Your Scars are Beautiful to God...

... is the title of a self-help book I saw in a truckstop. This nation is doomed. Springfield was outstanding. Jaxx is a well-appointed club with a great stage and PA system, and for the first time on the tour we sounded as massive as our headlining cohorts. The audience was the best and largest yet, and there were even some in attendance mouthing words to some of the songs (which is always hard to get used to, though obviously not undesired). It was inspiring and hopefully it is a herald of things to come. Our first shows were to audiences to whom we were relatively unknown, but it seems we have a larger foothold in the northern territories. It is nothing compared to Goatwhore's small empire, but it affords us the necessary fuel to our fire.

A moment of levity: We did not have our set lists present, and accordingly I lost my place and thought we were on the final song "Battle's Clarion". Paula from Candlelight USA was in attendance so I made a typically dramatic dedication of the song to her. Sanguine interjected from his mic,"Yes, but we still have one song before that," to which I growled, "Ohhhh..." Laughter rippled through the audience, we grinned, and then shifted gears with a a ripping version of "Plagabraha".

We are enjoying spending time with 1349, as their outlook tends to resonate with ours. Seidemann and I were commiserating on how it seems that good Black Metal is invariably made by smart people but then somehow seems to appeal to idiots. This isn't a blanket statement by any means, but every night there are people that I cannot imagine actually understanding or caring about Black Metal in the way it is intended. I suppose this is the nature of making one's art available on a large scale, but in the end it matters little. We do this for ourselves, regardless of who or how many take heed.

En route to Poughkeepsie we just passed through Lodi, New Jersey, which is the birthplace of the Misfits. It was nothing to look at, just a dingy little nothing-burg outside of Hackensack but it also revealed why Danzig looked inside himself to create a new reality to subvert the rawness of the "green hell" into which he was born. Your scars are beautiful to God.