Excuses, excuses. Also, drug users and day time drunks. It's like a Tom Waits song.

Look. Just blame Captain Bluebear. I wanted to keep the blog updated while we toured and relaxed and generally spent a good week in Southern California, where it's short sleeve weather in the middle of January after a spate of frigidity that left all the citrus frosted over, which is of course depressing, unless you enjoy $30 orange juice, which of course you don't.

Like I said: blame Captain Bluebear. I certainly would have had more time if it wasn't for him, although he made my back-seating far more interesting, despite that innevitable section of any sci-fi or fantasy book where the author devolves into seventy pages of plotless description regarding characters and races and beings and buildings that might never even appear in the story, thus boring you to distraction and wholescale skimming. That said, if you want to shirk obligations, friends, family, and the outside world, I recommend this book. Also: purty pictures. And trolls. All manner of huggable dorkdom, really.

So I owe some stories. After all, it's been nearly a week and I'm back at a desk now, so there's no strangely hued mammal to distract me. Onwards.

- I'm not sure which is more off-putting: that we played at on-campus bar at a publicly funded university at noon or that there were people there already on their fourth beer. Wait. The noontime drunks were more off-putting. That's right. Still: that was a fun show. Not everyone there was destined to be unemployed and twice-divorced at twenty-eight, drinking Steel Reserve in a public bathroom.

- You ever been somewhere that seems immediately sketchy? How about playing a place bisected into two groups: one containing concert-going high schoolers, the other containing a Narcotics Anonymous group. Nearby pawn shops were alerted. I stared suspiciously at mustachioed meth heads. Someone tried to sell David a religiously-flavored necklace.

- The aforementioned venue (The Dome in Bakersfield) was also a gym. And not one of your sissy, wheat-grass, stationary bike gyms. No, sir. It was a boxing gym. I mention this only because I tried to use the speed bag and found it it's the most difficult thing in the world to master. That and improvising an aria in Chinese. It's a toss-up.

- The Prospector in Long Beach is fantastic. I thought you should know. The all-night free-drink bribery may be affecting my recollection, but it was my favorite new venue this tour.

Anyway, here's the point. I'm finished with Bluebear and we're still technically sort of kind of half on tour so I'll be back tomorrow. For the time being, I have to do that first day back at work thing where I pretend I'm following up on old assignments but really just answering stale emails and reading Jon Carroll from the week before. Don't tell anyone.