Dear Mike

So, last week in unexpected news that hit way harder than I expeced (not sure really what I "expected" I guess I didn't expect to hear our old pal, our French guardian angel, our saving grace died last Sunday. Once again sending me into a deep, rough spiral that makes me just flat-out sad. Is that what getting old is really? Just getting progressibely sadder until you are like my mom, the only one left alive with no one to talk to about the things you used to love, the experiences that made you? I pulled the ol' tour diary off the shelf again and aside from being pissed that I wrote absolutely NOTHING down about our time with the Vicious Fishes, it hit me this time how many times I referred to thinking we were surely gonna die due to some sort of risky behavior or because we were trusting the help of people we did not know. Honestly, Marc really was the guy who epitomized for me the best part of being involved in punk rock - cause he, like so many of us, let a buch of

This is a bit off topic for us Mike, but still I think you would appreciate it (what's weird is that I think Kjell might even get what I'm thinking - how weird is that?). So this global superstar that I have recently become a bit of an acolyte of - (and who I genuinely find fascinating on several anthropological levels) played his 5th night at whatever the major arena in Austin is (a town I could visit, I think and have people to stay with even!) and the night before he had made this very typical (for him) statement about "don't let anyone tell you what you can and can't do with your body" - which is of course a great sentiment, but kind of ineffectual when said in a state run by a redneck Trump-wannabe who recently shoved a bunch of anti-abortion laws through their statehouse. Anyway, I feared he was gonna be just another fucking joker who sits on the fence saying vaguely political things but never actually taking a stand with his music or personae, and then