No one's gonna play the harp when you die

I'm packed and ready. Again. I've crammed my life into a little box on wheels and I'm ready to take this show on the road. Again.














These last few days have been exceptionally perfect. Other than repeatedly waking up with a hangover befitting Chuck Bukowski, I have been really enjoying this bizarre schedule of mine. I stay up late drinking wine and reading books (mostly about zombies, sometimes about hitler), and I wake up whenever I damn well please (usually when the busses start their normal morning schedule outside my window at 9am). Tomorrow I fly to Toronto. This will be my third time there in as many months with Interpol. We are playing another Virgin festival there. Bonus is that Bjork is playing right after those guys, so I miss the wrath of Billy Corgan's giant bald head. I'm looking forward to bits of this next one. There is lots of new stuff to play with, and, I think, some new songs. The band is working out how to play the funeral dirge of a song that closes the new record. Should be nothing if not stunning live. There is the amazing jump from Madison Square Garden to the Disco Rodeo in NC. My family usually makes it out when I work there. It's embarrassing to think that the most they see of what I do for a living is inside a rodeo bar. I mean there is a line dancing floor and pinatas hung from the ceiling for fuck's sake.















I'll remember this when I'm in a field in Canada. Ocean beach on a warm, sunny day.

















I'll picture this as I repeat my new tour mantra: 'I am well payed for a job where my creativity is well-respected and the beer is free.' Also every now and again I have two weeks off to sit on the beach and do little else.
















I saw this mural yesterday above 826 Valencia in the mission. I recognized it immediately as Chris Ware's. He wrote/drew 'Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth.' It's one of the saddest and most amazing things that I have ever read. I always wish that I could go back to the time before I read it, so that I could experience it again. Sentimentality aside, it is an amazing mural. I went to their website to confirm it. Here's what it says:

Chris Ware, one of the world's great artists, designed this mural specifically for 826 Valencia. It depicts the parallel development of humans and their efforts at and motivations for communication, spoken and written. It's a very complex mural, and requires its most devoted viewers to study it for about an hour, from the middle of Valenica Street, by far the best vantage point.

Awesome.

















That's Jimmy Corrigan....in case you are still in the dark:





















Like a dead man walking I am lazing about my last day at home. I might venture out sooner or later. Maybe I'll finish reading the David Sedaris story in the New Yorker, maybe I'll pimp out my ipod for the flight tomorrow. All I knows is I've got a date with a masseuse and some thai food later on. There will most likely be some beach involved as well.