The Plan

There are two kinds of holidays in this world: the ones you spend with your family and the ones you spend with your whiskey. On one hand, you've got your Christmases, your Mother's Days, your National Hideous Deformation Awareness Weeks. These are days dedicated to the unwrapping of gifts, the eating of honey hams, the giving of flowers, the staring and the pointing at hunchbacked albinos. They are days where we gather with our loved ones and, well, that's really the point: gathering; making merry; feeling lucky that there are people somewhere in the world who care what happens to you. These are good holidays, but good in that 17th century Puritan kind of way.

On the other hand, you've got your drunk days: your New Year's Eves, your Labor Days, your Halloweens. And while they do indeed have societal import---the signification of another calendar year, the enjoyment of day off, well earned, the Pagan-flavored need to dress up like a Leprechaun and grab women's asses---these holiday are just nationally sanctioned excuses to get stumbling and blotto. I, of course, have no problem with this.

Unfortunately, I'll be missing Halloween weekend in San Francisco for the second time in a row this year. Last October, we found ourselves in New York, doing the CMJ thing, riding in taxis with bloodthirsty, braying lunatics. This year? Well, we're flying to Chicago, we're doing a little recording. Thing is, its been a while since we recorded our last album and we're in full on let's-get-our-lazy-asses-into-the-studio mode. We've got plenty of new songs and now, alls we need is to find somebody who can make those songs sound the way they should sound and, quite honestly, that's what this weekend is for. Maybe we've found someone. All we can do is try it out. It's like a really expensive, horribly loud first date. Except without the sexual tension. Or the dressing well. Or the copious lying.

Needless to say, we're excited. Our current recordings of these new songs have that AM-radio quality to them, which is to say they sound like they're coming out of my old Dream Machine, which is to say you're never hearing them ever. So this Friday we're vamoosing, skipping a weekend of booze-soaked revelry, and returning, we hope, with two or three songs that make us feel like I feel at the end of Beethoven's Ninth: awash in sonic euphoria. "Doesn't sound like butt" would be an improvement, however.

So that there is the plan. The unfortunate lack of Halloween weekend will be remedied when we return, even if all that means is me sitting on my couch with a bad mustache drinking Hamm's out of the can. I don't know how this qualifies as "Halloween" but I figure that if you're drinking Hamm's, you should have a bad mustache.