, drive to a town you have very little familiarity with and just camp out in a studio. this place is like a cave, and i mean that in the best possible way. there's no windows, no light from the outside world. when the lights are out, you have no idea whether it's 6am or 6pm or anywhere in between. i slept past noon today, which hasn't happened in a very long time. the songs are sounding great, better than i thought they would turn out to be honest. everybody's in pretty good spirits too. i think we're on that cusp of everyone being broke right now. you can almost smell that point when you're on tour, or in the studio. at least when you're on tour you know that you'll be getting some money almost nightly. it's never much, but it can usually put gas in your tank and taco bell in your belly. in the studio you're pretty much doing the same work, playing music, drinking, partying, but there's no monetary reward for it. you pretty much live off of what you could afford to save in the weeks prior to ditching town. what's great is knowing the people well enough, and being good enough friends that the stress of poverty really doesn't change conversation and the ability to shrug shit off.
we've got a couple more days here, living the dream, then we get ripped back into reality, back into our work, our family, the daily grind. it's bittersweet, we all love our families, most of us are fairly fond of our day jobs, but what we're doing here and now is what we all dream of. I haven't really left the studio since we've been here, we spent one night at a bar, we've walked to the grocery store and to grab some pizza slices, but that's about it. i feel like i should take this opportunity to see a city that, even though i've spent a couple weeks here over the last couple years, i've yet to really experience. then i realize how warm i'm kept by the booze and music here in our bat cave and how comforting it is knowing that, if even for a miniscule amount of time, here i am, living the dream.
we've got a couple more days here, living the dream, then we get ripped back into reality, back into our work, our family, the daily grind. it's bittersweet, we all love our families, most of us are fairly fond of our day jobs, but what we're doing here and now is what we all dream of. I haven't really left the studio since we've been here, we spent one night at a bar, we've walked to the grocery store and to grab some pizza slices, but that's about it. i feel like i should take this opportunity to see a city that, even though i've spent a couple weeks here over the last couple years, i've yet to really experience. then i realize how warm i'm kept by the booze and music here in our bat cave and how comforting it is knowing that, if even for a miniscule amount of time, here i am, living the dream.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
sometimes......
i feel like it's a race between the beer and accomplishment......sometimes it's a tie
The 'Noog part II
So the second time we toured through Chattanooga was a bit different. This time we were actually playing Rev Tom's basement and this was near the beginning of tour
I remember being very excited to head back after the last experience. Again, we show up at Tom's house, start drinking and smoking almost immediately. Pretty much the same experience, Weird Al blaring on his $30 stereo, mangy dogs, 12 very different yet equally noxious smells. It came time to play, we set up in his basement, played the set, and it just wasn't the same. This time it seemed kids were way more into drinking in the front yard than checking out the touring bands. It was rather disappointing given the build-up we had for our second visit to this glorious city.
After the show, we were all pretty drunk and tired. We decided that we had to do whatever we could to not have to sleep in Tom's dilapidated house of fumes. We found an old friend of our drummer's who offered up her couches and floors. We buy some beer, get to her house, start drinking and just realize we're not really into it. It was just us and her and no one was really in a party mood, so we decided it was time to douse the lights and hit the hay. So our host puts on a chill ambient/metal/whatever record and we all get comfy, a few of us in the house, Paul and Nick decide to catch Z's in the van.
I remember very clearly up to this point thinking, "wow, maybe i had chattanooga all wrong, maybe that last visit was just under amazing circumstances, maybe i overestimated this town". About the time i was finishing this train of thought in my head someone busts through the front door. When i say busts through the door, it was like it was getting kicked in by a burglar. It's a girl with dreads, crust punk looking, with a giant blunt in her hand. She jumped into the room like a raving lunatic demanding a party. At this point she lights the blunt and starts ripping her shirt off. Out of nowhere, other people start showing up, mind you, this is at like 2 or 3am. Now there's a house full of punk rock kids, including a handful of girls with their shirts ripped off, and these are real punk girls who don't wear bras or anything of that sort.
I also remember at this point thinking very clearly, "this is the 'Noog i was waiting for". We partied the night away, it was a great night. The only thing that sucked is that Paul and Nick missed out, thinking the night was over and passing out in the van. I've made the same mistake before, you can never underestimate how a night's gonna turn out.
We had a great fucking time that night, got super-shitfaced, super-stoned, and were surrounded by serious partying maniacs.
god i love Chattanooga, TN.
I remember being very excited to head back after the last experience. Again, we show up at Tom's house, start drinking and smoking almost immediately. Pretty much the same experience, Weird Al blaring on his $30 stereo, mangy dogs, 12 very different yet equally noxious smells. It came time to play, we set up in his basement, played the set, and it just wasn't the same. This time it seemed kids were way more into drinking in the front yard than checking out the touring bands. It was rather disappointing given the build-up we had for our second visit to this glorious city.
After the show, we were all pretty drunk and tired. We decided that we had to do whatever we could to not have to sleep in Tom's dilapidated house of fumes. We found an old friend of our drummer's who offered up her couches and floors. We buy some beer, get to her house, start drinking and just realize we're not really into it. It was just us and her and no one was really in a party mood, so we decided it was time to douse the lights and hit the hay. So our host puts on a chill ambient/metal/whatever record and we all get comfy, a few of us in the house, Paul and Nick decide to catch Z's in the van.
I remember very clearly up to this point thinking, "wow, maybe i had chattanooga all wrong, maybe that last visit was just under amazing circumstances, maybe i overestimated this town". About the time i was finishing this train of thought in my head someone busts through the front door. When i say busts through the door, it was like it was getting kicked in by a burglar. It's a girl with dreads, crust punk looking, with a giant blunt in her hand. She jumped into the room like a raving lunatic demanding a party. At this point she lights the blunt and starts ripping her shirt off. Out of nowhere, other people start showing up, mind you, this is at like 2 or 3am. Now there's a house full of punk rock kids, including a handful of girls with their shirts ripped off, and these are real punk girls who don't wear bras or anything of that sort.
I also remember at this point thinking very clearly, "this is the 'Noog i was waiting for". We partied the night away, it was a great night. The only thing that sucked is that Paul and Nick missed out, thinking the night was over and passing out in the van. I've made the same mistake before, you can never underestimate how a night's gonna turn out.
We had a great fucking time that night, got super-shitfaced, super-stoned, and were surrounded by serious partying maniacs.
god i love Chattanooga, TN.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Chattanooga, TN part I
In some ways, Chattanooga may be the greatest city on the planet. I've had the honor of visiting the 'Noog (that's what close personal friends of Chattanooga call it) 3 or 4 times now. That might not seem like a lot, but you have to put into perspective what a single day in the 'Noog can do to one's mind and body. I feel like the best way to portray my feelings on Chattanooga might be to just let you into the visits i've had, starting with the first.
VISIT I
So we're on tour for a couple weeks, and we're heading into the last couple days of tour, those last couple days consisting of Chattanooga, a day off, and then Asheville, NC. We pull into the Noog mid afternoon. Our drummer hooked this show up through his friend "Rev." Tom Foote, which i didn't hear all that much about till we pulled into town. We drive up to the Rev's house, we walk up knock, and there's Tom.
Tom is a late 30's early 40's WM with no teeth in the front of his mouth, i'm pretty sure he's drunk already, and he's really friendly. Don't get me wrong now, i love Tom, he's an awesome dude, "punk as fuck" would probably be the best way to describe him. His house smells akin to a farmyard barn. He's got a few dogs, all are older, mangy, and looking like they don't have long on this earth left. I can remember thinking, god, there's got to be a pile of dogshit somewhere in this house. So we proceed to get drunk at Tom's, our show is at a house across town, the turtlehead house. We spend some time at Tom's abode, listening to Weird Al and Minor Threat back to back with the stereo cranked to 11 and the speakers half blown. Tom's pretty much making us shotgun beers and smoke a lot of bad pot the whole time, but he doesn't have to twist the arm too much, i mean, you can't rape the willing.
So we end up at the turtlehead house, we load in, and we're setting up in a nice little cozy living room that's got all the furniture moved out of it. I love these shows, there's enough kids so that everyone's jammed together and everyone is in a good mood. We were at that perfect drunk, not too hammered to play, but drunk enough to rock, and we did, we rocked, it was a great show. Unfortunately for me, i got a migraine strength headache come on about 10 minutes before we played. For anyone not in a band, you can only imagine having the worst headache in your life and having to stand within a few feet of 5 or 6 large speakers, all cranked as high as they can go. It was a really good show, but i had to dip after we played and go sleep in the van and hope that when i woke up it would no longer feel like my head was in a vice.
I wake up fairly early, when you're in the Van the sun hits you as soon as it comes up and it's hard to sleep late. When i go back to the house i see a couple kids milling around the front yard and there's Rev. Tom. He's stoked that I'm awake, because now he has one more person to drink with. We proceed to go into the house and wake up my bandmates with beer bongs and bottles of Jameson's. Outside there's a kid trying to hit empty beers with a wiffle ball bat, he's missing....badly. When he starts talking i realize that he's mentally handicapped....or so i thought. Turns out he's just a crusty traveller kid from the Ukraine who speaks english in a way that just makes him sound retarded. Anyway, i felt bad for thinking that for all of about 10 minutes.
So we head back to Tom's house, and start drinking and smoking heavy throughout the day. Ian and Tom hit it off immediately, it didn't take anytime at all before they were arm and arm singing along to Weird Al and pouring beer bongs for each other. Ian got smashed, real smashed. At one point he asked for the keys to walk down to the van to get some rolling tobacco. He takes the keys, and he can't really walk down the stairs, so he slides down the stairs on his ass, gets to the van, forgets why he's at the van, throws the keys in a bush, and sits down in a mud puddle to continue drinking his beer. That was a few minutes after he tried to fight both Nick and Joe and ended up with a pretty good scab on his head.
We come to find out somehow, that Tom's roomate Mickey (who's quickly become our hero in the Noog) is selling acid, gel tabs to be exact. Well at this point Ian's passed out but the rest of us are all about taking some acid. We quickly realize we don't have any money but we pony up some of the band fund to buy us all one hit each. Half an hour goes by, Joe is tripping his face off but the rest of us aren't feeling anything, so we make that mistake everyone's made once or twice and decide we need to take more. We understand that it just wouldn't be right to take any more out of our gas money to buy drugs, so we come up with a plan to offer Mickey a paper bag full of fireworks that we procured in NC earlier in the tour when we did have money. How were we gonna ask this stranger if he'll trade acid for fireworks? We decided to send Joe in to reason with Mickey, "Joe, tell him that it's not working and we'd love to trade fireworks and a some merch for more acid". Of course, it's gonna be hard for Joe to convince Mickey that the acids not working, by this time Joe's walking around with his shirt off and a big plush goose under his arm preteding it's talking to people. Joe was fucked. We sent him in there anyway, with a goose under one arm and a big brown paper bag filled with fireworks under the other. Joe walks into Mickey's room drops the bag of fireworks, gives Mickey a look that to Joe says, "hey man, can we trade you fireworks for drugs" of course to Mickey the look said, "holy shit, my face is melting, i'm gonna go outside now and watch the trees fly away"
Luckily enough Mickey came outside and asked us folks who's faces weren't quite melting yet what the bag of fireworks was for. We explained, he gave us all another hit. We probably didn't need the other hit, our stuff started kicking in pretty soon after the firework negotiation.
We decided it was a good idea to start lighting off the fireworks we didn't barter away, one of which looked like a giant bottlerocket with a grapefruit sized ball of aluminum foil at the end. This was way too top heavy to light out of a bottle, so i came up with the idea of sticking it in the ground and lighting it from there. We're all standing a foot or so away as i light it, the fuse burns to the gunpowder and we quickly realize that it's stuck too far in the ground to take off. I saw my life flash before my eyes as i ran, tripping my face off, from this atomic bomb looking thing that was about to blow up right on top of us.
We lose Joe at this point, he went a bit over the edge. We saw him through Tom's front window laying on the couch with one of the mangy dogs at his feet. We figured that Joe looked pretty comfortable and maybe he was just done for the night and decided we should walk around the Noog at 3am and take a look around. Turns out Joe was scared shitless of this beast at his feet, and wasn't moving because he was afraid the dog was going to eat him if he tried to get away.
We decided to take a quick trip to the gas station at 4 am or so where we sent Paul in with a handfull of nickels and pennies to buy us candy, which was pretty hilarious because it was just Paul, with a headful of acid, and a bunch of construction workers or whatnot preparing for a day of work. Then it was time to adventure on foot.
Turns out Chattanooga has an entire little park built out of landfill. There's perfectly shaped conical hills named "adventure mountain" and weird stadium seating cut into the terrain, all facing the a sewerage pipe. We decided that we couldn't drop a cigarette on this landfill hill because it looked flammable, the grass was more of a sponge, hydrogen sponge is what we figured, the whole thing could blow at any second. I'll tell you though, sitting atop the hydrogen sponge "mountain", watching the sun come up, and feeling like you could touch the reds, purples, and oranges in the sky was damn near a religious experience. We realized it was landfill while we were walking back to Tom's and we see rust running out from the bottom of the hill and a powercord coming out of the ground.
We were walking back to Tom's at about 5 or 6 am, the sky lightening up, and we realized that our fingers were yellowed by the cheap rolling tobacco we've been smoking for the last day or two. "Holy shit, look at our hands, fucking gross, they look like Tom's hands, it's the fucking appalachian mist man, if we don't get out of here now, we're never gonna get out of here". That was pretty much the train of thought at 6am in Chattanooga, still tripping hard. We find both Ian and Joe in the van already, which makes escape a lot easier. Ian's still sleeping, Joe's wide awake and hiding behind a plastic spoon with a picture of an antelope on it.....we all deal with stuff in different ways. We explain to Joe that the Appalacian mist is upon us and we have to get out of there now, he put up a bit of a fight, but was in no position to be dictating what we were doing, we might be tripping, but we weren't hiding behind a spoon.
We left a note on a pizza box for Tom, thanking him for the amazing time and high tail it out of there. On our way to Asheville we had a really strange run in with a waffle house employee but that's for another blog entirely
VISIT I
So we're on tour for a couple weeks, and we're heading into the last couple days of tour, those last couple days consisting of Chattanooga, a day off, and then Asheville, NC. We pull into the Noog mid afternoon. Our drummer hooked this show up through his friend "Rev." Tom Foote, which i didn't hear all that much about till we pulled into town. We drive up to the Rev's house, we walk up knock, and there's Tom.
Tom is a late 30's early 40's WM with no teeth in the front of his mouth, i'm pretty sure he's drunk already, and he's really friendly. Don't get me wrong now, i love Tom, he's an awesome dude, "punk as fuck" would probably be the best way to describe him. His house smells akin to a farmyard barn. He's got a few dogs, all are older, mangy, and looking like they don't have long on this earth left. I can remember thinking, god, there's got to be a pile of dogshit somewhere in this house. So we proceed to get drunk at Tom's, our show is at a house across town, the turtlehead house. We spend some time at Tom's abode, listening to Weird Al and Minor Threat back to back with the stereo cranked to 11 and the speakers half blown. Tom's pretty much making us shotgun beers and smoke a lot of bad pot the whole time, but he doesn't have to twist the arm too much, i mean, you can't rape the willing.
So we end up at the turtlehead house, we load in, and we're setting up in a nice little cozy living room that's got all the furniture moved out of it. I love these shows, there's enough kids so that everyone's jammed together and everyone is in a good mood. We were at that perfect drunk, not too hammered to play, but drunk enough to rock, and we did, we rocked, it was a great show. Unfortunately for me, i got a migraine strength headache come on about 10 minutes before we played. For anyone not in a band, you can only imagine having the worst headache in your life and having to stand within a few feet of 5 or 6 large speakers, all cranked as high as they can go. It was a really good show, but i had to dip after we played and go sleep in the van and hope that when i woke up it would no longer feel like my head was in a vice.
I wake up fairly early, when you're in the Van the sun hits you as soon as it comes up and it's hard to sleep late. When i go back to the house i see a couple kids milling around the front yard and there's Rev. Tom. He's stoked that I'm awake, because now he has one more person to drink with. We proceed to go into the house and wake up my bandmates with beer bongs and bottles of Jameson's. Outside there's a kid trying to hit empty beers with a wiffle ball bat, he's missing....badly. When he starts talking i realize that he's mentally handicapped....or so i thought. Turns out he's just a crusty traveller kid from the Ukraine who speaks english in a way that just makes him sound retarded. Anyway, i felt bad for thinking that for all of about 10 minutes.
So we head back to Tom's house, and start drinking and smoking heavy throughout the day. Ian and Tom hit it off immediately, it didn't take anytime at all before they were arm and arm singing along to Weird Al and pouring beer bongs for each other. Ian got smashed, real smashed. At one point he asked for the keys to walk down to the van to get some rolling tobacco. He takes the keys, and he can't really walk down the stairs, so he slides down the stairs on his ass, gets to the van, forgets why he's at the van, throws the keys in a bush, and sits down in a mud puddle to continue drinking his beer. That was a few minutes after he tried to fight both Nick and Joe and ended up with a pretty good scab on his head.
We come to find out somehow, that Tom's roomate Mickey (who's quickly become our hero in the Noog) is selling acid, gel tabs to be exact. Well at this point Ian's passed out but the rest of us are all about taking some acid. We quickly realize we don't have any money but we pony up some of the band fund to buy us all one hit each. Half an hour goes by, Joe is tripping his face off but the rest of us aren't feeling anything, so we make that mistake everyone's made once or twice and decide we need to take more. We understand that it just wouldn't be right to take any more out of our gas money to buy drugs, so we come up with a plan to offer Mickey a paper bag full of fireworks that we procured in NC earlier in the tour when we did have money. How were we gonna ask this stranger if he'll trade acid for fireworks? We decided to send Joe in to reason with Mickey, "Joe, tell him that it's not working and we'd love to trade fireworks and a some merch for more acid". Of course, it's gonna be hard for Joe to convince Mickey that the acids not working, by this time Joe's walking around with his shirt off and a big plush goose under his arm preteding it's talking to people. Joe was fucked. We sent him in there anyway, with a goose under one arm and a big brown paper bag filled with fireworks under the other. Joe walks into Mickey's room drops the bag of fireworks, gives Mickey a look that to Joe says, "hey man, can we trade you fireworks for drugs" of course to Mickey the look said, "holy shit, my face is melting, i'm gonna go outside now and watch the trees fly away"
Luckily enough Mickey came outside and asked us folks who's faces weren't quite melting yet what the bag of fireworks was for. We explained, he gave us all another hit. We probably didn't need the other hit, our stuff started kicking in pretty soon after the firework negotiation.
We decided it was a good idea to start lighting off the fireworks we didn't barter away, one of which looked like a giant bottlerocket with a grapefruit sized ball of aluminum foil at the end. This was way too top heavy to light out of a bottle, so i came up with the idea of sticking it in the ground and lighting it from there. We're all standing a foot or so away as i light it, the fuse burns to the gunpowder and we quickly realize that it's stuck too far in the ground to take off. I saw my life flash before my eyes as i ran, tripping my face off, from this atomic bomb looking thing that was about to blow up right on top of us.
We lose Joe at this point, he went a bit over the edge. We saw him through Tom's front window laying on the couch with one of the mangy dogs at his feet. We figured that Joe looked pretty comfortable and maybe he was just done for the night and decided we should walk around the Noog at 3am and take a look around. Turns out Joe was scared shitless of this beast at his feet, and wasn't moving because he was afraid the dog was going to eat him if he tried to get away.
We decided to take a quick trip to the gas station at 4 am or so where we sent Paul in with a handfull of nickels and pennies to buy us candy, which was pretty hilarious because it was just Paul, with a headful of acid, and a bunch of construction workers or whatnot preparing for a day of work. Then it was time to adventure on foot.
Turns out Chattanooga has an entire little park built out of landfill. There's perfectly shaped conical hills named "adventure mountain" and weird stadium seating cut into the terrain, all facing the a sewerage pipe. We decided that we couldn't drop a cigarette on this landfill hill because it looked flammable, the grass was more of a sponge, hydrogen sponge is what we figured, the whole thing could blow at any second. I'll tell you though, sitting atop the hydrogen sponge "mountain", watching the sun come up, and feeling like you could touch the reds, purples, and oranges in the sky was damn near a religious experience. We realized it was landfill while we were walking back to Tom's and we see rust running out from the bottom of the hill and a powercord coming out of the ground.
We were walking back to Tom's at about 5 or 6 am, the sky lightening up, and we realized that our fingers were yellowed by the cheap rolling tobacco we've been smoking for the last day or two. "Holy shit, look at our hands, fucking gross, they look like Tom's hands, it's the fucking appalachian mist man, if we don't get out of here now, we're never gonna get out of here". That was pretty much the train of thought at 6am in Chattanooga, still tripping hard. We find both Ian and Joe in the van already, which makes escape a lot easier. Ian's still sleeping, Joe's wide awake and hiding behind a plastic spoon with a picture of an antelope on it.....we all deal with stuff in different ways. We explain to Joe that the Appalacian mist is upon us and we have to get out of there now, he put up a bit of a fight, but was in no position to be dictating what we were doing, we might be tripping, but we weren't hiding behind a spoon.
We left a note on a pizza box for Tom, thanking him for the amazing time and high tail it out of there. On our way to Asheville we had a really strange run in with a waffle house employee but that's for another blog entirely
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