I had a night full of very frightening dreams. I forgot most of them once I got up, but I had woken up a number of times throughout the night in a cold sweat. One of them involved a man chasing me through a large house trying to kill me. This theme was not an unfamiliar one for me, but this instance turned out to be especially torturous. When I finally woke up, I looked up to see a man dressed in a blue hospital outfit being led along my hallway by two men in white uniforms. As they came closer, I saw that the man in blue looked just like the man from my dream. He looked up and saw me and started growling viciously, struggling to get at me. He broke free and ran right up to my face. I woke up again.

Josh's friend Wendy, whom I had met at our friend Tyler's wedding had put us up for the night in her comfortable apartment, which was right down the street from where we were to play later, so we found ourselves in the unusual position of not having to drive at all. A free day. I had stayed up till about 3:30 the night before working on my electronic music, so I slept in until about 1 or so. Once I got up, Lauren and I, being the caffeine junkies we are, went to go find coffee. We decided to walk to Modified, as it was supposed to be a coffee joint, and also because I wanted to check out the situation for the night's event. When we walked outside however, I lost about an inch off my height, as my entire body began to melt in the hot Arizona sun. We opted for the first place we came across, a tiny coffee/art-gallery called The Paisley Violin. I think every place in Arizona is a coffee/art-gallery. We ordered our coffee and a Greek salad, and eavesdropped on the local conversation. A couple barstools down, a guy who looked the Texarkana gas station version of James Dean was relating to another fellow about his bad neighbor situation, to which my ears immediately perked. He was saying how he would play his stereo at low levels and wouldn't get much hassle until one day a friend of his brought over a cool middle-eastern CD, to which his "overly-patriotic asshole neighbor" immediately began stomping on the floor. I cut in, "Which is stupid because very little middle-eastern music has anything to do with the Taliban. I read that their own people have been shot for playing instruments or singing songs that aren't patriotic." (I'd leave a foot-note as to which issue of Time I read that in ... if I'm mistaken, as I very well may be, please let me know ... who knows how reliable Time is on those issues anyway.) He then relayed how he had once worked on an assembly line in Nashville, and how everyone in Nashville was a songwriter. Three out of every ten people he worked with had sold a song to a mainstream country artist, "... which says a lot about today's country music, if you asked me," he says.

Modified turned out to be a pretty hip place with some really cool photography, contrasted with some utterly horrible photo work as well. One "artist" who apparently worked at a photo booth in the mall, had put up some really bad in-house kid shots, as well as pictures of other photographers' photos, other designers' graphic work in books and a mouse pad with a beach scene on it. Plus, they were all poor color laser copies of whatever originals he had. Now look fella, just because you take a picture of something, does not mean that it automatically turns it into art. And taking pictures of other pictures doesn't count either ... that's about as cheap as a Puff Daddy remix. "Yeah, yeah." His one saving grace was a photo of a bee that was perfectly in focus, while the rest was far away and blurry. I liked that one.

We had met Dan Harmann at our Old Firehouse show in Redmond, Washington and it was great to finally be playing a show with him. Dan's a super-nice guy and has a nice voice as well. He played a great acoustic set with a couple keyboard cameos by a fellow he referred to as "Red Bone" and traded us some pins. Plus his CD looks hella cool, with nice minimalist graphic work on vellum. Mmmm, vellum ... Dan Hargest, who sports a crew cut also played a solo acoustic set and had some very nice vocal moments with a well-delivered falsetto. Dan also used to be in a band called Pollen.

Today Arizona, tomorrow the city of angels.

Judah