Dear Readers: Greetings from Brooklyn, the town that my dad was born in. Sorry, we're a little behind on the journal again. We have most of it written up to date, but there are holes in it, so I can only post up to this date right now. We're doing our best to resolve this. Talk to you soon!

Welcome to the jungle ... er, Ann Arbor. I learned today that Tylenol Flu treats my head in a very similar fashion to that of Vicodin, the indie-fave party pill which also happens to be the painkiller they give you in the hospital if you get a bullet wound. Soon after I took said Flu medicine, I felt pretty alright, and was getting a bit peckish, but as an actually party had happened in the rest of the house where we were camped for the night, only Lauren and I were up at the moment. We decided to hijack the van for a couple hours to get breakfast.

We made our way down the street to a place called Johnny's Grille which serves your basic American breakfast, but our stomachs were pleading for something weighing a little less heavily on the Travolta/Newton-John and a little more on the Green Party. I left Lauren waiting inside Johnny's and with little hope, walked outside into the ensuing blizzard to find such a place. Luckily, two doors down was a little nest called Lola's (or something similar) which served an amazing ginger-based tofu scramble and boasted a warm and pleasant atmosphere. THIS was more like it. I've found that one of the most important things about being on the road, especially during such horrendous weather, is that of staying healthy; and today we ate our fill. We got directions to the local Whole Foods and stocked up on canned soups, and I bought some boots I could knock.

On our way back, we drove by Johnny's again and were flagged down by Brian Moss of The Ghost, who was there with the rest of the group. "Brian Moss, it's in the sauce!" I greeted him. We stopped in for a second to get pointed in the right direction back to the house (I get all turned around in turnabouts, surprisingly enough). Brian had been unconsciously kind enough to lend us the use of his room and bed vicariously through his roommates, who said he had lost his rent check that month anyway. Back at the house, we hung out with Jordan, Jordan, Maggie and Shane for a while and Josh and Logan fought The Debil for the Jebus.

We were a little late in arriving at the Elbow Room, and were assisted in our loading-in by the very kind Fullereens. The sound guy at the Elbow Room wasn't quite as sound as we could have hoped for, and actually was probably one of the worst ones we've come across in our entire career. We had to deal with the following: Logan had to pull a Def Leppard, as his microphone kept cutting out so much that he had to hold the wire while playing, and even so, he still ended up sounding like Max Headroom; during the delicate intro of Mother of Love, a blaring wall of feedback came over the system repeatedly, which the sound guy "fixed" as you would a pet, by cutting off all the channels; not to mention the song; plus, there were only about fifteen people in the entire place and he had mic-ed both amps ... and the side of Logan's snare. During the first song, I pushed my amp's mic out of the way with my foot, and during the break called to Josh over the PA, "Hey Josh, don't tell the sound guy, but I've moved the mic away from my amp, because we're in such a small club. You probably can too." I guess I could've been nicer about the whole thing, but COME ON, there's a reason they call them AMPLIFIERS. It's built specifically to make a small sound a lot bigger. I don't have a Marshall stack but I can make the people at the back of a small room hear me just fine. We made the most of it and had a good time.

By the end of our set, the club had filled with smoke, which is not Doctor Mom's number one recommended flu remedy, so I headed for Hospital van Ak-mak where I would recoup for the rest of the night. Logan and Josh later relayed to me that The Fullereens were on-point, and One Block West was some decent pop-punk-rock. Wordemup.

Ryan from The Fullereens put us up for the night in his shared apartment in Lansing, where nothing matters when we're dancing. Ryan made plenty of comments about Josh getting into bed with him and not having any hidden cameras in his shower, so we felt right at home. Opefully Ann Arbor won't arbor any ard eelings oward us.

Judah