The Velvet Teen does Dallas. At what was probably four or four-thirty in the morning, I awoke to hear my compatriots playing sans drummer downstairs. They later told me they had played a few impromptu songs with the drummer from Fivehead before playing Mother of Love and Penning the Penultimate as an acoustic duo, but for some reason I only heard the last two songs. They were good, and if I hadn't been so tired I might have gone downstairs again. The floor was very old and thin and there seemed to be a hole somewhere nearby which was open to the room below. I had put my earplugs in and gone to bed at around midnight. Sometimes it's just good to sleep, and for some reason I had been especially exhausted.

At around eleven or so, Josh came to wake me up. I deflated my air mattress and made my way downstairs. We all dismantled our equipment from last night and began the torturous process of lugging it all back down two flights of stairs in our groggy state. Moving equipment is the mostest funnest of all.

Josh and I walked down to the Mexican restaurant/bar where I had lost my camera the night before in the hopes that someone had turned it into the lost and found. No such luck. Basically, the rest of the day went without visual documentation. I am sure that whoever has my little Hewlitt-Packard camera now really doesn't care that it belongs to me, or that I actually needed it for a very good reason. I hope that they can do something productive with it, like making photo-essays on injustices in the third world, or documenting the lives of young criminals as an educational tool so nobody will ever steal anyone's personal property in the future.

We hit the road again, stopping briefly at a Subway for some of that good old fairly-healthy food stuff. I like the fact that they sell cookies at Subway. I bought three cookies in order to counteract any nutritious intake I happened to receive. Take that, Jared! I'm going to do a commercial about how I gained two hundred pounds eating only Subway food.

Here are some incredibly interesting things that may or may not have happened during our long drive to Dallas: we saw a giant, forty-foot-tall man made of stone, who stared at us as if to say "Welcome, travelers!"; we saw a sign that offered us a chance to "drive through espresso"; Josh received a telephone call from President Reagan, who said we were the greatest band ever to decline to play at the 1980 presidential inauguration; we pulled over a few times to go the bathroom; I was so hungry that when I looked at Judah all I saw was a giant fried chicken leg; Lauren crocheted the world's largest placemat; and the planet exploded in a fiery cataclysm.

Finally in Dallas, we pulled up to Good Records. They weren't kidding. All they had there were good records. Several times on this tour, we've either played in or visited great independent record stores which seem to stock only bands that I like or should probably listen to. There were probably ten or fifteen people hanging around the store. It turned out that some of them had our albums already and had been waiting at the store for us to show up. Our stage area was very small, so we opted to play an all-guitar-rock set, leaving the massive keyboard setup in the van. Once again, there weren't enough working microphone stands to accommodate a three-vocal group, so I jerry-rigged a temporary solution by duct-taping a broken stand to Josh's bass cabinet and angling it so it would reach my general facial area. Josh put a little goose-necked stand on a wooden stool so it would be tall enough.

The show was broadcast live on the internet at goodradio.com. I hope it sounded okay--I've heard it didn't. That's too bad, since it was actually a very good set. We played all the big rock smashes and the slow guitar ballads. It was refreshing to me to play some of the more rocking material, since for the past couple of days we had opted to play mellow, quieter, shorter sets. The people who came out to the record store seemed to really enjoy the show, too, so that was definitely a contributing factor.

After the show, a great guy named Travis with well-tended dreadlocks offered us a place to stay for the night. We had tentative plans to drive to Austin immediately following the show in order to possibly be added to a club bill with the Hurricane Lamps and Fivehead, but we were much more thrilled about the idea of kicking back early, eating pizza, listening to music, and watching movies. We followed Travis to his apartment.

By the time we reached the apartment, the boiling gray clouds which had dominated the sky all day had broken open. Pouring rain and gusting wind pelted us as we pulled our bags inside. While everybody settled inside the warm, dry apartment, I opted to go back out on the front balcony to watch the lightning storm which had begun to pick up. I love lightning storms. I had been hoping all tour to get caught in a huge lightning storm. This one was shaping up to be pretty spectacular, with flashes in the north, west, and east. After a short while, the storm was right overhead. The rain was blowing sideways. Huge forks flickered across the clouds. A few times the thunder was loud enough to shake the windows. At various times, everybody came out to watch the storm with me. I must have stayed outside for a good hour, until the winds slowed down and the lightning became more sporadic.

Travis was a very generous host, providing us with drinks, towels, a shower, an internet connection, a couch, access to his massive cd collection, and floor space. He also called his friend John, who was working at pizza delivery, and told him to bring over some free pizza after his shift. John was the lead singer/songwriter for the band My Space Coaster. We listened to their EP, and it was pretty impressive prog-indie-pop-rock. Apparently their stage performance is marked by a great deal of flailing and the occasional bloody accident.

After watching Josh's favorite movie, Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls, we all retired to our respective beds and fell asleep.

Logan