Last night we played a show in Denton, TX, a college town just outside the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex. It was about a four hour drive from Austin that we did starting at about four-thirty. We got to the club right about at nine at the end of our assigned load-in window becuase of difficulties finding the club -- the Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studio and bar -- which was bizzarely located in the middle of the industrial zone on the edge of town.

When we finally got there, the show ended up being about average for tour: a dark divey-looking place that turns out to have some history on the circuit that good bands play (posters for Mates of State, Don Caballero, others), starting late and playing to only a handful of people -- this time aggravated by the fact that this was a college-town bar in the middle of a summer rainstorm. There were, as always, a couple of things that set this show apart: while waiting for the soundguy, we ordered a pizza, not expecting it to arrive until after our set as the club was pretty removed from what passes for Denton civilization, only to have it show up seeminly instantaneously and be quite good: J & J's knows their stuff. The two other bands, The Glass Factory and The Tah Dahs, each had members that qualified as (very) minor indie rock celebrities: Glass Factory bass player had been in Mineral and The Tah Dahs singer/guitarist has played with the Polyphonic Spree. Both bands were pretty good, a strong 7 or 8 each on the scale of the bands we've ever played with.

After the show, we loaded our stuff into the van and headed back towards Austin. It was about 1am and it's a long drive, but we'd been getting to sleep pretty late on each of the previous nights so we figured we might as well do it and have the full day to spend with Chris. When we finally found our way onto the highway going the right direction, it started raining. Or, more accurately, it started raining again, since the condition of the road showed that it'd been raining pretty heavily on and off for a while. The rain built and built, coming down in heavy sheets reducing visibility and roaring as it banged on the van's roof. Then it would suddenly die off for patches between torrents. Each section of the storm was worse than the last, finally forcing me to slow the van to about fifty since I could only see for feet in front of me. A new and exciting danger developed then in the form of speeding towers of light and noise -- big rigs that couldn't slow down safely in the wet and couldm't see small cars (like our enormous, SUV-limo sized van) in the squall. We pulled off the highway, fording a side road ankle deep in water to get to a Mobil travel center and gas station. We took a Polaroid under the gushing overhang overflow and then headed inside, standing momentarily inside the sliding doors shaking our head in disbelief and an attempt to dry off, as would, we'd soon see, every other incoming customer. After using the bathroom (and especially the hand dryer, for cycle upon cycle) and wandering around the inensely-white-lit store staring at candy and leafing through Maxim, FHM, and Smooth (the particularly excellent latino version), we sloshed back out to the van to decide what to do.

After a discussion with a kindly highway patrol officer with a deep and wide scar on his left cheek about road conditions and a vote of two-to-one, we decided to drive over and park in the McDonalds parking lot to sleep until sunrise. We called Chris to leave a voice mail telling him not to worry about our absence. Just after getting off the phone, as we were settling into our cramped quarters in the van and preparing to grouse about the flood lights in the parking lot, there was a particularly forceful blast of lightning and all of the ourdoor lights went out within our field of sight. We slept fitfully for about three hours in the half-gloom.

After a relatively uneventful, if wet, morning drive (featuring a particularly pleasant listen to Mingus' Ah Um) we arrived back, alive, at Chris's apartment and fell on the floor asleep. Now, food and some solid loungin' hours later, we're getting ready to go see I Robot. We probably won't tell you how it is.