There are times in everyone’s life, or most everyone’s life, when things get really nasty.

You can see danger, pain, death, just ahead of you, and you become a religious person really fast.

“Oh God,” you pray, “Just please let me get through this one scrape and I’ll never ask you for another thing”.

Or at least that’s what I do, after soiling myself.

Then if you get through the scrape, all you can do is smile and say “Holy SHIT that was close!”.

If someone were about to shoot me, I’d certainly try to talk them out of it. What a favor it is to not shoot me when you were planning on it.

I think if someone else were about to be shot, and I were able to talk the potential shooter out of it, then I would feel really proud of myself, because I granted the shootee the favor of avoiding that horribleness. Life is precious, and preserving it is a very worthy cause.

If someone else did the same for me, then I would really be grateful to them.

So, escaping danger fucking rules, is what I’m saying, and helping someone escape danger is also awesome.

And that, my friends, is why I don’t squish spiders.

Okay kids. I’ve got a new song recorded, so warm up those clicky fingers.

This is called Hold My Calls. I wrote it for an online songwriting contest called Songfight which it promptly didn’t win, but I like it anyway.

Check it out by clicking the below button, and let me know how you feel about it.

I pulled the big van onto the Tulane campus just in time to load in for the gig. We were playing at a fraternity christmas party which they had thoughtfully scheduled for November. I have no idea.

We unloaded all of our shit with the help of some of the frat boys and began to set it up. The place reeked of bleach. I remember the overpowering smell of bleach fondly from my college days, but it still was pretty bad. Fran opened a window. My eyes fell out of my head.

We checked the sound, went and ate a slice of pizza at a nearby pizza joint, and I found a local pub to do a shot of Jager at with Bald Mike. One good way to tell if you are in a college town is that the Jager shots come in test tubes. Okay, a college town or a strip club. At any rate, all was well when we got back, and people were starting to arrive, so we started playing.

Now, Fran always brings girls up and puts them on stage to dance while we are playing. The girls love this. I’m not one to be a naysayer about nubile college girls writing in front of me, but I can’t help but notice that their favorite part of it is to knock over and or step on gear that I am currently using. It’s like they get one look at my pedalboard full of expensive effects and just go hog wild stomping on them, effectively giving me the musical equivalent of tourette’s syndrome as the sounds leap from here to there. Sometimes there are so many of them around my gear that I can’t get to it, so I try to politely ask one of them to turn on or off the appropriate switch. This usually doesn’t work.

Almost at the end of the show this little girl appeared in the heaving throng of college aged girls at the front of the stage. She was wearing a shirt that left almost nothing to the imagination, and shaking her boobs around like they were on fire, so Fran dragged her up on stage. She went to Willie like a moth to a flame.

Willie grinned a big “HEE HEE BOOBIES” grin and kept playing, even though she was trying to take his shirt off. He did pretty well playing the bass anyway. Another girl walked up on stage and bent over to shake her ass at me. I thought it was a nice gesture, but as she was between me and my gear on the floor, it was somewhat cumbersome.

I tried to reach my leg around her to switch some of my floor effects off, but she fought me off with her ass. I guess she was up for some mid-show dry humping, but I was just trying to play some music. She eventually pouted at me and left. I guess I wasn’t very fun.

Eventually we finished playing, and I immediately crashed out on a couch and took a nap. Fran woke me up to load the van 15 minutes later. I had had a long day, now having been awake 24 hours and at the wheel for 7 of them and playing for 4. We loaded the van back up and went to go find a hotel.

It ended up that I stayed in the driver’s seat the whole way to New Orleans. Fran was chatting into his cell phone as we drove across the lake into the city.

“Is this a lake or an ocean?” He wanted to know.

“It’s Lake Pontchartrain” I said.

“Yeah, we’re driving across Lake Pompatrain” he said into the phone.

Ha ha. Pompatrain.

After I got fired, Francisco asked me if I wanted to play guitar on some dates down in New Orleans with him. I said I sure did, but I warned him that I don’t drive long distances very well because I get bored and fall asleep. He said it would be okay.

He planned to show up to pick me and my gear up at around 8 AM on Friday. The problem being, you see, that I usually go to bed around 3AM, so 8 is smack in the middle of the night. I took a nap from 12 to 4AM to try to stay up a little later.

I piled all my shit up on the back steps and started waiting for Fran at about 7:45. Europa happened to come home around then, so I ensnared him with conversation, hoping to trick him into being around when Fran showed up and we had to load the van up. It worked.

The rental van containing Francisco and the other car containing Bald Mike the drummer and Willie the bass player appeared at the same time. Bald Mike’s not really bald, but his hair’s getting a bit thin up front. He’s built low and thick like a fire hydrant. He wears glasses most of the time, but when he has them off he squints moleishly. This appears to have no negative effect on his drumming.

Willie’s full head of hair is twisted into orangish beginnings of dreadlocks. He’s 17, weighs maybe 90 pounds, and is very thin. With his explosive orange hairdo and thin frame he rather resembles some sort of exotic palm tree, but he’s a good player, especially for his age.

Everyone began milling around and pulling gear out of cars, laying it around our driveway. I unloaded the rental van with Europa’s help.

Packing a vehicle is an art, I think. I quite enjoy the challenge of getting a shitload of gear into a small space. It’s a very zen activity to me. It involves the labor of lifting things and moving them around, as well as fitting things into place. Fran, on the other hand, lobs whatever he has on hand into the vehicle, to the peril of both his gear and anyone nearby. This packing job was too big for that sort of frivolity, so I unloaded his avalanche and packed it all back up in an orderly fashion.

We got it all in, hoppped into the van, and we were on our way with our fearless leader at the wheel. He had elected to take the first shift of a 9 hour drive, which was fine by me. I planned to get a good nap in and then maybe take the last shift.

As we got on the highway and started getting up to travelling speed, we heard a very loud farting sort of a noise from outside the van. It sounded like it could have been a Harley or something, but there weren’t any around.

“Was that us?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Fran said, scanning the guages.

“Boy it would sure suck if this van exploded not even an hour into the trip.”

There it was again. FRAAAAAAAAAAAP! It sounded like it was coming from the front of the vehicle somewhere. I pulled the rental agreement out of the glove compartment and dialed the number on it. Someone answered.

“Hello?” the guy at the rental company answered.

“Yes, hi. My name is Jim Hodgson and I’m in one of your vans and it’s making an enormous farting sound from time to time. Can you help us?”

“Farting sound?” he asked.

FRAAAAAAAAAP went the sound.

“Do you hear that?”

“Yeah I do.”

“Your van is farting like that. That was your van”

“Uh…” he said.

Fran started motioning frantically from the driver’s seat for me to hand him the phone. I handed it over. They worked out that the van was not supposed to make that noise, but not much else. I looked up at the top of the windshield where it joined the roof of the car, and noticed a bit of what looked like duct tape.

Could we be riding unbeknownst in a van whose windows are only held in by duct tape? Could that tape be coming off? I told Fran to pull off the highway, and he drove down an exit ramp to a red light.

“I’ll call you back,” he said into my phone, hanging up by clipping it shut.

I opened my passenger door as the van stopped, Fran’s pocket knife open in my hand, and like a pirate I climbed over the open door onto the front of the van to the cheers of Mike and Willie. I sliced and diced the duct tape, which had indeed come unstuck and was flapping in the wind. Problem solved.

We got back on the highway, and the van stopped farting. Now, however, it was making a loudish whistling noise.

“What the fuck’s that noise?” Fran asked.

“Maybe that’s the noise that the tape was there to correct” I suggested.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE” said the van.

“That’s really annoying.”

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”

We rode along for a while, listening to the van whistle. Finally, Fran shut the van’s vents and the noise stopped.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, that’s better.”

We were about an hour outside of town, and our first obstacle had been overcome, so we pulled over to rent some movies. Fran desperately wanted to watch Planes Trains and Automobiles on the portable TV/VCR combo he’d brought along. I decided to take the next shift at the wheel since I was feeling pretty alert and confidant.

Now, I hate driving a lot of the time, particularly on long distances. I just don’t have the attention span for it. I get irritable and fidgity waiting for water to boil, let alone waiting for Louisiana to creep up on us. I figured I’d better do my time early while I was somewhat conscious.

“You call that a fucking shift at the wheel, Fran?” I asked as we loaded back up in the parking lot of a movie rental place. “Maybe fifty miles outside Atlanta and you want to watch a movie.”

“Yeah I know, terrible…” he said, but he was busy setting up his little portable TV. It had two screens, one for Mike and Willie in the back and one for Fran.

I pulled the big assed van onto the highway pointed south, and put my foot down. We were on our way to New Orleans.