i am done at heartland and have started the rad which i like so far.  it’s much better than heartland and safari in that i’m constantly doing something and moving around, as opposed to just sitting there for hours.  getting paid to do nothing is sweet, but the boredom makes it not worth it.

friday i ended up working 3 jobs, and i thought that was impressive.  7am-12 at heartland, then 330-midnight at the theater, then 1230-145 at the radisson.

i need some time at the lakes this week.

DAY 6: June 6, 2008 ottumwa, iowa (show moved from the flipside to the parking lot behind a teen center)

we got the hell out of there as fast as we could.  too many young kids hungover.  we had to stop to fix our side mirror which had just fallen off and shattered for no reason the day before.  i drove through the worst illinois traffic/construction on the hottest day ever, which was a treat.

ottumwa is a tiny town where there is apparently not much to do.  we played at a teen center, or rather in the parking lot in the hot sun, on top of a flatbed truck.  the people running it obviously had no idea how to run a show, and the other band was irritating.  the drummer tried to have a drum off with me but he was a scrub.

we played around 5:00 and were told that in order to get paid we had to stay for the whole show which ended at 11:00.  fair enough, that sounded reasonable, other than the fact that the show totally sucked and we were upstaged by a dunk tank.  i hate to say it but a majority of the kids there didnt seem to be interested in music at all, and many of them seemed to fall a few synapse firings short of “average intelligence.”  it was just such a weird vibe.  a dude from another trendy metal band came up to us and said that he “liked us, and likes how punk rock sounds.”  cool man, try not to make it sound so forced next time.  his band, obviously, was not good.  they played for 3 hours, played the opening riff to new noise by refused (didnt finish the song) and played the aqua teen theme song.  i walked around, went to some comic shop and a dollar store, went to taco bell with trevor, and resumed sitting and waiting to be paid so we could get out of there.

the cops came and were there for awhile.  everyone thought it was a noise issue, and people were stupidly parking their cars and trucks around the stage and crowd in probably the poorest attempt at outdoor soundproofing i have ever seen.  turns out, the cops just wanted the band to stop saying “fuck.”  the final band were awful, and even called out their own encore when they were done.  the dude who was supposed to pay us was preoccupied with other shit and kept wandering off, thus prolonging the already irritating situation.  they had a barbecue and didnt even offer some food for the bands.  meh, whatever.  we were fed up and hot so we got a hotel and a 30 pack and got to work.  swam and went to bed.

here’s what the van looked like before leaving illinois, after the addition of horns

gabe brushing his teeth alone in ottumwa.  this picture describes all of our attitudes towards this town.

and trevor