Hey!!  We’re in L.A.  I re-read what I wrote before and I can’t believe I admitted I’m an Audiogalaxy addict!!!  I have a big fucking mouth.

Tour’s going great, except I caught a cold.  Seems like I never get sick when I’m at home, just on tour.  The guys are telling me I’m snoring like a buzzsaw and coughing and sputtering all night… they all have earplugs but I still feel guilty for being the loud one every night.

Last night at the Spaceland was such a great show, much better than the last time I played there.  The last time I was here I remember feeling kinda like "what the hell am I doing here?  Everyone’s acting weird!!" Not that many people showed up, and I just felt like an alien for whatever reason.  But this time we had a good turnout, for a Sunday night.  The audience was really listening, which is the best feeling.  When you can tell they’re actually paying attention and not just standing around talking to each other, it makes you want to kick ass and really wow the crowd if possible.  My voice was a little raggedy what with this cold, but not too bad.  The silver lining to having a cold is the gravel you get in your voice — low parts are a lot easier to sing than they normally are when you’re healthy.  We played "Who" for the first time on this tour… I think of all the songs I’ve written, it goes the lowest in pitch, so it’s usually pretty hard for me to sing, but not last night!  Whoo-hoo!!

A guy came up to me last night to ask me a question, I can’t even remember what.  But when he walked off, somebody else ran up to me and said — "do you know who that was?  He’s a movie star!!!!!!!" And they told me his name is John C. Reilly, and he was in all these movies, some of which I have seen.  But I hadn’t really looked him in the eye enough to register what he looked like.  And even after getting the band to explain to me who John C. Reilly is, I still can’t for the life of me remember actually seeing him in any movies or anything.  I can’t remember any of the characters they’re telling me about.  Oh, I just suck that way.  I have a bad memory for faces, and names, and places and you know, pronouns in general.  Heheh.  Another guy was telling me he’s a TV producer and did I see this show, or that one, or the other one?  I hadn’t seen jack shit.  I told him all I watch on TV is the news… he says "CNN?" and I go "Yeah, and Ashleigh Banfield".  Blank stare.  Well, I guess I live in my own little world don’t I.

We’ve had pretty great luck finding places to crash along the way.  I’m terrible about that, I’m hardly ever the one who scores the crash-pad.  Because I’m always running around, putting on a show or just busy schmoozing with the customers at the merchandise table.  The lowest point for me was after the San Francisco show.  One of the bandmates found us a place to crash with a friend of his who lives in Oakland.  We get there and all the guys threw their sleeping bags down and I soon realized there was no place for me to lie down!!  It would either be the kitchen or the hallway, which I didn’t want to do.  So I went out and slept in the van, but I was a big baby about it.  I got all pissed off and started crying and feeling sorry for myself.  Adam came out after about 20 minutes and told me they’d moved things around and made a slot for me to lay down.  But by that time I was all tear-stained and full of anger at what had just happened (even though I had no right to be angry!!), so I told him I was staying in the van.  I didn’t really want to, but I didn’t want to go inside either.  Of course I didn’t get any sleep to speak of, and I was a fucking wreck the next day.  It just sucks to get depressed on tour.  I guess it’s just a result of being so far away from home, meeting a lot of strangers and feeling like an alien in general.  Every once in awhile I have to just bawl my head off and get it out of my system.  It’s no good though… Ryan says I need to find a better way to deal with my problems than to just go into my shell and get so upset.  He’s right!!  I’m working on it.  The really low points like that are so few and far between, but still…

Anyway, I pulled myself together for the show in Sacramento.  It was one of those hippy coffehouse-slash-bar-slash-restaurant type places.  They had *great* food and lots of yummy juices and power-drinks.  So I got to eat, and drained a couple of juicy-juices and felt a lot better.  The opening band in Sacramento had about 50 people to see them, but by the time we played there were only maybe 15.  But I like playing for a small audience.  I repeated the Steve Martin gag that goes… "I’d like to thank each and every one of you for coming tonight.  Thank you… and you… and you… and you… and you…" etc., pointing to all 15 audience members until they’d all been thanked.  It was pretty funny.  :-)