Saints and Sinners Tour (Draft 1)

There are some things in this world that a person just can't handle. For me, bad music is one of those things. And unfortunately, I am a pretty tough music critic. I hate that I am. I really wish I could make myself like everything under the sun and everything would be peaches and cream. But I can't.

Right now we are on tour with 2 of the worst bands I've ever heard. They are really nice guys and at this point I have separated the two: music and people. I've had the ability to do that with many bands in the past. You don't have to like the band to like the person, easy as that. But it still doesn't mean I want or can even handle listening to their band. Sometimes a band grows on you and sometimes you can't allow that to happen. Thats when you cant let yourself agree with anything the music speaks. Morally, musically. You can't allow yourself to support something that you know could possible be the end of all good music in general. I mean, I know that that is impossible. There will always be good passionate musicians out there that are positively going to make an effort to change music or even the world for the better. But its just a little too close for comfort.

Anyway, over the past few years I have had a hard time controlling myself when I get angry or annoyed at something. Its sort of a temper tantrum, so to speak. It isn't something I am proud of. Its quite embarrassing actually. I hate it. But it happens none the less. Maybe sometime i will learn how to use restraint or self discipline but for now i guess I'll just appoligize when i come to my senses and move on. Tonights "episode" happened like this: We played the show in Portland, Oregon. It was a pretty good show. I think we played decent and the crowed seemed to enjoy themselves. I was in a good mood after the show. We got in the van and realized someone had given us a big pink box of donuts. One of them had Coco Puffs on it and I ate it. It was delicious.

Let me back up a minute and tell you that earlier in the show, chuck, the merch guy for Hollywood Undead (one of the bands I was refering to earlier), called my name. when i turned my head he was holding up one of their cds and he asked me if i wanted it. I didn't want it at all but to avoid bumming him or creating an awkward situation I said "sure." and he threw it over to me.

Ok, back to the van. I still had the cd on me and I wasn't sure what i was going to do with it. I sure as hell wasn't going to listen to it. As I was brainstorming ideas on what the future use of this seemingly useless cd could be, Dave started telling me about how he was starting to actually like hollywood undead. For entertainment purposes of coarse but it still bummed me out. Its kinda like when a friend tells you they like heroin or math. But I was trying to be nice so I gave the cd to him. He seemed pretty stoked on having it so I was ok with it. Now we are getting to it. The reason I freaked out and all.

Mark was driving at this point and he took the cd from Dave and put it in the cd playing. As soon as I heard it through the speakers something snapped in my head and my mood instantaneously went from really good to angry and annoyed. This is a perfect recipe for one of my freak outs. I tried to play it cool like I was joking and I asked them to turn it off. See, when you are forced to listen to something over and over, night after night, and its stuck in your head all day, you kinda want to get away from it. Sometimes hearing something never again is too soon. So the van is kind of my safe house. A chance to get away from the show. The music was completely harshing my mellow. So, since asking wouldn't work, I demanded it be turned off. I was laughed at. Now, when demanding didn't work, I panicked and went on to plan C. I was going to attempted taking the cd out myself and possibly throwing it out the window. Crazy I know. It wasn't the most sophisticated, mature thing to do but it was the only thing that made sense to me at the time. It was my only option.

So what I did was I socked Mark right it the face. He was knocked out and the wheel went free. We were going about 70 mph on the highway so when I jerked the wheel in attempt to straighten the van but it was too late. And it only made it worse. The trailer whipped around swinging the van like a baseball bat hitting a home run. As the van was being thrown around like a rag doll, we flew into a ditch. At that point we were overrun by midget pirates. We lived happily in the land of ever after.

Obviously, the end of this story never actually happened. Everything after the me punching out Mark bit. I actually just got bored while I was writing this and I realized the real ending to the story wasn't actually that interesting and i was kind of embarrassed by it. I guess the real point of this story is that I let stupid stuff get to me. I have this delusion that I am in a place to criticize music to the point of annoying the people around me. What does it really matter if someone wants to listen to horrible music? Who am I to say its horrible, anyway?

This tour still has another week to it. So, I suppose I'll use this last week to chill out and let things be. What i mean by that is I will just enjoy life and not let dumb stuff ruin it for me. Life is too short for that. Isn't it?

Stephen Albert Joseph Keech

PS that was the longest blog ever. sorry about that.