Monday, April 5, 2004

The Postal Service are going on their second tour, and I am asked to open on 8 of the dates. I kind of wish I was opening on all of the dates, but I am so happy to see Ben and Jimmy and Jenny when I arrive at the first show that I tell myself I will just have the best time possible on these eight shows and fit a whole month's worth of bro-down into them.

The first show is at a small college and after we play, we are walking around a crowded freshman dorm, where the promoters are putting us up for the night in separate rooms, rooms whose occupants have found other places to sleep for the night. Steve Olson from Stars as Eyes is also traveling with us on this tour for some reason and he calls the first room we see because it has a big, exexcutive-looking mahogony desk with an internet connection. Jenny gets a really narrow and messy room, and I get the only room where the bed is perpendicular to the doorway, so that you see the side of the bed when you walk into the room. The bed is against the other wall of the room, and sideways, and under a window. I am not tired so I go back to Jenny's room. She's already asleep. I sit on her bed and start talking to her anyway, but even though she wakes up and talks to me for a while politely, it's obvious she just wants to go to sleep so eventually I wander off elsewhere.

Lots of friendly little college kids are around. Somehow, though, things become kind of dramatic, and Ben, Jenny, myself, and 3 random college kids are outside of the dorm. We know somebody or a bunch of somebodies is inside trying to get us-- suddenly, we're the only people here and we're scared. There's a wooden fence along the side of the building and a little yard in the back, and we go there, afraid of the darkness in the building. One of the kids picks up a flamethrower and sprays it around the yard just in case anything we can't see is there, and part of the wooden fence next to the building catches on fire. We're strangely relieved, though, that nothing else is there, and we relax a bit. This backyard area has access to a garage and a back road. Ben and I sit at a picnic table while the college kids and Jenny go for help. There's a boombox on the table and we use it to play a tape. The tape is the sound that is going on inside of the building. We can hear a group of "agent"-type people searching the building for us. For Ben, specifically. We're safe, though, outside at this picnic table-- at least for the moment. I'm pretty nervous about the situation, but then I remember that Ben's last name is Cooper, and suddenly he takes on a much more Dick Tracy-type of air. In fact, everything feels older and spy-ier after this realization. I think about how Cooper is not only the name of the detective from Twin Peaks, but also of that guy who jumped out of a plane with millions of dollars and was never caught or found. Then I remember that David Lynch named Dale Cooper after the plane guy so that makes sense. Soon, a much-more 1930s-out Jenny Lewis drives up in a jeep and tells us we need to get in. Ben, who is now at least 40% physically larger and heavier than I remember him being, jumps in the back. I grab the tape out of the boombox so they won't know that we were here, and get in, too. We take off. For some reason the steering wheel is on the right side of the car.

We drive down a country road, surrounded by big hills. There are cop cars everywhere, and tons of traffic going the other way. Cop cars seem to be coming towards us then turning left over and over again. I don't think they know we're in this jeep. I tell Ben to take off his big cowboy hat, it might be a giveaway if a cop looks into our car. We take a turn up a steep road towards an old-looking school building, and finally some cop cars seem to be pursuing us directly. We pass a sign that says excavations are in progress and pull the car up a very steep incline where we find ourselves at a dead end. The cops think they have us until I tell Jenny to gun it and the car flies off the precipice and into the school. We drive through the hallways, where no one seems to be freaked out at all, with the cop cars eventually chasing behind us. I take out a very antiquated pistol and try to shoot the cops' tires, but the gun is really hard to fire and doesn't seem to hit anything I aim at.