Jeezus, it’s gonna take me a month to finish that story, I’m not even halfway through! I spent the day today looking at used vans with Ryan Hembrey and George Langford (the other Jive Council bassist). George knows a lot about cars, and he’s good at haggling, so I’m letting him do all the talking. I guess I’ve decided to ditch the whole idea of trying to a regular job, and concentrate solely on playing out and touring and working on music. I don’t know if or how long I can keep it up, but I figure I’ve got to try doing that sometime, and there’s no time like the present, right?

I talked to Mike Daly on the phone yesterday, that was cool. We shot the shit. He’s back home after touring with Whiskeytown for awhile.

So where was I with the Paris story? Okay, after we ate dinner me and Ryan walked around quite a bit more… anyway by the time we decided to call it quits and find the train, it was around 2:30 a.m. This is the dumb part… see, I lived in New York for so long, and I figure trains should always run 24 hours, but, well, they don’t do that in Paris. The station had a big fucking metal gate which was CLOSED and LOCKED. We asked a woman walking by when the trains started up again and she told us 5 a.m.! We asked a couple of cab drivers how much it would cost to get us back to the hotel, and it was way too much to think about… we figured it wasn’t worth it just to get to the hotel a couple of hours earlier than we would if we just waited.

We killed some time with a beer at a little bar across the street called Louie’s. They had a little upstairs area with TVs, which we were able to claim for ourselves, and we sat there and sloooooooowly nursed our beers and got zoned watching French videos. That lasted about an hour… it’s 3:30 and we’re getting sleepy! We start walking. I mean, we had been walking a lot before but now we’re walking all around the Louvre (which is like a city unto itself), and along the Seine, in the rain, at four in the morning. It was SO COOL AND SPOOKY!! Walked all the way down to the Place D’Alma, the bridge where Princess Diana died. There was a statue at one end of the bridge, a giant brass torch, which had been converted into a giant shrine for "les trois victimees" (I’m sure I spelled that wrong) with flowers, photos, candles, drawings, etc. Very unreal at that hour, and very sobering.

So we walked around until the trains opened (which was actually 5:30, not five!), and then it turned out that the train WE needed wasn’t coming until 6:20. So it was 7:00 when we finally got to the hotel again. Neither of us were feeling very well at that point — I had blisters on both my feet from walking all night in a pair of Docs which I bought in 1986!! But we got a couple hour’s sleep, I put on my makeup (yuck), put the boots back on (AAAAHHHgGGGGhhhh!!!) and we stumbled out of there with the rest of the Boxheads for the photo session around eleven. I think the rest of the ensemble had taken a leisurely dinner in the city and caught the last train to the hotel, around 1 a.m., so maybe me and Ryan should have consulted with them before we set out on our own! But it was fun to talk/brag about our adventure… what a cool way to see Paris. I’ll never forget it now, that’s for sure.

Ken Vandermark left that morning… he had to miss the photo session to catch a plane back home. So now there were seven of us, plus Fab. And it’s Thanksgiving and we’re driving to Reims!! Whoo-hoo!!

(t.b.c….)