Green

Here in Ireland at the Wineport Inn.

We have been touring since Tuesday to crowds ranging from shrieking 6 year olds hopped up on sugar and the thrill of staying up past their bedtime (their request that we play something 'better, like don't you know any Britney Spears or PDiddy?' was really quite heartwarming and made all of our hard work seem so damn worthwhile), and 56 year olds who are so drunk by the end of the set that they are singing louder than we are. What exactly they are singing we can never be quite sure, but they seem pretty pleased with themselves and as long as the audience is happy the gig seems to have been a successful one whether or not they know where they are and who they are letalone who we are.

For some reason my father has two very different types of fans. One kind is the extremely creepy, living in mother's basement and never going to move out, diehard fans who do things like bring napkins they collected from my dad 18 years ago. They bring entire albums filled with pictures of themselves and my dad throughout the decades displaying various facial hair evolutions including, my personal favorite, the bedroom eyed afro debuted circa 1970 and cool circa never...
For some inexplicable reason these fans are often about the size of 12 of me put together... perhaps you can even calculate their fandom based on their height to width ratio, which for the diehard extremes is 1:1 at most. "But how diehard can they be?" you might be asking. and even if you are not I will tell you that last week a woman came to our practice gig bearing three dozen homemade temporary tattoos that she had made using cover art and photos from my dad's website, as well as graphics from the web like a baby superimposed over a mailbox for a song about an adoption. The creepiest thing of all was when she proudly extended her amply fleshy forearm to reveal a picture of me. Me and my brother to be exact, in the giant shoe car we helped my father construct during one of his midlife crisis project phases... my mother always wondered why he couldn't channel his energy into fixing the plumbing or learning how to tile the roof but I'm sure the practicality of this baby is evident. Totally.So I can safely say that seeing my own face staring back at me from the limb of an obese woman who probably fantasizes regularly about killing my mother so that she can marry my father, and then having her pull me tightly to her enormous bosum before I had a chance to breath was unheimlich and a half... Freud would be all over this shit. I, however, was quick to duck under her embrace asap so that I could make sure she was not wielding a knife or a pocketbook made out of tanned human livers or something. She was perfectly friendly actually but the tattoo... it was just a little past the line of enthusiastic and into realm of disturbing

The other kind fan is the best kind because they are the absurdly wealthy and inexplicably generous kind- the kind that offer to have your whole family stay at three of the top spa resorts in Ireland for a week totally free if you play a few gigs for their friends. I am sitting in a $950 a night suite and this one is all to myself... I've been sharing with sam for the past few days. We've enjoyed fabulous food (though the sweetbread was an unwelcome if cerebrally scrumptious surprise) and lovely walks through the misty moors and whathaveyou. This room is lovely because now I can stay up and type without Sam bitching about how the clickityclack is bothering his sleep... last night i had to write in teh bathroom because he was aggravated, although even the bathrooms in these places are nicer than most of my house, with heated floors and waterfall showers with cornucopias of french lotions dotted all over the shelves. Having a room to yourself is nice, and having wireless is even nicer. This might be totally gross but I think I'm accurate in assuming that Sam and I are both really happy to have those two very key ingredients in watching and enjoying internet porn because it's been a stressful few days and sleeping in the same bed as a sibling is possibly the biggest cockblock known to man short of sleeping in the same bed as your grandmother.

Must go write but will post later. And by write I mean take advantage of this free internet. And by free I mean I have to go humiliate myself in front of hundreds of people singing songs with my father about S&M, smoking pot, and a lovely little ditty entitled "thank god my penis is just the right size."

...if it got any bigger it'd burst my levis
it used to be longer 'til i got circumsieeeeezed. etc etc. (--bangs head on antique oak table worth 20 times more than the entire contents of my suitcase--)

xox
H