Sunday, July 17, 2005

March 12, 2005 - Vancouver, WA

After the house show in Boise, we found a kid that was willing to let us all crash at his house for the night. It was actually his parents’ house and they were out of town for the week. We stopped by the grocery store to get pasta and made a hell of a feast for everyone, and talked about old fight stories for a few hours. We always seem to do that: spend hours at a time talking about shit that happened five years ago with kids we’ve never met. The stories are funny to us, but to the kids hearing them, we must sound completely insane. Oh well. I guess that’s how Salt Lake gets the reputation it has.

The next morning, we were on the road to Vancouver, Washington. It was about a seven hour drive, so we weren’t sweating it too much. We hopped in the van and were on our way. The drive was uneventful, and I mostly retreated into the back and rocked out to my sweet tunes.

Vancouver is only about 15 miles away from Portland, so we decided to stop there to see our friends in the Dead Unknown and find something to eat. Brook is probably the coolest best looking guy I know. We got to Justin’s house and watched a terrible movie on the Sci-Fi channel for a few minutes before we set off to eat. He told us about a place called the Vita CafĂ© that was a bit like home style cooking. He said they had biscuits and gravy and we were sold. The biscuits and gravy was true and we all spend way too much money, but we were full as we set off for the venue.

Vancouver is just over a bridge and the place we played at was the basement of a church. We seem to get these places a lot. For some reason, Cherem and church are like peas in a pod. Not sure how it got that way, but it probably won’t change. Well, it might, but only if we start playing huge stadiums and I don’t see that happening. So we’ll take church shows. Brutal Fight rolled up just after we did in a sweet/deadly looking school bus and started unloading their Hot Topic worthy merch display inside. They had a credit card machine, which is a good idea, but easy to make fun of. We decided that we now accepted checks, but they had to wait until we got home and the check cleared before we could give them anything. No one really went for that idea when we pitched it to them.

Aftermath and Cherem were up first and second so we hit the stage to set up. Aftermath didn’t get a great response, but there were a few kids singing along, and it was fun. That’s all that matters I guess. Cherem got a little better response, I think mostly due to the Dead Unknown kids hyping us and we had met a few of the kids when we played Olympia the last time we were on tour. We decided to give the Life of Agony song a shot up in Vancouver, and to our expectations, maybe three people knew what it was. I think that made 6 kids in three cities that knew what we were playing.

After we were done, I hung out by the merch table for the rest of the show. The highlight of the night came when two girls started fighting in front of me. I was pretty excited, but I guess that kind of thing doesn’t happen up there too often, so it stressed everyone out. I enjoyed it though. After the fight, one of the girls came up to talk to me about touring and said she’d be down to help out if we ever needed it. Austin dubbed her my Vancouver girlfriend for the rest of tour.

We had a long drive down to Sacramento, so we piled in the van grabbed some cold soda and hit the road.

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