no camera makes for bad company

Back on tour, which means back to blogging. I have no pictures this time as the camera jumped into the river to end its miserable existence with us. We thought we treated it well. but it jumped and we watched in horror as the bubbles rose very quickly... meaning that his little lungs and circuits were filling with water. But I'm still going to blog... its just going to be boring without pictures.

Pictures with words? What is this a book?! I came to the internet to be intertained.... (i made a new word)

So here's the update as seen in a letter to my friend Billy:

Billy,


All i do is work too!. its fun, and people call it play when you are holding an instrument. but i take it seriously too. I have too. It's awful and I have been warned that it may take the fun our of music... but we gots to make money.

So i spent the last whole week making wallets. When we are in Knoxville its not a vacation at all, we try to go hiking to get out of the house, but there is no money for anything except CDs, posters, T-shirts and fabric.

The last 3 days Chad has been helping me too. I give him the dimensions and he cuts all the fabric out. Then I do all the rest of the steps...

ironing, sewing, ironing, sewing, detailing the front, sewing, and finishing the fasteners (in that order). its quite a production line. The last day we were home we made 12 wallets, usually i can only do 4 in a day. It was awful, we were up til 4 am, I had been sitting in the same chair for 8 hours... just doing these repetitive motions. It really feels like a sweat shop those times. the disc burner as well is going non stop for 15 hours to make 150 CDs. Around 2 am i started getting like telescope vision while looking at the wallets. I'm not complaining though, it was ridiculous, but seriously, i thrive in those moments. Repetitive, meticulous, gigantic art projects (I might have been a wonderful scientist if I could do statistics and write papers like this).

when my first album came out I had this ridiculous ideal of the cover art. I wanted it to be homemade... but really classy and awesome. Simple, but with excellent composition. It was 2 trees (one for each disc) the same tree in sunset and then again in twilight. damn... i just sent you a copy of the cd but i didnt send you the first edition... I'm sorry. I meant to... i just wasnt thinking straight. When i get there I'll trade you (I still have a few left). I must have drawn, painted and spray painted the design about 100 times to get it just right before I did the actual project. Anyways... I spray painted all of 500 cardboard cd cases... with 2 panels each... 1000 panels. and Each panel had a set of 4 stencils. 4000 stencils total. And it has to dry in between each. This was when i was still in school, still working at starbucks. I lived in a house with this great big porch i made into my spray paint studio. I'd be out there listening to music with my respiator on in the heat, in the cold (since I did 2 pressings, of 250 each on in winter one in summer) just feeling like a bad ass. And no one could be out there with me or help me since i had only one respirator. It was awesome. I loved every minute of that work, because i knew i was doing something directly related to where I wanted to be... which is here.

(in a basement in greensboro full of instrumetns with a little black kitty jumping around)