carriespondace

Carrie,
I'm really long overdue in rattling off something to you. I can't imagine what it must be like waiting for letters from friends and wondering if they are ever going to come. Let me follow up my apology by stating that I am not leaving you out in the wind. The sad fact is that I just got out of the habit of writing to you and it's taken me longer than I would have thought to put the time and the inspiration together to complete the task. Hopefully now I'm back and you'll have some more frequent communication from me.
I'm sorry they decided to throw the book at you, that is really sucks. It came as a rather large surprise to me that you still had so much to go. Tell me about your new surroundings, you know how I'm interested. What are the major differences? Now that the first month is over what are they doing with you?
I've been such a slacker lately, not even blogging much. UG! I think I'm really getting a bit tired of this job. At least the band is keeping me occupied in a refreshing manner. We leave this Friday for a very short tour up to Seattle, WA, I imagine Devin has told you about it. Just 4 shows, but it's the most we've ever played with no day off. I'm looking forward to getting out of Southern California and away from the routines.
Our first show is in Alameda, somewhere in the greater San Francisco area, we will stay the night with Denny pop after the show, that should be interesting. We play the next night at a place called Kimo's in SF, funny huh? After that show we will leave and drive a few hours north to get a jump on the long drive to Portland, OR.
The Portland show is the one I'm most looking forward to. I've never been to Portland before. This show is for the fine people at Church of Girl, you should remember them from Myspace. We stay that night at this neat little bed and beerfest type place called Beauty Sleep. Some neat person has made it into a sort of retro community hotel and we'll be getting an entire floor, including two bedrooms and 3 couches. Very excited.
The last night we play at a hardcore punk club in Seattle, in the shadow of the space needle. Never been to Seattle either.
We will probably come back from all this driving broke and hating each other. Gas prices are so out of line right now. 350 a gallon out here. Never the less I'm really excited for my first ever rock and roll tour, even if it's really short.
We had a good weekend last weekend. We played a show at the palms, with a band called Hayden and the Headphones. It was their first show in 6 months or so so they had a great draw, and combined with a bunch of good friends of ours coming out it ended up being packed. We played a really high energy show and the crowd danced along with us. I LOVE when people dance, makes it all worth while :). We stayed up late partying that night, and then like idiots had to wake up early to drive up to Santa Barbara to play their pride festival on the beach. Their pride was po-dunk, but fun. The way up was very exciting. I was driving Amy's truck and and we were following Devin and Dylan in their car, traffic on the 101 started to back up so I applied my breaks... which did nothing for about 40 feet. Scary... They finally worked a little, but nothing like they should. I slowed way down and got of the freeway and pulled over. I checked the break fluid, which was totally absent. Ruh Roh. We pulled into a gas station and got some more break fluid, filled it up and tried to drive again... no improvement. We pulled around the corner and into a service station which was just closing. Keep in mind Amy and I have all the equipment in our car and we are kind of in a rush to get to the show on time.
The mechanic looks at our car and tells us we have a leak in our master cylinder and that we probably have air in our lines... Apparently he had just sent his other guy home and fixing it is a two man job. We told him our sob story so he had me drive the car onto the hydraulic lift and then proceeded to raise me to the ceiling of the shop, that part was cool. He then had me pump and hold the breaks while he bled the air out. He finished in under 15 minutes and charged us 10 bucks cash. Pedro at the 76 station in the valley rocks.
Okay, my day is wrapping up so I'll copy/paste some blog entires for you to fill out this letter. I'm sorry i took so long to dash this off. You'll get more. I owe you some love. Believe me, I still have a lot of love for you.
Your Friend,
Brandon