Let’s play some Thursday show and tell.
Yes?

Here’s the rules.
Pick a random photo.
Tell a short story about that photo.
It doesn’t have to exciting.
It’s just a slice of your life…

I found this above backstage picture in one of my folders.
And there’s always a story…….

Here’s a never before seen entry that I wrote in my personal diary on the last day of tour in 2013:

In room 205, in some dive budget hotel in Cleveland, I let the door slam behind me on a adventure.

Several hours later, the maid would find a ripped open bag of mini pretzels from a 3am vending machine run and last night’s red glitter lipstick and black eyeshadow smeared across the pillow.

My black, battered, well-worn high heels that I wore all over the stages we played over the last two months, sat in the corner, as if I was coming back, along with a hotel key from Montreal.

Evidence.

The night before, Maggot and I stood in the hallway listening to the couple talking next door through the paper-thin walls, it felt very spy movie, very top secret….
We listened until we were bored.
I reached into my leopard bag and pulled out all the quarters I had to raid the snack machine.
“I’m not sleeping tonight,” she announced. “Let’s explore.”
In the elevator, Maggot looked down at her naked feet.
We looked at each other and and back at the stained elevator carpet from the 1970s.
“I can’t believe I’m not wearing socks.”
“Fuck it.”
She hid her beer under a red kimono she picked up in Texas and we got out on the ground floor to see a sleeping bum in the hallway and a bored girl behind the front desk.

Neither of them cared about the beer under Maggie’s kimono or the fact that she was barefoot.

I fell asleep writing postcards with scenic pictures of Route 66 and New Mexico – the Land of Enchantment on them.

I never sent them.

____________

Her alarm went off at 6:10am, and she stumbled out of bed with her captain shirt and into the shower. By 6:27am, she was throwing herself across my bed to give me a kiss on the cheek.

“Until the next adventure…”

And then she threw the door open, and banged her bag of stilts and her luggage against a wall already so scraped and dirty no one would ever care.

With a click of the door, she was gone.

And with the departure of my last traveling companion, the Winter tour of 2013 was officially over.

I pulled my computer out of the leopard bag I was sleeping next to. Road-worthy and beat up, itself, its “delete” key blackened from when I set a paper on fire in the hotel in Montreal and burned a hole in the curtains, in two spots of the rug and in my suitcase.

That’s a whole other story.

Quick Quiz: On all of the tours, who is the only one in the band who has ever trashed and had to pay for a hotel room?

This guy.

I did get out of that Montreal situation without anyone knowing though…
thanks to a hotel complimentary sewing kit that helped me quick stitch up the holes in the curtains
and scissors I had with me to cut the burn marks out of the rug.

But this was another hotel,
another road side,
another parking lot that could fit a tour bus if need be,
and it was the last one of that tour.

I sat there alone in the early morning.
Last night’s destruction all around me.
And I kept my promise to you.
My fingers, painted with black Sharpie,
typed Magic Monday.
I like to capture stories when I’m in the wild adrenaline of rock and roll and little sleep.
The time got away from me, the sun slowly moved across the sky, and I had twenty minutes to get out of there to my shuttle to make it to my flight.

I threw the cash I made in merch for the last two months in a zip lock bag of Poloroids, receipts and a drawing someone made of me.
I grabbed my fan case, my purple carry-on and my leopard purse and raced out the door.
With the slam of the door, I thought of what I left behind.

We are no longer here.

This adventure is but words in a book.

____________________________

On the plane, the man next to me politely asked where I was from, where I was going.
He was going to a conference for work in DC, but not in the part he really liked.
He was polite, but something in him was held back.

One of my favorite things about flying by myself, is that I encourage the person next to me to say anything.
To break out. .
It is the moment that I can ask how you are
and you have hours to tell me how you are….
what your life has been like,
what you dream of.

In real life, for most people, there’s no time for that.

I want to ask real questions.
I want to find real things out about strangers that I will never see again.

The truth
is so easy to tell
when you will
never
meet
again.

Off to Detroit.
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