chrisg's Tour Diary

Day 1 of tour. We have a show at Spaceland tonight. We drove down last night, and I'm spending the day hanging out in Santa Monica while Chris W does work. Dan is also working, and Adrienne is trapped in Upland. The weather is great down here, especially near the coast where the bright sunshine is accompanied by a bit of a breeze. I've packed way too many clothes for this trip, and yet I hate them all. So I got some more tshirts today. i succumbed and went to suburban outfitters. they have a lot of good tshirts, but there are like eight hundred of each kind. the whole point of getting a tshirt with some cheeky, clever saying is that you're the only person wearing it, right? you're combing through piles of crappy shirts in some thriftstore somewhere and then behold! the perfect shirt. being able to buy one off a mall store shelf takes the fun away. i hope to have some thrifting action out in the wild southwest. if i do, i'll have to mail some of my clothes back home or burn them or something, because i'm all out of room. but secretly that's very exciting.

despite the great weather, i decide to fork over $7.50 (for a matinee!?) and sit in the dark for two hours watching Monster. Not the most uplifting of movies. But I get out of the theater and it's still so nice outside that it's hard to stay sad. Caffeine further removes me from the movie. I sit outside of a cafe and watch the sun go down.

the spaceland show is a lot of fun. lots of great friends from the neighborhood are there, which always makes things easier. it turns out i forgot to pack my microphone, but that's not too big a deal. the band after us has a lot of people in it, and they are very eager to get on stage. very eager. most random moment of the evening is before we even play, when someone spots Keanu Reeves in the club. Why is he here? Has he heard about my amazingly mad bass skillz, and has come to beg me for tutelage? Well if he did, he got cold feet, because he quickly disappears.

Some people are walking around the club giving away free zippo lighters if you fill out a survey about your smoking habits. i don't smoke, but i really like zippos, and figure that this is a sign to begin my new smoking habit. i manage to get two free zippos that night, and some coupons for my first packs of cigarettes. apparently, i will be a marlboro man, because that's the coupon i got. mental note: remember to look up clever ways to light zippos on the internet.