I am writing this blog because they are dangling prizes in front of me like some airline reward system. “Write a blog” they say …“don’t you want to get a gold star like Kenny and Georgia?” This is so manipulative. And yet….it IS a gold star.

Thoughts from the road. “The Road” like there is a direct line from Jack Keroak to us. There is so little connection between him and us that I cannot even spell his name. “Thoughts from The Road” (Every one in every band has written this… but mine will be different because I will end each paragraph with a word that has the letter Q in it. Something I would like to point out that Jack Keroacke never did.)

Riding from town to town in a big bus means you will never… NEVER… watch anything you like. No matter what you watch it will freeze as soon as someone says “And the killer is…” You will miss every answer in every game show…. every breast shown on every racy show…. the name of every miracle cure you can buy on the internet at 3 AM. So you set the channel to the weather station or something equally benign. There is an exact ratio between the number of freezes and the watcher’s interest in the show. Save yourself a shitload of aggravation and check out that rain in Omaha!

Apparently rock stars train from a very early age to not poop for incredibly long periods of time. That explains why so many of them die in their late twenties. Now, I am pretty much a camel when it comes to peeing… I have actually considered competitive peeing as a secondary occupation if this music thing doesn’t work out… but I lika de poop once in a while. It is a cruel joke that the perfect time to stop for gas is 5 AM when we all sleep thru it. When we stumble out of our bunks at 9am no one wants to be the pussy that says, “Hey dudes, I gotta make a pit stop and _____ “ (insert your own disgusting little euphemism for number two here…you all have one. Send me the most colorful and I will be able to once and for all convince Kenny we are aiming too high)

All switches are random. The switch you pressed to turn on the light yesterday will not turn that light on today. Apparently the bus is rewired every night. This goes for TV remotes, A/C and doors. The door part is especially painful. “Hey what happened to the door?”

“That’s not the door switch, man” (Everyone is “Man ” in a band)
“It opened the door yesterday!”
“That’s not the door switch man.”
“Can we stop? I have to _________?!!?”

Everyone gets exciting at the prospect of bus tours. “We’re gonna write on the bus!! We’re gonna jam on the bus all night!!” You don’t do that. You watch the weather channel and you sleep on the bus. The guitars ride under the bus like Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Titanic. On the bus but not allowed up where the action is. I hear them late at night under me weeping for what might have been. I hear them because I don’t sleep on the bus. Ever. Because….

I used to get upset about Tennessee spending more for road repair than for our children’s education. Now that I am in my bunk wide awake all night being thrown up and down while we hit bumps in the road the size of alligators, (If we had been touring thru Florida I might check out the window but we are in the northeast) I have a new appreciation of priorities. I say let the little ones grow up ignorant and doomed for jobs in the fast food industry. I would like to not be pummeled like an ultimate fighting B squad substitute all night so I say… fix the roads, America.

Also, because we all sing… there’s no cheese on the bus. I like a little cheese. So we don’t hit the high notes. Cheese is not a lot to ask for.

I’m too tired to go back and put a word with the letter Q in it at the end of each paragraph. Let this be a lesson to you that life is full of disappointments. Oh look!… there’s a flood in Nebraska!

Gary