We got up in the mornings and walked to the coffeeshop for breakfast. Everything was greesy. It felt good to have a valid reason to get up. It was the loudest neighborhood. People screaming, skidding bike tires, the church that stays open all day and night on sundays. I walked around the neighborhood and saw the school. This is where you send your children, it says a lot about you. We saw the door to the bar open with music pouring out when we went to breakfast, it was so dark in there and you let the light spill inside in the mornings through that one door. It seemed like an even worse place to be than alone in my room. I guess I have that to look down to, so that's good.

Lexie and I had a good night downtown. We started off riding the elevator up through the rafters of the building accidentally; we didn't know it would go up that high above the building willy wonka style. The elevator started in a mall, went through a parking garage, and then ended up in the lobby of an expensive hotel high above downtown. We rode that elevator up and down the New Orleans skyline for a long time. We each got an Irish beer at an Irish bar and watched a band start off playing Irish influenced folk, segwaying not so beautifully into "Listen to the Music" and "American Pie". The year I went to summer camp, my cabin counselour was a spastic frizzy redheaded girl that announced to us on the first day that by the time we left we would know "all 8 and a half minutes of American Pie" by heart. It was her torch song. She had some groupies among the girls in our cabin, and they gathered around her bunk at night where she'd tell them stories about the love of her life and how they were being kept separate by their parents and fate. It was a tale full of woe and I listened to it from my bunk, knowing full well in 5th grade that it was a crock of shit. I knew "American Pie" was a crock of shit then too. But she's probably married now and I'm still on my bunk making judgment calls. Who's to say who's doing better?

Long story short, we finished our album in New Orleans, and while it's not a magnum opus, I do think it justifies a little bit of the intensity I feel towards doing this music thing.