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

So, Ryan and Sara and Giacomo went to a club and met with the girl and guy who put this tour together.  There’s a show tonight with 4 bands playing, but I decided it would be better for me to stay "home" and get some alone-time.  I need lots of that in my life and it’s really hard to get it when I’m on tour.

The girl who booked the tour came by the apartment today, to check up on us I guess.  At that point I was feeling very weird about this tour and decided it would be best to talk to her about it.  But that was exactly the wrong thing to do.  What I said was, more or less, that it seemed like we really do need to use the van that was arranged for us, and that I was a little upset at the way things had gone last night.  That I thought it was unprofessional to show up at a club with no amps, no guitar cases, and try to put on a show.  Unfortunately she got upset at my saying this, which made me upset, and I almost started crying.  I had to go back into the bedroom and blow my nose and try to calm down a little.  Came back out and apologized to her and said, "don’t worry, we’ll just go with the flow and everything will be fine." It’s funny that it was ME who was doing all the apologizing and her that was being so defensive.  Usually a good booking agent will act as a sort of psychologist, assuring you that things will go smoothly.  They don’t usually put all the burden on you to make THEM feel better, leaving you in the lurch wondering what the fuck’s going on, but oh well.

I realized back when I did it that pulling the drummer out of the scenario (only about 10 days before the tour began) might be a problem for them, but I never realized it would cause so many difficulties.  My line of thinking was… we have very little money to work with.  If we cut out the drummer we’ll save money on the drum rental, and we won’t have to pay the many hundreds of dollars in plane tickets for him.  I thought it would only make things easier, but noooooo.  Instead it’s like a huge issue for them to deal with.  Uggghhh.  I would never have made that decision if it weren’t for the very loud encouragement I’d gotten from a certain person that I work with back home.  He or she made me believe that it was the best decision, but now it seems it was the worst thing to do for the Italians.  I still think the money we’re getting makes it impossible to have enough left over to pay a third person, but whatever.  I guess the thing to do would be to pull money out of my pocket that I don’t really have, so I could pay the drummer, pay Ryan and rent the extra gear.  To invest in this tour, because theoretically it would help my career later on and make it easier for me to tour here in the future.  I’m not sure that I’d even want to come back at this point, but I guess that would’ve been the ideal thing to do if I’d had the money to invest.  In the U.S. I always make sure that we have enough money in guarantees to ensure that we never go into the red.  The tour has to be self-supporting; Drag City doesn’t give me any money for that, other than sometimes fronting money for tickets, which I have to pay back upon completion of the tour.  They did that in this case.  I owe a whole lot of money right now, maybe $3000 if you include the money I owe to Ryan for the tickets he bought on his credit card.  I don’t really anticipate being able to pay back all that, but we’ll see.  Mike Hoff seemed to think it would be alright but I’m pretty dubious.  I just hope I don’t have to keep owing them money (which they’d take out of my skimpy royalties), or in the worst case, have to go running to my daddy to ask for money to pay them back.  I fucking hate it when I go broke and have to ask for money.  It hasn’t happened in awhile and I’d like to keep it that way.

Tomorrow (Monday) is another day off in Roma.  Ryan and I are going to visit the Coliseum, which we sort of meant to do today but never got around to it.  Instead, we slept very late, then did laundry, ate some rice and peas that Sara cooked for us, and then took a long walk around her neighborhood.  Nothing to see at all but at least it got us out of the house for an hour or so.  Later we played a game of Scrabble, that was fun.  I’m really glad Ryan brought that thing.  He borrowed it from me actually!