Last night we played Boston. When we arrived, all these dudes and dudettes were marching around the streets in yellow T-shirts and viking hats, doing a college-style bar crawl. Classic Boston crust punks were on the scene, reminding me of my Boston crust punk experiences from the days of yore. This girl Aoife came to our show (how Gaelic can you get?). She was indeed from Ireland and had seen our band’s show in Cork last November.

The show itself, well, it was by no means the biggest, and nothing new or unpredictable happened, but it was nonetheless a pretty damn good performance. And that was that. I knew it was the last time I would be playing these songs for a good while, likely a year. I knew a nightly tradition that I had become immersed in was finally concluding. I knew that I would have to cease existing 24/7 with this group of best friends the way I’ve been doing. But I couldn’t feel sentimental or sad or dramatic. Dancing the Miike Snow Dance finale. Returning for the Constellations encore. Packing up. Even the drive home. I felt eerily normal, chill. It’s always hard to know things are really over until they are months and months behind you, and you realize how difficult it may be to bring them back in exactly that way that you had loved. Or maybe even impossible.

Playing in this band for the last year was a trip. Made me think a lot about fame, and made me think a lot about promiscuity. I hope it made me wiser and more kind and more appreciative. I hope it did not fill me with pride or arrogance, or make me bratty and difficult to please, or make me a superficial irresponsible party boy. It was a real blessing. It was true fun, true love.

I was struck by an uncommon craving during the journey back to New York from Boston, and Darwin indulged me with a detour to Dairy Queen. We also allowed ourselves a little time at a classic, cheap, non-picked-over hunt in the goodwill. And soon enough, Darwin was dropping me off in Brooklyn.

Greg is going to keep living in this city with me, but we are on opposite sides of town, and to be honest, we don’t see each other that much when we aren’t touring. Michelle lives here, too, but we see each other even less. Miles is in LA. And my best bud, Darwin, is heading down south to North Carolina to buy a trailer in Asheville where he can live for cheap and make as much noise as he wants. With any luck, we’ll have a new Darwin album on our hands for 2012. Fingers crossed, everyone.

The family we are staying with is slightly eccentric. There are multi-generations in this household. The grandma is a raw foods enthusiast. The grandpa hangs out in this room downstairs and jams blues solos on his electric guitar over instrumentals of songs like Green Onions. I can see him in there; his door is open a crack. The mom, Greg’s friend, is the daughter of some famous CBGB’s New York rock band. She talked for me for a good while last night about her path from insanity and drug addiction to equilibrium. The little daughters have left an abundance of arts and crafts all over the house, along with a toy apocalypse in the room next door. They are presently naked like pixies and frolicking about.

When Greg and Darwin picked me up at my apartment, they blurted, “did you hear!?” Hear what? “Cole’s coming on this tour! Playing guitar! For Caged Animals!” What? Really?! When did you find that out? Who told you? “Not Cole,” Darwin continued. “Stephen told me in an e-mail this morning.” (Stephen’s our manager)

Back in January and February when shit went down, it seemed appropriate to be discreet about this situation, but now that there’s been some time and space in between, I feel there’s no harm in telling you that there was some drama and tension when Cole’s time with the band ended.

For these last four East Coast dates, we have our friend Isaac Gillespie along as videographer. As the band rolled off to Philadelphia, we briefed him that he absolutely had to capture the moment when Cole and Darwin first meet during load-in. Our very own made-for-reality-TV moment.

Michelle (back on bass for the final four) taught us a game where you go into the gas station and try to find the most compelling oddity item for the least amount of cash. Greg won that contest yesterday by buying this interesting version of Teriyaki Flavored Beef Jerky in the form of chewing-tobacco-esque shreds.

The first show in Philadelphia was a little lackluster, causing Darwin to tiredly declare backstage that this final leg of tour was entitled “Going through the Motions tour.” “Oh great,” Michelle quipped, “you guys get High Spirits tour, and the Last Supper, and I get stuck with Going through the Motions.” But the kids in DC last night were a real special crowd. Excited, supportive, sincere, fun, good natured. I think it made Darwin feel a little better. I think everything’s going to be okay.

Last summer at a restaurant, Greg, who had never liked his original nickname “Griffin”, without warning declared, “from now on, you will call me The Big Prawn.” (Popular variations have been simply “Big Prawn” and also “Master Prawn”). In the year that followed, Greg continued to prove himself a master of naming things, from Darwin’s pedal case (“The Calzone”) to our most recent Brazil/California tour leg (“The Last Supper”).

Exhibit B: on occasion, our band would have some downtime between shows, anywhere from three days to a full week. During these times, Greg would often make a trip to the grocery store, returning to our temp-apartment with three of the most budget-yet-healthy food group basics: uncooked lentils, uncooked brown rice, and a big head of cabbage. Prepared with little embellishment, besides occasional seasoning from squirreled away fast food salt and pepper packets, Greg would boil his rice and boil his lentils and saute his cabbage, spending as little money as possible until the next haven of free backstage food.

Exhibit C: during February, I tried my hand at rap battling Darwin during the City Remix. Although my execution was lukewarm, at best, I wrote a few good lines. Between our band, my most popular line was “Big Prawn, get frugal with the cabbage”, the final line of my verse. This was, of course, a reference to Greg’s cooking habits and his general spendthrift approach to money.

As the months of tour progressed onward and inside jokes mutated into even less accessible inside jokes, this rap line received many treatments. Members would frequently and spontaneously sing, “Can we get more frugal?” (A parody of Kanye West’s line “Can we get much higher?”). Another favorite was “Prawn, frugal, cabbage. Cabbage, frugal, frugal…” (A parody of the YouTube video “Big Booty Bitches”). Also popular was repeatedly rapping the phrase, “Big Prawn gettin’ frugal with it, DAH.” (dah = breath punctuation sound)

More recently, Darwin began imagining in the van, “what if we were able to get ‘frugal’ to catch on? Like as a slang word… what if you started hearing people say things like, ‘hey man, did you hear the new Chris Brown joint? That shit is frugal!’ Darwin continued, “what if people found out about Big Prawn and cabbages, and they started showing up at our concerts with cabbages?” As we would drive along, Darwin would riff about all the funny ways he could hype the cabbage holders in the crowd. “What if we bought a bunch of cabbages and passed them out?” one of us suggested. We paused for a moment, and then unanimously agreed, “People would throw them at us. We couldn’t do it.”

Which is why I was surprised when Darwin and Greg showed up at the Echo with a grocery bag of green cabbage heads. “We’re going for it,” they announced.

Soon it was time to start our entrance music (accomplished by pushing the first button on Darwin’s foot pedal), which is currently the theme from Star Trek. “Start the music, but don’t leave the stage,” Darwin instructed me. “Take your position on the right, extend your hand, and hold up the cabbage. We’ll join you when it’s time.” I did as I was told. I stood there, staring into the blackness of the Echo, staring into that familiarly nebulous region of the room where you can see the tops of people’s heads, mostly darkness, perhaps an exit sign in the back. I almost broke into laughter onstage. A few days later, I’m happy to discover that this moment was captured and posted by two different YouTube clips.

Mid-set, Darwin distributed the cabbage (smartly selecting girls who looked least likely to throw the heavy heads back at us). We played a little bit more, and then Darwin broke out the same riffage that we had entertained ourselves with in the van. “All you ladies in the house,” he hyped, “if you’ve got your OWN cabbage, and you don’t need NO MAN, raise your cabbage in the air and say I’M FRUGAL!”

It was a lot of fun. I especially liked it because LA is another one of those shows where there’s this undercurrent of band awareness telling you: “this is a big one. Important music industry people and press people are here. You’ve got to nail it tonight.” At some of our shows (Glastonbury, for example), I think we’ve psyched ourselves out with that pressure, but this time in Los Angeles, we just had fun and did an over-the-top silly show using one of our favorite long-time inside jokes. The concert received two reviews, and both mentioned the cabbage, and, miraculously enough, both reviews were POSITIVE!

http://www.mxdwn.com/2011/07/08/reviews/darwin-deez-live-at-the-echo-july-7-2011/
http://www.buzzinemusic.com/reviews/music-review-darwin-deez-live-echo-07092011

After all the hard partying, I finally got a good night’s sleep on the day before the flight out of Rio. But, alas, I had to relearn that being well rested on the day of a gigantic flight is never a smart idea. I was up all night on the flight from Rio to Miami, reading my book, in perpetual worry that I was annoying the sleeping stranger next to me with the bright light above my seat.

Now we are in San Francisco, another of the world’s most splendid cities. I love the old vintage signs here, the neon signs, how half of everything looks like it was drawn by Robert Crumb. I love Taqueria Can-Cun, the heaven-sent Mexican cheap eats joint down the street from our crappy motel. I love how there’s more homeless people here than any other thriving city, and they’re all talking to themselves. I used to play this gory apocalyptic computer game when I was a child called Manhunter: San Francisco. Part of navigating the game involved using a map of the city, and so, two decades later, I still know exactly how this place is laid out. I went to the ferry building, to the pyramid-shaped trade center, to Chinatown, the Colts tower, to Ghirardelli Square, to all the places from that computer game that I’ve only known as infested by aliens and full of bloody corpses. It was a fun wander. I tried to make it all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. This is my fourth time in this city, and I’ve still never seen that thing. I’ve finally come to the conclusion that if i’m gonna see that iconic red bridge, i’m gonna need a fucking car.

The second floor of the club was lined with narrow glass booths, the likes of which I’d never seen before. They were big enough for four people, max, and contained nothing but a couch. They were basically a place to put you and your friends on display. Half the booths were occupied by couples making out. PDAs carry zero taboo in Brazil. Equal portions of gay couples and straight couples were lip locked everywhere. The real party was on the roof. DJs spun ironic mashup after quirky mashup, Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” mashed with Blink 182’s “All the Small Things”, the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” with Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” On the side of a tall building next to the club, visuals were projected. Oftentimes, it was footage of giant 30 feet X 30 feet thong adorned booties.

It got to be five in the morning. The crowd began to thin, but there was still a reasonable amount of committed partiers. Brazil goes late! “You ready to take off, bud?” Greg deduced as I wearily limped up to him, content but exhausted. I nodded. “Okay, I’ll split a cab with you. But first, five more minutes.” We broke into more dancing, and danced hard. It was Vampire Weekend’s “A-Punk” mashed up with “Blitzkrieg Bop.” I started noticing a girl making eyes at me from the sideline. I couldn’t tell if she was intrigued by my outrageous dancing, or perplexed, or if she thought I was a total clown. I returned her stare a second time, and without warning, she pounced on me. An aggressive makeout session commenced, stumbling across the dance floor, completely in public, no conversation. I spoke no Portuguese and she could only piece together a few words of English. It was very in the spirit of the night.

Now it was 6 AM and there was talk of traveling across town to the favela to experience a party in the ghetto. Five hours ago, this possibility had sounded compelling to me, but at this point, I felt we had already lucked out with a jewel of a night. How much more joy could we possibly squeeze out of it? I expressed my reservations to Greg. “C’mon, man,“ he jostled me. “When’s the next time you’re going to be in Rio? When’s the next time you’re going to have the chance to party in a favela? You almost left an hour ago. Aren’t you glad you stayed for those five more minutes?” I knew that Prawn was right. So off we zoomed as the sky began to lighten, our taxi never stopping for red lights. If you stop for red lights in Rio, you’re making yourself vulnerable to getting robbed.

At the base of Vidigal, a rotation of tough dudes swerved rumbling motorbikes to the curb of an uphill street. I’d never ridden before, and being a bit clumsy, I nervously gathered as much advice as I could from Georgi. Lean on the curves. Either hold onto the back of the seat, or if you want, it’s okay to hang onto the dude. I don’t much trust my balance, so I handed over my fare, a blue two Real bill, and awkwardly wrapped my arm around the belly of the gruff driver. Off we shot, snaking up the narrow winding hill, through the colorful cramped disarray of the favela, other motorbikes passing us, heading back down to pick up the next passengers.

It wasn’t long before we had arrived at the party. It was 7 AM, completely bright out, and felt safe enough. About 30 diehard partiers remained at this particular street corner. A DJ was set up on a table of planks, nodding his head to the baile funk beats and smiling, paying us no mind. There was a massive white wall full of speakers and bullhorns, a homemade one-of-a-kind rig, pounding the deafening raw beats, the obscene yet undecipherable Portuguese lyrics. A cluster of prostitutes squatted low to the ground, dancing casually and provocatively in their slinky outfits, with their hard lives written on their faces. One of the ladies was obviously a man. From the doors and windows of the pastel shacks, waking grandmothers peeked out upon the scene, unbothered, accustomed to the mayhem. On another table of planks, an improvised bar was set up, from which Greg ordered us a round of plastic cups filled with a tart limey nameless beverage. Local boys and men sauntered, laughing and enjoying themselves. I felt like I was in the middle of a living, breathing MIA song, which is itself an implication of my admittedly limited American hipster musical palette. It was then that we saw the guns. The laughing, sauntering teenagers had AK-47s slung over their shoulders like purses. Upon first glance, it appeared to be a toy, but we quickly realized that this was the real thing. No one seemed agitated or hostile, so we kept our distance, kept our smiles, and everything went smoothly. That is, until we noticed that Big Prawn was gone.

“Where’s Greg?” we asked each other. Alex and Miles searched up one hill, came back after a minute, tried the other direction, came back. “Last I saw him was when he bought us drinks.” “He’ll turn up. Let’s just wait a few more minutes.” Alex and Georgi exchanged concerned glances. Miles, Georgi, our friend Mari, and I slunked down the hill to see if he might possibly be waiting at the bottom, but this behavior didn’t seem like him. Our worries heightened. We analyzed Greg. He has his whimsical moments of solo wanderings and exploration, but he’s certainly not reckless or irresponsible or insensitive. We went through worst-case scenarios. Had he been coaxed into a house by some faux-friendly people and then held up for his money? Was he tied up somewhere? Unconscious? Laying in some corner with a bullet in his head?

25 minutes after Prawn’s disappearance, we got a text message from Alex announcing that Greg had been safely recovered! It was the first moment of my life where I experienced that reaction characteristic of parents, the sort where one second you’re thinking “Oh my god, where is he, I hope nothing bad has happened, this is terrifying!” and then the second you find out he’s alright, your thinking, “I’m going to strangle him! Don’t you EVER do that again, you IDIOT!”

Greg’s explanation? He had wandered off with a friendly woman who wanted to show him her storefront church. After that, he decided to make the climb to the top of the favela by himself. In the words of Big Prawn, “I thought, ‘When am I ever going to be here again?’ Nobody was bothering me. I knew that if I asked you guys, you would’ve said ‘No, it’s too dangerous.’ So I just went.” In other words, he HAD acted recklessly and irresponsible and insensitive. What can you do?

I reconvened with Darwin when it was time to go sound check for the show the next day and recounted our adventures. “What have you been up to?” I asked him. “YouTube,” Darwin shrugged, sounding content. “Any highlights?” I asked. “I found some footage of raves from 1989… 1990… the music was very cool… and the style of dress was very cool.”

And this is the difference between the way the rest of the band responds to new cities and the way Darwin responds to new cities.

While I was pressed against our van window like one of those old Garfield car ornaments, Darwin had his baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, curled up and snoozing. He’s a funny one when it comes to all this world travel. Every now and then he finds something he’s excited to explore, but more often than not, Darwin prefers the comforts of the familiar, of YouTube and Star Trek, of catching some sleep. After checking into the Princess Copacabana, it was time to find dinner. ‘WokSoba?” Darwin suggested, pointing to the Asian restaurant on the corner. The rest of us dragged him along to find something properly Brazilian, like any sane tourist would do. “I’m afraid of foreign food,” Darwin explained. “Chinese is foreign,” our manager Stephen shot back. “I’m afraid of the unknown…” mumbled Darwin, unenthusiastically following us toward the beach.

After a few hours of napping, Miles rang my hotel room at midnight. “The promoter is taking us out on the town in 5 minutes,” he reported. “You in?” I had been partying hard since we arrived in South America, and I thought it might be better to not get sick. I’d wake up early tomorrow and see some city life during the daytime rather than another night of drinks and dancing at the nightclubs (as dear as those nights are to my heart). “Nah, I think I’m going to do the sensible thing, for once. Have fun.” I hung up and lay in bed, thinking for a minute. Then I scrambled to punch Miles’s room number. “Can you guys wait 10 minutes? I’ll be right down!”

Thank God for that last-minute decision. The night that ensued was worth a dozen tour colds and 100 missed hours of sleep.

We exited our cabs at Arcos de Lapa, a plaza which was already alive with the boom of street drums and the fray of a party crowd. A stunning double tiered white aqueduct made of glorious stone arches crowned the glowing scene. Our promoter and leader for the night, Alex, was a magical guy, full of energy and goodwill and street smarts. He was a man with a musical history, as well, telling us a story of how, the week after Nevermind was released in 1991, he saw Nirvana perform in Seattle with Mudhoney and Bikini Kill as the opening acts. Alex guided our group through the back door of Circo Voador, the venue we were scheduled to play the next day. It was a spectacular place, an outdoor amphitheater lined with a patio and drink counters and tables. A Brazilian folk act was on stage that night, their instrumentation: a ukulele, an accordion, a triangle, and a drum.

Another member of our group that night in Rio was Georgi, a veteran party girl and world wanderer from Australia whose trail of adventures led her from Thailand to Los Angeles to her current couch surfing stint at Alex’s. She treated our group to a round of Cachaca lime drinks, warning us that if we had more than three, we would fall over and not get up for the rest of the night.

I learned some interesting things about Brazilian relationships through my conversations that night. “We are roommates, but that concept doesn’t really exist here,” Georgi explained about her nontraditional living situation with Alex. “In Brazil, people live with their parents until they get married, and then they move in with their spouse.”

Another girl in our group, Matti, told me, “People in Brazil don’t really have a concept of being faithful. People get married and then they cheat and think nothing of it. If you are in a relationship, you are with that person 24/7. Because during whatever little time a couple spends apart, either he is cheating on her or she is cheating on him.”

Nearby the venue, a massive modern Inca-looking Temple towered above its surroundings, seemingly waiting for a final human sacrifice before unleashing the alien apocalypse. Lit from the ground, the colors of the temple shifted from green to purple to blue. Apparently it is a Catholic church that has services on Sundays. Only in Rio.

To be continued…

Backstage in Porto Alegre, the sound technician pulled Greg and I aside. “There are a couple good whorehouses near here, if you are interested in checking one out later,” he excitedly informed us. “Girls in bikinis… big butts,” he elaborated, flashed a huge smile and making the rock ‘n roll symbol with his right hand. Based on our interaction with this guy, we wondered if Brazilians have a different attitude towards prostitution. The sound tech’s endorsement was made with a lighthearted innocence, as if he was recommending a dance club . There wasn’t any of the darkness or sleaziness that would accompany this topic in the states, or even in Europe. “Also, there are good swing houses,” he added, shimmying his hips and making another rock ‘n roll symbol. This piqued my curiosity, and after a little querying I found out that he had seen up to five couples doing it in one room, and that, yes, you are allowed to go and just watch.

Brazilians love social networking. Everyone’s noticeably plugged in to their tweets, their blogs. In Porto Alegre, the front row of the audience was lined with people permanently brandishing their digital cameras and smart phones, reaching them above the monitors, only inches away from our legs, capturing every facial expression, every last second of footage. Darwin eventually asked them to stop about halfway through the set. It was hard to tell if his request was lost in translation, or if they were simply incredibly bent on documenting our show, because the front row kept their cameras held high throughout Darwin’s request, great big smiles on their faces. After a few more requests, Darwin asked, “am I being a dick about this?” “YES!” fired back the audience. It was an uncomfortable moment but eventually we convinced the photographers to mellow out. Sorry if we offended any of you, Port Alegre! We just needed a little room to move our legs, and all the flashes were giving us seizures.

Sometimes when you are playing a show, you have the pleasure of having a beautiful girl standing right in front of you, watching you. I always love when this happens, and in Porto Alegre, I had an especially lucky night because they were two of them. “I hope they stick around after the show,” I thought as I picked away at my pink guitar. “I hope I can find them…” After our encore, Constellations, I hustled backstage, wiggled into a non-sweaty shirt, and raced back upstairs. There they were, waiting for me, Laryssa and Roberta. They were so fun and cute. I danced with them for hours, until the club slowly emptied and the lights flipped on.

We took a look around at the sizable spread of vegetables and sandwiches and beers. “I think I’d rather just save the money and make this my dinner,” I said. The rest of the band shared the sentiment, but we agreed that it would probably look rude to turn down the invitation. Who knew how excited the promoters might be to spend some quality time with us and show us around Sao Paulo?

We piled in a shuttle van and inched along through the heavy Brazilian traffic. Sao Paulo is an endless expanse of city punctuated by clusters of concrete high-rises. After we took our seats at the restaurant, the promoters caught us off guard. “We’ll be back to pick you up in one hour,” they told us before promptly departing in the van, leaving us to ourselves. It turned out, we had accommodated their desire to spend time with us, which in fact, did not exist, and they had accommodated our desire to eat at a restaurant, which in fact, did not exist. This is what happens when you go play Brazil without knowing a lick of Portuguese.

Our first Brazilian show was an odd one. The performance was being filmed for TV, and the venue was filled with an invites-only studio audience. Everyone was wearing black, looking fancier and sleeker and older than our usual crowd. We assumed it was the entertainment industry. The band made the glad discovery that a few super fans had weaseled their way in, despite the exclusivity. One particularly wonderful guy, Andrea, brought us a tote bag full of Brazilian indie rock CDs. When it came to Darwin Deez, he was exceptionally astute. He knew about our Earth Wind and Fire dance. He knew that when I had played bass, it was a Rickenbacker. Whoa!

Another amusing element of the show was that it was the gayest Darwin Deez had ever played. I mean this strictly in the sexual orientation sense of the word. As I wandered amid the after party, I was repeatedly approached by extremely friendly fellas. “Do you like girls or boys?” one of them inquired quite directly. Greg later reported back to me that four different people had similarly questioned him about what team I bat for. Perhaps the genre of heterosexual femininity that I am comfortable with simply doesn’t exist in this country. But don’t get me wrong. I was flattered.

The Austria Festival set we played was tops. What a beautiful last hurrah. We tried out a new intro using the Star Trek theme. “Take your positions in the diamond formation. Hands behind your back. Look regal,” Darwin instructed. “When you get to your instruments, keep looking regal.” It was an outdoor stage, and we played after night had fallen. No rain or mud in sight. Our audience was positioned in three tiers up a hillside in front of us. It was quite a view, looking out at them. I didn’t sleep that night.

Darwin calculated that we are in the midst of flying on 9 planes within 11 days. Insane! These flights are:

1. London to Austria
2. Austria to London
3. London to New York City
4. New York City to Rio De Janeiro
5. Rio De Janeiro to Sao Paolo
6. Sao Paolo to Porto Alegre
7. Porto Alegre to Rio de Janeiro
8. Rio de Janeiro to Miami
9. Miami to San Francisco

Today is my one day in NYC. I did some laundry. I put the rent check in my landlord’s mailbox. I picked up a repaired amp from Main Drag Music. No rest for the wicked. Tonight, we’re off to Brazil!

Post-set, we donned our wellies and embarked through the unfathomably sticky mud to the Radiohead “secret” set. The masses of people and rainy drizzle spun around us like a misty dream. Piles of countless forsaken boots lay abandoned in the sludge. When we arrived, there were so many people there that I could only glimpse the upper stage lights. Even perched upon a garbage can, it was impossible to get a view of the band. Fragments of Thom Yorke’s voice emerged and vanished beneath the pounding bass emitting from a nearby dance tent. And so, it became a metaphor of what that whole day was, for me. Something that was supposed to be momentous and important, but somehow was a bit of a disappointment. No sooner had Radiohead launched into their second or third song, “15 Step”, than it was time for our Deez crew to hit the road.

It was our last night in the noble silver Elephant Riders van, the tour vehicle that has driven us to so many beloved cities, concerts, and adventures. Everyone took turns DJing, trying to choose the perfect comedown song to complement that sentimental post-festival feeling. Greg really nailed the mood with a song I’ve never heard before, “Why Does Your Love Hurt so Much?” by Carly Simon. Miles chose another beauty with “Lady Daydream” by Twin Sister, another tour favorite of the last year. The vibe was strong that night for our group of six great friends.

It really was a classic Elephant Riders midnight drive. At Darwin’s encouragement, we pulled off in some no-name England town and scavenged some takeaway Indian food from a restaurant that was closing for the night.

At 3 AM, we arrived at the familiar Travelodge near Stanton Airport. Something had gone wrong with our reservation, and after hitting up a few more last-resort hotels, we realized there was nowhere in the area for our band to sleep. Only one option remained. We spent our last Elephant Riders night crammed in the van, half-sleeping for a few fleeting hours. On top of the aroma of six smelly, sweaty boys in dirty clothes, our van reeked due to our muddy Glastonbury boots and expiring supply of apples, soymilk, and stale cereal. It was comical, humble, intimate, uncomfortable. It was perfect.