Note: This is a journal entry — it was written on paper or on my computer, then transferred to my website, maybe years later.

Hey there, happy Halloween!!  I just got back to the hotel after the show in Sevilla at the Fun Club.  I KILLED tonight.  Swear to god.  The sound was really really good, at least for me, so that made it a lot easier to hear myself well and put on a good show.  Also, all the employees of Green UFOs were there (the folks who put this Spanish part of the tour together), so I guess I wanted to do really well so they could see what a kickass performer I am.  Hahaha!!  Good thing they didn’t see me last night in Puerto Real.  ;-)

Speaking of which, guess what I did.  I fucking forgot my two bags of t-shirts at the club there in P.R..  Andy had thought they were still in the van, he didn’t know that I’d brought them inside.  And when I did the dummy-check (which is when I check the stage area after we load out the gear, to make sure we didn’t forget anything) I only looked at the stage and didn’t check the area where the merch table was.  FUUUUCK!!!  I didn’t realize they’d gone missing until we loaded in our gear at the Fun Club here.  SHIIIITTTT!!!!  Andy called the club in Puerto Real on his cellphone to see if they’d found them, and they had.  Rafa from Green UFOs was there when I realized this, and he did some quick calculations and figured it would cost me about 100 Euros to express-mail the shirts to the next show in Italy.  Fuck that, they only cost me about $150!!  So what we’re going to do is fucking drive BACK there tomorrow morning just to pick up the stupid shirts, which by the way, nobody has wanted.  I mean, we might have sold one or two shirts in all of Spain, but that’s about it.  :-( Oh well, that’s the story of my life.  Murphy’s fucking law.  Arrghh!!!  Anyway… that was my fault.  Era mi culpa, una tonteria.  (It was just my stupidity.) I was the one who brought them in and I should’ve been the one to make sure they got back in the van, pero no me fije donde estaban.  I fucked up.  Ugggh.  Hate it when that happens.  Anyway… at least it’s only a little over an hour’s drive out of the way.  Andy’s taking it like a man, and says it doesn’t matter.  But it takes away from the time we could have spent wandering around Granada.  Sigh.  ANYWAY… I have to stop quejando de eso.  (bitching about it) I must sound like a real Tejana talking en espanol y ingles a la misma vez!!  But that’s how my brain is working now.  It used to be that way quando vivi en Mexico.  Siempre estaba hablando en espanol, y cuando se me olvide una frase, I would finish it in English.  (podia terminarlo en Ingles.)

What a great show.  I’m still buzzing.  It’ll take me awhile to come down from the rush of doing a good show, so I guess I’ll keep typing.  :-) My voice was working great tonight.  I was a little worried before the show ‘cuz it seems like I’ve been getting a little more hoarse every night.  And then right before the show, I was blabbing my head off doing an interview with a writer from… ummmm… a Spanish music magazine.  I can’t fucking remember the name!!  It’s the biggest indie music magazine in Spain, a glossy mag sort of like Les Inrockuptibles in France.  Rock-something.  I want to say "Roctober" but that’s a Chicago mag.  Fuck it.  I suck with details.  Anyway, I had a couple of cups of tea to warm up the ol’ garganta, and as it turned out I had no problem.  I was worried about the high notes but they were all there.  My lower register is getting better and better, with the slight bit of hoarseness.  I have a song called "Who" that goes much lower than I’m really capable of singing, but right now (to my amazement) I can actually nail that lowest note, which I couldn’t even do on the record.  I never really planned on successfully hitting that note when I wrote the song, so I’m always fudging it.  But now I can really do it.  Hee hee!!  There’s another song like that, that has a super fucking low note that I can hardly ever reach.  Ummm… oh yeah, it’s a line in the song "Are You Sure" where I say "loving you no more" and I go really fucking deep.  I hit that one square on the head today too.  Nice.  :-) A lot of times I just say fuck it and sing that line an octave above (where I know I’ll be okay) but tonight it was no problem to do it the way I’d written it.  :-D Sorry if I’m obsessing over the quality of my voice.  I should be worrying more about my sloppy-ass guitar playing!!  Whatever.  I do duh best I can.  :-)

They had really good lights at the Fun Club.  Which is great for the audience but not so great for me.  The problem was that all the lights were flooding out onto me, but there was no light ABOVE me so I was having a hard time seeing the spots on the side of my guitar neck.  I sort of depend on being able to see those little spots so I know where my hands are supposed to go.  But my eyes got used to it after the first song or two, and I just had to pay a little more attention to the whereabouts of those spots.  It wasn’t any problem in the end.

Tonight was one of those pay-to-play gigs.  They don’t have those in the States really, but here I guess it’s customary at a lot of places.  We paid the club a hundred Euros for the privilege of playing there, and in return they let us keep 100% of the door.  Thank god a lot of people showed up so we not only made our money back, we also made another hundred or so Euros on top of that.  Euros are almost the same as dollars, so yeah, I made a hundred bucks.  Kinda pathetic innit?  But hey, it’s my first tour here and I’m a total unknown.  Thank god I did all those interviews so lots of people came out to see us and we didn’t end up LOSING money.  The interviews got printed in all three major daily newspapers here in Sevilla today… "El Correo", "El Diario de Sevilla" and another called "ABC".  They all had pictures too… one of them used the Drag City-sanctioned press shot by Mark Nomura, but the other two were taken by photographers employed by the newspapers.  One of those pictures was a full-body shot of me and Ryan standing against a wall, not a very good picture if you ask me.  You can see my shabby-ass shoes, and I had gotten black paint on my arm somehow (from leaning against strange walls) and you can actually see the paint in the picture!  Must look like some kind of weird tattoo or something.  But the other picture was a lot better.  A closeup of my face.  I was standing in front of a gate that had lovely metal loopy-loops, so it made for a nice background.  The photographer who took it was this older guy, an employee of the newspaper.  I didn’t think he’d enjoy doing pictures with me (some indie rock chick he’d never heard of) but I made a few jokes and tried to charm him into having a little fun with it.  I think I won him over in the end, ‘cuz the picture came out so good.  Either that or he’s just a very good fucking photographer (that’s more likely!).

Shit… I just remembered I forgot to eat dinner.  :-( We were supposed to eat after the show, but we never did.  I had had a little plate of fried rice before the show, while I was doing that interview for Rock-whatever, but that was supposed to be just a snack.  Oh well.  I also didn’t have time to put on any makeup before the show, other than a quick smear of lipstick.  The lights were so good the audience must have been able to see the circles under my eyes and everything.  Oh well!!!  I was never one to put on much makeup (because I hate it, because it’s a fucking pain in the ass) but as I get older I start thinking I need it more and more.  Bags under my eyes and all.  But oh well.  At least my voice was spot-on, that’s all that really matters in the end.  And lest I forget, Ryan was playing (and singing backups!) really well too.  That never hurts.  :-)

I made a couple of jokes onstage tonight in Spanish.  At one point I said something stupid that I thought was going to be funny, but nobody laughed.  So I said… "tienen que REIR cuando digo algo chistoso!" (you’re supposed to LAUGH when I say something funny!) and everybody cracked up laughing.  It’s like… helllooooo?  Anybody out there???  Heheheh.  Then at another point I said (in Spanish) something like, "oh jeez I always forget this part.  Let me present my friend Ryan Hembrey" and pointed to Ryan.  That is not funny at all, but for some reason everybody cracked up laughing when I said that.  Ryan made a funny-face too, like… "okay… I’ll be sitting over HERE if you need me…" Heheheh.  Always making jokes at the expense of my bandmates, pffffft.  I’m really lucky that Ryan has a pretty good sense of humor about things like this.  He knows I love him (like Telly Savalas) and he usually forgives me when I make a little fun of him onstage.  I’m just lucky, believe me!!  I can think of other folks I’ve played with who couldn’t stand that kind of back-talk.  I won’t say who, but it’s nobody I’m playing with anymore, that’s for sure.

Earlier this afternoon before the show, Ryan and I met up with Andy so we could meet his wife Mapi.  (I wonder what that’s short for?) She’s a doll.  She’s from the Canary Islands (or… Los Canarios… is that the same as the Canary Islands?  I assume it is).  She speaks English really well so we didn’t have to translate anything.  Poor Ryan has been suffering a bit of culture shock because he’s been sitting around while everybody (including me) is chattering away in Spanish, getting into really involved conversations.  Well, we’ll be in the same boat when we get to Italy, ‘cuz I don’t know dick about Italian.  And Sweden and Norway, fuhgettaboutit!!!  I think most people will be able to speak English there, but Italy will undoubtedly be a bit of a problem.  No… an ADVENTURE.  That’s how I have to look at it, it’s an exotic adventure.  :-)

Shit-fuck!!  The battery on my laptop is running out and I don’t know why.  My transformer thingy must be broken.  What the fuck???  I have to turn off my laptop now and pray it’ll charge up by morning.  Fuck… I wonder if I’ll even be able to find another transformer thing if I need to buy one.  It would fucking suck if I couldn’t keep writing journal entries every day.  No way I could do this on paper, I’m helpless without a typewriter.  :-( Okay, see you tomorrow I hope.  I didn’t even get to tell you about going to see the great big cathedral today with Ryan!!  We didn’t go in because it cost 10 Euros and we didn’t feel like paying, but we did walk around and look at the thing.  Okay, byeeeeee!!