Las Cruces, NM

From Telluride to Albuquerque, Albuquerque to Las Cruces.

Played Henry last night to a very enthusiastic crowd of 400 Sureños in beautiful Las Cruces, New Mexico. The women are beautiful and capable, the gas stations are on every block, the food is delicious and cheap, the weather is perfect, and the desert is huge – huge, huge, and clean.

The hotel last night was a classic. Clean, friendly enough, but the door did not open from the outside. As a result, there were two ways to get in: kick in the door, and break in through the window. Both of these were surprisingly simple and intuitive.

It’s difficult to resist the sentimental notion that rising up from the dirt is the red, dusty taste of who I was ten years ago. So, I am queerly unable to make sense of what I’ve been doing – not narratively, but developmentally – for the past few years. This sense, and some jawing with my dad on family psychology – hereditary legacies of genetics, alcoholism, and rock and roll – have me loathe to leave. There’s something here I need. Some key piece in the continuing search for God and faith.

Next up, Santa Fe, where for the first time in a month, we play the Spy.

For glory, friends.

Baton Rouge, LA

Back from a week off in the City So Nice, they flew us into New Orleans.

The french quarter is full of incredible looking crawfish nonsense, people wandering around holding quart-sized tupperware containers labeled “Huge Ass Beers”.

Bar flavor, Bourbon St style: a middling quality live band, a guy in a t-shirt that says “fighting solves everything”, girls with beads on their necks and wild, slow looks in their eyes, and three for one whisky. This is not one bar, this is every bar on Bourbon St – whose commercial potential eludes me, as the idea of being drunk in that environment makes me exclusively nauseous and frightened.

After some delicious Beignets at the world famous Cafe Du Monde, a few hours to Baton Rouge, where we played Henry. At 150 people attending, the 550 house felt deserted. Entering on the first chorus braced for an unpleasant, silent slog through a bizarre three hour history, we were delighted to discover a most lively, intelligent, responsive and respectful audience. They have no idea how they rescued their own evening. I mean, flip back seven hours and you find us in horror staring out at the audience, as (no joke) half of our moribund student audience unceremoniously bails on us literally during the climax of the play. Boom. Turns out there were maybe some scheduling issues. Nonetheless. Brutal.

Back on board the bus, it’s been a day.

Shreveport for lunchbreak, where shirtless in the warm and beautiful woods, I discovered a veritable colony of upended shopping carts, as if homeless drunks had some sort of art exhibit on the subject of mankind’s futility and the stripmall’s inevitable decline, the victory of wilderness.

After lunch, another Company Meeting in which Letters are Read. We learn: our entire New York run of the Spy has been cancelled. The Spy has joined its own list of casualties. Our old director, see, who jumped ship back in December, refuses to put his name on the project as director, and refuses to allow us to use the name of the man who resurrected it. The upshot? The show must not, after all, go on. We are all, naturally, having some feelings about this.

From there, things go downhill. One of our members is throwing up into a plastic bag at 75 miles per hour. The bus bathroom catches up with us, and in our last moments of olfactory desperation while dumping its contents on the side of the road, we hand around an eleven dollar bottle of whisky, breathing in its sweet, clean vapor, like divers in desperate straits.

Next up is Telluride CO, by way of Wichita Falls, TX, and Albuquerque NM.

Yo ho, yo ho, the pirate’s life for me.