Part Deuce

77 East Lorain Street
Oberlin, Ohio

Snakes, snake handlers, and prophecies... the end of tour, the beginning of wide open spaces... how to convince a company to give you a cell phone even though your credit rating doesn't actually exist...

If I were a scripture reading man, I might take the sight of a sketchy fellow casually ambling down a street in my town with a giant goddamn snake around his neck as some kind of obvious prophecy. But I'm not, so I'm blissfully free of a predisposition towards those sorts of sudden shocks that might send a devout person into a froth. My much more learned housemate, Adam, quoted some Bible section at me - strictly reference only, mind you - involving something about a sect of tweaked out snake handlers coagulating around a tossed off line in an obscure Biblical backwater.

At any rate, even if I were to view the asp as some kind of sign, I wouldn't know how, precisely, to interpret it. Tomorrow, I'm off for California - by way of Chicago, Denver, Vegas, and who knows how many other American curiosities along the way - and I'm not sure what the order of seraphim might be trying to convey through their convoluted language: should I go? Should I stay? Should I sell off my holdings and head for Halifax? I'll be damned if I can discern it. Actually, that's a lie. If I can discern it, I probably won't be damned.

Phish tour is over and done with and good fucking riddance. That's not to say that there was anything particularly bad or undesirable about the four or so weeks I spent trekking about the better part of America east of the Mississippi. In fact, they were four of the coolest weeks of my life. I went to the south for the first time, I ended up in twisted locales like the lawn gnome shop near a mythic Indian reservation in between Buffalo and Pittsburgh, I encountered entire clans of distinctively strange people whose surreal essences seemed to be drawn out by their surroundings, and I saw 18 extremely good Phish shows.

There is no way to sum up the musical aspect of it all without resorting to what I've been comparing the trip to all along. Talking to Downbeat Magazine about the midnight to eight a.m. set at Big Cypress, Trey Anastasio said "we played so long that all of the boundaries seemed to just melt away. It just didn't matter any more. This is the ultimate goal. The concept of good note/bad note went away. We were just playing, living, and breathing. We were breathing up there. It starts to feel so good when you just don't care." That's very much like what the experience of seeing 18 Phish shows in a row was like. Forced to write about them, certain things emerged, but listening to the shows on tape in retrospect it's slowly becoming obvious that petty things like judgment could've easily swung in other directions.

The feeling of flying is a powerfully addictive one. I've heard it said, and seen it happen, that it's an fixation that burns itself out with time. This is probably for the best. But why stop when I'm getting good at it? There's a certain whirlwind attraction to shucking off the highway, dropping deftly into some damn place and letting the stored up energy from the car ride tumble you through whatever obstacle course or hedge maze presents itself, spinning like a devil back into the car and getting back on the road with the same momentum.

The better to do it without warning, though. Drop like a motherfucking special forces agent in the night. There's definitely a mass-produced feeling to the kind of travel that comes with going on tour with Phish. People know you're coming and are waiting for you in lawn chairs, sipping lemonade. Showing up unannounced is way more fun. This is exactly what they don't want or usually even expect. A herd of Phishheads is a clump that will show up clearly as a heady blip on some sort of radar. My goal now is to slip in underneath that. And, besides, Phish tour is just plain constricting. You've gotta be places on time, man.

Representatives of institutions with a fair amount of financial holdings start to get worried when you try to tell them in a soothing voice that it's perfectly okay to extend you a line of credit even though you've never held a real credit card before. Computers start to freeze and they start asking for things like social security cards or dental records. Operators begin to further panic when you try to reassure them that your credit is perfectly fine even if you can't make it to one of their service outlets because you're lighting out for California the next day.

Jesse Jarnow can be reached at jesse.jarnow@oberlin.edu or by his homepage. Previous tour journals are located here.