Sending coins in the mail
Our agent is working Boston out. I don’t know where we will play. I hope to play the Middle East in Cambridge again, it is a choice place.
It was really strange going up to Boston, a couple years ago. I thought about you while I was there for the Music Festival. I ate at a restaurant downtown that had bison meat. It was very succulent, and nothing like bovine steak. I was in a foul mood at that point on the tour, I was stressed and Washington DC did not go as planned.
While on a day off in DC, Craig and I went to the Smithsonian. Someone took a picture of me in front of the capitol building pantomiming shooting a pistol in the air. The hope diamond was not on display. In the top attic rooms of the museum there were glass cases full of masterworks in marble and oil that were not attributed to famous enough names to make it down into the museum proper. On the way out of DC we passed a park wedged between the highway and the banks of the Potomac. I cut off some people in BMW’s and pulled off the road. I ventured down the rooted and rocky slope to a point of no return, where I realized if I turned around to go back I would probably fall down a bad drop through the trees and with poor luck slide clean into the muddy waters. I was scared. When I had maneuvered my way down to the silt water I pictured George Washington himself clambering into a boat with filthy boots, and it did not look as graceful as it did in the paintings.
Boston was strange to me. I took pictures of smokestacks there and watched the rowing teams. It was cold but the air tasted different than anywhere I had ever been and I drove for an hour with everyone occupied elsewhere in town and back and forth over the few bridges past the universities with the windows down and the heater in the tourvan all the way up. As the lights went out there were geese or something of that sort flying over the bridges. I remember wanting to talk to someone desperately. I went into several pubs, and sat down but never ordered a drink. Eventually I made it back to the Hotel. I remember nothing about the Hotel. I remember nothing about that night.
From there we went to the Berkshires for another day off. I walked through apple orchards and saw where Moby Dick was written. I was not there even though my body was. I went candlepin bowling. I wondered what it was like snowy. The forests of trees I could see from the highway as we came and left looked like oceans of leftover pocket change, with copper leaves and silver chips, flowing in the wind. A waitress at a seafood restauraunt was so horrified by the look of me that she forgot words while trying to serve us, although upon reflection, she may have just had a stutter. The fried haddock was pleasant. The apple pie was better.
New York made me hate NY, and I won’t elaborate why, but I didn’t meet a single person there that I liked on that tour, except perhaps the sound man at the Lit Lounge in the East Village because he was so obviously sick of himself, the club and the bands that were so excited because they were “playing NY!!!!” that he was amused at how angry in general I was about everything. I remember telling him that I had half a mind to just drive straight back to Florida after that show and forget about everything else. A unjust parking ticket and bent tie-rod on the tourvan later due to a open manhole and I did exactly that. I left NYC at 12 am, and made my way over the bridges, and by 8AM the next day I was somewhere in Virginia, hallucinating and sleep starved in a rest area eating a fresh orange and blinking confused at some sign my eyes were too tired to read, describing details about missing children that I knew no one would ever see again because all their pictures in the advert were digitally altered to be 10 or 15 years older than they were when they went missing.
A few hours later I stopped at South Of the Border, which seems to be an abandoned wasteland of a tourist trap with doubles as a pick up joint for strange and awful truck stop prostitutes and also random greasy vagabonds. No one there spoke English. I didn’t buy or take a bumpersticker. I bought some Roman coins that were minted before Christ from an antique store in S Georgia for a nickel a piece and intended on giving them out as gifts via the mail just to make people wonder what the hell I have been doing with my life. I never sent any via the mail. But I must have sent them somewhere. I have not seen them in some time.
