So yeah, as you can see by the "future entries" above, I have a couple of Chicago shows lined up in the next few months.  How do I explain this?  Well, I got a wild hair up my ass last night.  After the rehearsal I did with Ryan yesterday, I was feeling the sudden urge to play a show RIGHT THIS MINUTE!!!  It just popped into my head as something I really wanted to do — a sort of a secret show where I could bust out my new songs and try them out on a few people.  I haven’t played in over a year and I’m pretty nervous but getting more confident every day so I really wanted to set something like this up.  So I got ahold of Derek, the booking agent I’m working with for the tour in December with Manishevitz.  He suggested that opening slot at the Hideout, playing first on a bill with Dr. Sax, which is a subset of a band called Judah Johnson that I saw last month and really dug a lot.  So yeah, that sounded perfect and of course I said YES YES YES.  :-)

But what I’m really shitting myself over is the next show, opening for Jolie Holland at Schuba’s.  That’s something I just never imagined.  It was sort of suggested by Derek as well, kinda like "while we’re at it, what would you think of THIS?”… he put it on the table as something he could inquire about.  And I sort of said… uhhh, ok, you could try asking them and see what they say?  But I didn’t think it could ever happen.  I already had my ticket to that show, and as y’all all know Jolie’s my favorite singer on earth at the moment.  It just seemed too fuckin’ cool to believe.  But after Derek talked to the Schuba’s booking people, they thought it was a great idea so BAM, I’m on the bill.  How SURREAL is that, man?  Anyone who knows me will know I’m absolutely dying from glee here.  And also shitting and puking and pissing myself from the feelings of "OMIGOD I’M NOT WORTHY!!!" Ha ha.  But yeah, I’m doing both these shows and I’m gonna do the best solo shows I’ve ever done in my life, and that is final.

Today I also finally met up with a longtime webpal of mine, Jeff Economy.  It was an extremely satisfying meetup, really left me exhausted from the chattering.  I can’t believe I never met that guy before, we had so much stuff in common to talk about!  Especially our mutual love of the Residents.  Well, I was doing most of the talking but he understood why… I told him flat out how spazzed-out I’m feeling the past few weeks due to quitting EVERY damn thing on earth all at the same time (well, except for caffeine but… maybe soon? we’ll see).  Jeff understood that phenomenon so I didn’t feel like quite as much of a FREAK as I could have.  Today is Day 13 I believe of no ciggies… hooray!!!  Jeff is a Quitter of Caffeine which I can’t even imagine yet at this point.

BTW I got over my wish to be a stoner again; I was talking about that the other day, remember?  But on Sunday night I met up with Rian Murphy and… well, something happened which really served to illustrate why it would not be a great idea for me to start up again with that wacky weed.  Rian pulled a baggie out of his pocket after he came over and MY HEART STOPPED!!!  I GASPED!!!  I had this insane COOKIE-MONSTER reaction like OMIGOD, HE BROUGHT ME SOME… OOOOHhhhhh, no.  Because it was just some teabags inside — he had wanted to turn me on to a different flavor of red tea than the kind I bought last week.  He looked at me and I looked at him and we both went… oh my god, what the fuck was THAT?!?  I was kind of embarrassed about it right then, so we just moved along and continued with the music practice.  But I thought about it after he left and wow, it just really got to me.  To imagine having SUCH a visceral reaction over just seeing a fuckin’ BAGGIE… it’s crazy.  It’s wrong.  It’s not right, it is wrong.  If he had pulled out a frickin’ HERSHEY bar, would I have FREAKED out the way I did when I saw that baggie?  NOooooo, I wouldn’t have.  So this sorta got me to thinkin’ that yeah, MAYBE just MAYBE people are right about the possibility of there being something just slightly *addictive* about marijuana.  Maybe it’s not so much a chemical thing as with other drugs like nicotine, but whatever it is, it sure makes me want it more than anything else I haven’t had in a while, like I dunno, ice cream or whatever.  It bothered me.  I don’t want anything having that much control over me, it was like fuckin’ Golum lusting after the One True Ring or somethin’!!  It’s not right that anything should have such insane power over me.  So yeah, I’m not going to be buying any of that stuff anytime soon, let’s put it that way, heheh.  Miss Frost is just a little too PARTIAL to that shit and wants to get that feeling under control a little better, alright?  Alright.  ::whew::