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The Mark Of Borf: “The mysterious, ubiquitous and eminently destructive graffiti artist known as Borf was arrested yesterday after waging a months-long campaign that may have been intended to enlighten Washington, but mostly just confused us.”

You are on tour in a school bus with about 30 other people. Today, you are in Athens, GA. You ride a borrowed bicycle around town and you remember that the person from whom you borrowed the bicycle once had his knee shattered in a bike accident. So, you also remember to stop at all the red lights. You wonder if its okay to make jokes about his accident. You ride past a bar and hear a song that you recognize drifting through the open doors. The song is “Hey Jealousy” by the Gin Blossoms. You realize that just as the song once felt intensely meaningful and now seems silly and archaic, your feelings of jealousy that your tourmates are getting what they want, or just feeling more strongly about what they want, will soon feel silly and archaic. You come back from your ride sweaty and with your muscles a little sore and you realize that even though you often feel exhausted, carrying a few amps or crates and playing for 30 minutes does not amount to a whole lot of physical activity. You see friends from all over and this makes you feel a little crazy. You watch one of your favorite bands play their last show and you sing along so forcefully that you wake up the next morning with a sore throat. You wonder what it feels like to do something for the last time. After the show, your friend tells you that this is the first time his divorced parents have been in the same place in years. Even though this has nothing to do with you, it makes you feel better. You do not get to go to Boneshakers Version 2.0, Athens’ premier queer dance club, but you do get to go swimming at a pool at an apartment complex. At one point you float on your back and narrow your field of vision so as to block out the streetlights and power lines so all you can see are the stars and for a few seconds you are alone with the night. You walk back to where you are staying and hang out outside a 24-hour doughnut store. You fall asleep on your friend’s floor, knowing that you will have to wake up again in 4 hours and get on a school bus. You are on tour.

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I tell people this frequently, because I am quite pleased with myself when some off-hand observation that I make turns out to bear more than a morsel of truth. I often feel awkward around very drunk people because they find an optimism, an excitement, an inspiration even, in the things around them, and I just can’t keep up. I can fake it, though, I’ve found, through a combination of volume, obscenities, and references to vice. “Fuck man, shiiit. Weed!” I was feeling particularly awkward last night as I saw as many of my friends drinking as an anesthetic as drinking as catharsis. “Shit man, fuuuuck.” We played sloppily and out of tune, not that people seemed to mind since the Theory of Musical Performance clearly states “Drunk people love live music.” The Defiance, Ohio corollary to this theory amends that “Drunk people seem to like Defiance, Ohio” (even in our out-of-tuneness and out-of-timeness, our broken strings, and cracking voices).

I said some ridiculous shit at the end of our playing, trying to clear the place out. It went something like this: “Go get drunk and if you don’t drink, go make out, and if you don’t want to do either of those things, go do something fun like ride your bike.” The fact that I made this statement to a room full of people, many strangers, made me sad for two reasons. First, I feel like it gave license for people to thoughtlessly engage in drinking and sex, two things that should require at least a shred of consideration or intention before jumping into, especially when combined. Not that those things are bad at all, but people can make their own decisions about them and generate their own energy for them and sure as hell don’t need someone behind a microphone mouthing off about them. Second, I feel like my statement exemplify a generally held perception of our scene of music that is, at times, earned, but often very narrow sited. This is the perception that our energy and passion can be invested in food or drink or romance and this will somehow get us where we want to go – that utopia is only a PBR (or a root beer for that matter), a bike ride, or a game of spin the bottle away. We do the things we have to do (or decide to do) and sometimes we regret them, sometimes we remember them fondly, and sometimes they’re just the things we do. In any case, life seems to be more complicated than we are able to, or willing to, express.

I regret some other things that I’ve said recently, though more as an expression of my mentality than what they might have meant to other people. We were sitting in a circle outside the show in DC when the question came up, “what was the best Defiance, Ohio show?” For whatever reason, I proceeded to dive into a description of what, in many ways, were some of our worst shows. Why is it always easier to express tales of calamity and misfortune (and more fun to hear them) than it is to talk about experiences that were special or meaningful?

On this tour, I guess words of negative camaraderie are often easier, and more fun, than the alternative – an isolated muddle of feelings.

…

Talking about romantic relationships is kind of the same deal, especially when those relationships are strange or feel fleeting. Every excited word is an investment that makes it harder when feelings change or go away and sometimes you just feel so confused that you don’t know the words to express those feelings. So, I often trail off, “yeah, things are good … I guess.”

Spoonboy saw the following graffiti in a bathroom at a gas station: “Niggers – God’s only mistake”. Below it was the retort, “Racist faggots can suck a dick” (or something equally offensive). He painted over both sentences.

For a town with places like the ACRC, filled with lots of zines, magazines, and books about interesting, challenging ideas; or bands like Trouble Trouble Trouble playing awesome, smart songs; there sure is a lot of silly quasi-political graffiti up around this town.

Oh yeah, our bus got tagged at the show in Asheville. My favorite was “making drunk a threat again”, which is sadly appropriate, though I fear the threat is mostly to ourselves.

I’m doing okay, really I am, but this is largely contingent on me being in my own little world, and largely contingent of me maintaining a certain ignorance or indifference to my tourmates. This is because the second I look over at someone and see them looking crazy, I feel crazy. I was trying to explain this to Ryan and he was giving me the “Geoff, what the hell are you talking about?” look when we looked out the window of the bus and saw Daun walking through the parking lot. She was clutching her bag, which was broken, and minding her dress, which was ripped, and squinting from the sunlight and she just looked crazy. Ryan started laughing until his face turned red.

I guess I’ve gone and am going to a lot of places on this tour, though I wonder, for all the time spent at shows, how much of them I really get to see. Still, I’ve been thinking about places a whole lot.

…

On one of the days where I got to do something that I wanted, or rather, got to do something that, in retrospect, I came to realize was what I had wanted, some friends took me along to Portland where we walked along the rocky shoreline and sat on the rocks and looked out at the lighthouse and the barges passing by in the night. There’s something mesmerizing about the darkness of water at night and how only the tops of the ripples are illuminated by the light from the moon, or the lighthouse, or the scattered houses. The niceness of the water at night is the same for water flowing from the Atlantic as it is for the waters of Lake Griffey back in Bloomington where I jumped off rope swings on two nights the week before I left for tour. The jump was all the more perilous for not seeing the wet landing below, but once immersed in the cool blackness, the whole world seemed quiet and beautiful.

In Portland, Shon and I waded a few yards out to some rocks and carefully climbed the slippery and seaweed covered surface until we were sitting just above the lapping waves. Shon told me that, growing up in New England, he had come to love the Ocean and though there was always the allure of living in other places, he wasn’t sure if, or for how long, he could stay away.

I understand this, a little at least, because I’ve seen the Rockies and the Alps in all their foreign majesty and they surely tower above the Appalachians that enclose the valley where I grew up, which aren’t even real mountains anyway. Still, even when hiking through these hills and stopping and looking over the valley, and seeing what once were farm fields or forests become subdevelopments, or looking at the hills above me, their faces bald and grey from the clear-cut and strip mines, I still think its a beautiful place. Driving around with my folks on the country roads, as farm fields turn to towns, we pass newly constructed strip malls and super-stores, the neighboring structures built while I still lived in the area and once filled with shoppers and adorned with banners, now sit empty and lifeless. Still, I feel a sense of comfort when returning to central Pennsylvania. I think that a lot of people feel this way about the places that they’re from.

Some don’t though, and in them I find an intense appreciation for distant places, for new places. My mom grew up in Flint, Michigan – a sad place by her own admission, despite her fonder memories of philanthropically financed libraries, symphonies, and youth programs. We rarely go back to visit my parents’ home town, and I don’t blame them. Even as a child, I found sadness in that post-industrial ghost town. Maybe that’s why my mom loved every nature hike in northeast Ohio when we lived there, or every family vacation to the shore, or every walk on the rocky Pennsylvania portion of the Appalachian Trail. She has a fascination with the fauna or the calls of some strange bird and this is a fascination that makes here walk slow through the woods while I careen obliviously on ahead. I love this about her, and wish I could entirely share her fascination with places instead of just admiring hers.

…

We were sitting outside the show in DC and someone on tour was talking about how he is not fond of the city of Tampa (though I believe the show on this tour has raised his opinion at least a little, and I’ve always had fun there and thought people were real nice). I told him that when we played in Tampa, he shouldn’t be too persuasive about the reasons he dislikes the town lest Tampa residents become convinced that their town sucks and move to Bloomington like so many of us have. Not that I can really say much about this seeming mass migration since I’m a fairly recent immigrant to Bloomington. Who wouldn’t want to live in Bloomington, especially if you come from a place that’s not so hot? Of course someone would be excited about streets with trees where you can walk and see your friends out on their porches, hiking trails, rope swings, quarries, bike projects, hiking trails, rope swings, quarries, farmers markets, and radical bookstores. And, of course, the merits of a place have to do with more things than those most obvious assets, but coming from a place without those things, they seem really nice. Since I thought about this though, I had a conversation with Greg Wells about how the punks in Richmond are more of a blight to traditionally working-class neighborhoods than the yuppies, and I recall our own pretty trashed (relative to our neighbors) house in the near west side of Bloomington with more than a little shame. I had a phone conversation with another friend who talked about how people from the suburbs are fascinated or enamored with certain cities or towns, but how this excitement is so far from having roots in those places. Being on tour so much these days, I wonder if I’ll ever have those roots, or if I even want them. Its like my mom loving natural places in such a fundamental way – roots are something that I admire, but aren’t really part of my life right now.

…

I know strip mines from seeing them in central PA, but if that seems like a blight, a mining technique called mountain top removal (MTR) seems even more devastating. Some folks from Mountain Justice Summer were tabling at the show in Asheville and they had some photos and information about MTR. Besides just destroying the beauty of the mountains and problems with erosion and contamination from mining by-products, someone told me a story that really drove home, for me, how extreme an environmental impact MTR can have. One Appalachian town suffered their first tornado after the mountains that had traditionally shielded the town had been lowered due to MTR. Mountain Justice Summer is mobilizing to connect with communities impacted by MTR, halt MTR in places where its happening, and to stop it from being employed in places where it isn’t yet a practice. Some actions have already happened, and they’re gearing up for broader actions later in the summer. The website for Mountain Justice Summer is mountainjusticesummer.org .

I want what I want. We all do, I guess, and I just happen to surround myself with people who are willing to admit that. On one Defiance, Ohio tour, bored in the van, we broke out the guitar and went around exchanging verses, teasing each other about the things that we secretly (or not so secretly) desired. The other night in Brooklyn, Ryan voicing his frustration about the reality of setting up, playing, and getting everyone at the show cleared out in 20 minutes was transformed by the rumor mill as “We’re Defiance, Ohio and we get what we want!” We may want what we want, and each of us is frustrated in our own ways when that doesn’t happen, but we definitely don’t always get what we want.

On this tour, its been hard for any of the 30 or so of us to get what we want. Some people want to feel more safe on the bus, others want to go swimming, others want more sleep, or better sleep, while others want to eat when they’re hungry instead of when there’s time. Even when you get pretty much what you want, its hard to see your friends not getting what they want. Because, isn’t that what we all want more than anything? An easy, perfect world where resources are not finite and where one persons desires don’t mitigate another’s?

What I want, on this tour at least, is to be more of a part of the things that I see that excite me or inspire me instead of being this passing observer. Ryan would tell me that this is stupid and that I am a part of these things but just in a different, less easily identifiable and less easy to pat myself on the back way. Maybe he’s right. What I want is to be able to take some of the inspiration and ideas that I get from seeing so many people and places and having so many conversations, both with people I meet and with my tourmates and do something right away with them instead of being stuck with this bus and this routine. I want to do things while the ideas still seem fresh and possible because I know that the responsibilities that I’ve put off from back home will catch up to me and quell my momentum like an anchor as will the tug of daily life and fun for fun’s sake. Ryan would say that this is stupid and that the festering and the waiting is what makes ideas into things that are better in the end and that having to balance them, or preserve them with other things pulling at your life makes the things that you make better. Again, maybe he’s right.

Still, it feels like that’s the rub of tour. Lots of inspiration, little that can be done with it. I’ve gotten to do some just for fun stuff, though that makes me forget about frustrations, at least for a little. These are things like skate sessions in Binghamton and Philly or hiking and a nighttime trip to the water in Maine. These things seem so necessary as the days leading up to them always seem so stressful. I’ve gotten to see old friends and I think that maybe being around so many people all the time has made me feel a little less awkward and a little better at conversation so I can appreciate these friends a little more than on my other travels.

So, I can’t complain about not getting what I want. Most of the time I don’t really know what I want, necessarily, so I guess I don’t really know whether or not I’m getting what I want. Ultimately, I get to do some things that are pretty fun and hang out with some people who are pretty nice and that’s always a good thing.