It was one of those mornings where I inexplicably woke up earlier than anyone else, and would remain the only one for hours. I checked email and some other bullshit, mostly. I'm sure you know how the infinite loop of cycling through websites. I did read an interesting article about Nebraska's Safe Haven law neglecting to include an age limit. Someone dropped off nine kids, ages ranging from 1 to 17. I wonder what goes through someone's mind when they do shit like that. They were smart enough to figure out a loophole like that, but too dumb to avoid having nine kids they couldn't take care of. Let that be a lesson, kids: CONTRACEPTION IS A GOOD THING. Wrap it up. Know what I'm sayin'?

Dan was up pretty early as well, getting some work done. We bullshit for a while over some Cuban coffee (it's espresso with sugar added in before). Sweet, sweet cafecito. Eventually, the rest of the Aloud brood rose from the dead and Dan offered to give us a tour of Cleveland.

Our first stop was Market Square, in Ohio City. Fresh vegetables, meat, fish, and homemade candy as far as the eye can see. It was late in the day for them (around noon), so they were trying to sell off the last of their goods. Haymarket back in Boston has nothing on this. We took a short walk to a small shop called Lelolai, where they have some excellent guava and cream cheese pastries (one of the very few things I miss from Miami that is difficult to find in Boston). Afterward, we drove through downtown near the Key Tower. There's been a lot of construction going on here lately. Money's been pumped into Cleveland to revitalize the area, and it seems to be working. The area we were in reminded me of Boston theater district, only bigger and a lot cleaner. You can tell they're really trying to get this area jumping again (or perhaps for the first time?).

Next was driving through Coventry. This area is where there's a lot of old money, and it has a reputation of being artsy— even the street signs forewent the traditional green or "Service Plaza Blue", and going with a tie-die effect instead. We ate at a restaurant called Tommy's. The food there was amazingly good; I ordered the Steph. We had a few laughs over the repeated misspelling of hommous on the menu (spelled "homos"), which then led to us laughing about a sandwich called the "Uncle Gay", and another called the "Chick-free sandwich". The epitome of maturity, we are.

There's a store called "Big Fun" that we headed over to briefly, and the sad part is that if given the opportunity, I could've spent all day in there. Old school comic books everywhere, GI Joes including their aircraft carrier, a shitload of Nintendo games and Nintendos, a shitload of Atari games and Ataris, Karate Kid toys, Pee Wee's Playhouse toys.. I probably owned half this shit when I was a kid (and now the kids say "Wow, you're old!"). We talked to the dude running the store (I want to say his name is Justin, but I can't be sure... I've been so terrible with names on this trip). He told us that each of the things in the store were collected by the employees and the owners, and they just bring them in to sell. If I had more time to spend there, I'd probably go broke.

It was beginning to get late, since we had to drive to Pittsburgh later on and we made our way back to Dan's place. We had to wait for some laundry to come out of the dryer. To pass the time, we watched most of Da Ali G Movie. I kept hearing it wasn't funny for a few years, but it actually was. Borat even makes a cameo. Cathy got back just as we were getting ready to leave, and in a final act of kindness gave us some homemade chocolate & peanut butter brownies and some strawberries. I don't know where we'd be without the IT kindness of the people we met on tour (yes I do: at another Super 8, broke, and sharing Cheerios for dinner).

It was a relatively short ride to Pittsburgh— about 2½ hours. We were a little concerned with how the evening would turn out. We'd be competing with Monday Night Football again, except this time the Pittsburgh Steelers were playing. We pulled up to Howler's Coyote Cafe practicing our best "Tom Brady? Fuck that pretty boy!" Fortunately, we were greeted warmly by Susan, the owner (who also has high scores on all the Megatouch games at the bar). We worked it out with the other band, Central Plains, that we'd try to share halftime, when no one would really be paying attention to the TV. While we were waiting around and exchanging some tasteless jokes with CP's drummer, Ross made good friends with three ladies: Rene, Bree, and another they called "Bubbles" because she could make her eyes bulge out of her head. They're also huge Steelers fans, and were totally decked out.

There's a strange law of inverse proportions in music, whereby the nights you expect to be the worst turn out to be really great; it's sort of like Murphy's Law's evil twin. Pittsburgh was no exception. We didn't fuck up once (at least not noticably), and everyone in the room was excited to see us play (including Rene, Bubbles, and Bree, whom we drew away from the Steelers game for 30 minutes).

We hung out with everyone at the bar to watch the end of the game, which went into overtime and Pittsburgh won by a field goal. The room erupted in such a way you'd think the Steelers won the Super Bowl. After a short celebration, which included someone playing We Are The Champions on the jukebox, we said our goodbyes, promising we'd be back to Pittsburgh. We had a ridiculously fun night.

The Aloud mobile drove ten miles to some Days Inn in the middle of nowhere. Half-watched some of American Gangster before passing out.

Sucks we've only got three more shows before returning to earth.

Aloud will return in: Philadelphia.

Cheers,
Henry

Labels: tourdiary