Eyes Wide Open. Some good friends of mine with whom I've slept alongside many nights on various tours tell me that I sleep with my eyes half open. Creepy Huh? I've seen pictures and it creeps me out. Consequently, my dreams frequently involve things in the room that I am actually seeing while I'm sleeping. Like when I lived at my folks' house, I had Cure posters all over my walls and dreamed of meeting them very often (which kicked ass). This morning was a different story altogether. My night's sleep was riddled with nightmares and I awoke looking directly at a silhouette of Freddy Krueger gearing up to slash me. I groggily reached for the camera and took a picture.

Seventeen year old Shane Lundy and his girlfriend, Jocelyn surrendered their bedroom to us four last night and slept in a crib in Shane's family's humble mobile home in the small rural town of Follansbee, West Virginia. The room was maybe nine feet by nine feet and we took up every inch of floor space. We woke up one at a time and took showers at around 11am. Once ready to go, Mark (Shane's dad) gave us directions to get to Edinboro, Pennsylvania and Taylor (Shane's baby sister) drew me a picture. We headed out at about noon to get our oil changed and hit the road.

The drive up through western Pennsylvania was beautiful and sunny - a nice change from all the damned snow. Judah and Lauren realized that today was their 6-month anniversary. Congratulations all around. Sara and I celebrated our 6-year anniversary last week on St. Patrick's day 1000 miles from one another. Soooo sad.

We arrived in Edinboro at about 4:30 and did our laundry at the local laundrymat. When we finally get to the college at 7:00 and load our stuff into the Multi-Purpose room, we are informed my Bob (the friendly promoter) that The Liars had cancelled. We've been hearing a lot of great things about these guys so we were a bit disappointed, but he assured us the A Party Of Helicopters were not to be missed either. We spent a bit of time chilling in the food court, eating dinner. I ignored my own advice and ordered some food from the 'Tex Mex' style 'grille'. What was I thinking? I'm in Pennsylvania for Jeeb's sake. The only border we're south of is Canada's! The ways in which this 'Mexican' food sucked are too many to mention.

The show was very well attended by mostly punker dudes and the bands before us were pretty heavy. Black Rose Diary were a really good and energetic rock band. I didn't get the second band's name, but they were okay. We set up and got ready to play around 10:45 and just as we were tuning up our guitars, the promoters informed us that we had to be out of the building in twelve minutes and play somewhere else. We said screw it, we'll just play for twelve minutes right now and began the set. After two songs, the police showed up and told us to stop. The employees had to go home and they were shutting the place up for the night. We told them we we'd stop and once the officer left the room, we started into "Radiapathy". The police lady came right back and wasn't happy, but once we finished and told her we came all the way from California, she seemed less upset. We loaded out and talked to the Party of Helicopters guys. They were loading up and taking their stuff over to the sculpture / printmaking building to finish the show.

These guys were one of the greatest bands I've seen in a long time. They sounded great - similar in instrumentation and sound to Black Sabbath, but faster, more indie, and better looking for sure. Is this band famous and I've just been left out of the loop? Probably not, considering they were playing an illegal hallway show to 25 people, but they will be recognized soon - mark my words. They literally rocked pieces of the ceiling off onto my head. No joke.

Although we were offered a few places to stay by the friendly students of Edinboro, we decided to cut our 10-hour drive to Boston into two pieces by hitting the road. So here we are now, 2:30am, Logan at the helm of Ak-Mak, Judah and Lauren cuddling in the back, and me typing away. We're gonna try to find a hotel around Syracuse, New York but for now, I'll go keep Logan company.

Josh