Our friend Dusty is on a week-long tour with Brooklyn-via-Mpls’  most-loved/hated band  The Hold Steady. It makes for quite the interesting read whether you dig The Hold Steady or not…

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

warning: this will most likely be entirely about me and not the band. okay then:

Dusty vs. Australia. Day 1.

6:45: Alarm cock goes off. Hotel le Jolie, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I had no idea until last night that there was a hotel this close to Greenpoint. Shampoo and condition the beard. Somehow I always forget to do this. It feels like a cashmere sweater on my face right now. Crush the early morning continental breakfast in the lobby with a few Iraq War vets. Frosted Flakes, a spotty green apple, several glasses of orange juice. Walk back to the practice space in Greenpoint. It is twenty degrees and invigorating. I’m afraid I’ll be missing these winter shock temperatures. The key to my productivity in NYC has been getting out in the air as early as possible and being cut through to the bone by the cold. After that there’s no sleepiness, no sluggishness, just having to move and get stuff done to stay comfortable.

I slack the strings on a few guitars (the six we’re flying with) so the tension doesn’t snap them during baggage handling and pack all of the cables. Leave the space by 8:30 to drop off laundry at my Greenpoint laundry stop. A small load of shirts and underwear that I have ample pocket change for. Take the G to the L back to Williamsburg to meet Gertrude for breakfast. Try to assuage her job interview fears while reading the NYT business section and a Far Side colection. Oslo Coffee Company on South 2nd and Bedford may be the last great coffee I have for two weeks. I enjoy it. I say goodbye, wish her luck, and take my last twelve dollars down the street to the Salvation army on N 7th and Bedford. I have no Australia-appropriate clothes packed. I’m hunting for pants to turn into shorts. There are no dressing rooms but the four foot tall Polish woman working shows me how to measure my waist using my neck and elbow. If the waist of the pants, while held flat, fit around your neck then they’ll fit around your waist. I trust her. I buy two suitable pairs of pants to convert to shorts for nine dollars. Blue wool pinstripes and brown corduroy. I plan on cultivating a weird style in Oz. I’ve been meaning to get a haircut and Jocelyn and cut off my beard for over a week. She finally texted me back and had time last night. Too late. I take my new out-of-control muppet-mopped hair disaster and convertible pants back to Greenpoint. I move my laundry from the washer to the dryer and do more packing at the practice space. I’m somehow ahead of schedule. I check my bank account balance and my payroll has gone through! This solves my last problem. I now have shorts for Australia but my big black Timberland winter boots are my only footwear. Not summer appropriate. I walk down Manhattan Avenue, into the Polish athletic shoe store and by some brown Adidas trainers. They’ll match my brown corduroys. Shopping done I’m back to the practice space for the third time. It is 11:30 in the morning. We have 13 pieces of gear to check. And we’re flying every other day in Australia. Tad cuts off the brown cords into shorts. I leave my winter coat in the space and put on Tad’s new sunglasses that leave me blind but cool looking. We wait outside for Alex, our totally awesome Venezuelan driver to show up. Cram too many people and too much gear into the van and we’re off to the airport. Check-in is somehow painless. Now is the time to sign up for frequent flyer miles on United.

Fly from JFK to LAX. I start reading the first Brooklyn Noir collection. It is one of the only two books I packed. I read three hundred pages of it. The flight crew is Australian but not going to Australia. Shortly before landing our stewardess gives each of us a large botle of water for the next flight and passes around a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies. Warm chocolate chip cookies. On an airplane. For free and without asking. I now never want to fly anything but United with this stewardess.

Land at LAX. Two hour layover. My time perception is already totally turned around. I was just going to pretend that clocks didn’t exist and let my sundial figure it out. But the six hour NYC to LA already has me discombobulated. There’s a great bartender at the terminal. Take half a xanax and two double-Makers gingers before boarding. Instead of knocking me out I just try to chat with Franz in the seat ahead of me or stare out the window like a zombie. I’m ready to sleeeeeeeeep. It doesn’t come. What the hell is Australia going to be like? My iPod and iPhone are both charged. So in the best of all possible worlds I have batteries to listen to tunes for half of the flight.

surf.
turf.
surf.
turf.
This is gonna rule.

Day 2. The day starts on the flight to Sydney from LA. The pills are doing their best but there will be no sleep. The flight is packed and nowhere are there enough seats to stretch out my six foot frame. The first inflight movie stars Ice Cube. Without the sound on I just gather that he’s spending a lot of time watching a girl play football(?). I listen to Richard Hell and close my eyes and try to fall asleep by pretending to be asleep. I do this as long as I can, like holding my breath underwater. I “wake up” and everyone has been served drinks and their in-flight pasta meal. It worked! I slept! I tap Franz’s chair ahead of me and ask how long I’ve been out. I have been “asleep” for twenty-five minutes. The stewardess put a cold turkey and cheese sandwich on my lap while I was down. I eat it. The next fourteen hours are basically the same thing. Total Hell. I was warned to dread the flight and brushed it off with my usual positivity. It defeated me. I faked sleep as much as I could but acutely felt every single hour of it. Somewhere over California the sun set on us while we were in the air. Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean a few hours later it rose again and we crossed the international dateline. I’m typing this at the beginning of “day” three. It is 6:00AM on Friday. At home it is 3PM on Thursday. We had a day disappear on us in addition to the one spent in the air. If you’re going to lose a day it might as well be a Wednesday, I guess. I just realized that the day that disappeared is January 28. My dad’s birthday. Sorry I didn’t call you, Dad, but your birthday didn’t actually happen to me.

We land in Sydney. The airline has lost Andy’s microphone box. It is still in LA. They will ship it to our hotel in Brisbane. We discover this because all of our equipment comes off the baggage carousel instead of being forwarded on to our final destination. I check all of the guitars for damage, they’re fine. Leesa, our Australian handler for the tour, finds us. She deals with bands coming to Australia for a living. She is the best thing in the world that can possibly happen to us right now. We have forty-five minutes to take a bus to another terminal, recheck all of our baggage and check in, pass security, and catch our next flight. Leesa makes it happen. Make it to the gate with enough time to (barely) order an Angry Whopper from Happy Jacks (né Burger King). Andy and Bobby and I all agree that it is better than in America. I sit between two very large men on this flight. I don’t have the room or air to read a book. I watch the close captioned local news on the tv and hope it is a short flight. I can’t even reach my bag between my feet to get my headphones out. It is a very long hour. We land at noon. Leesa has rental vans waiting. One of Tad’s carry-on bags that was gate-checked has been lost. The airline has no idea where it is and failed to tag it. We get to the hotel at 1PM. We have been traveling for 32 hours. I haven’t slept. Upon check-in I immediately buy two bottles of Budweiser from the bar, take them upstairs, drink them in the shower (the shower doesn’t get hot), put on clean clothes, and stare out the window. It takes me a minute for it to register where I am. I know it is Australia because I’ve been looking forward to the word for months, but I can’t remember the city. Finally: Brisbane.

There’s an Australian tourism contest going on right now where you can win a chance to live in a massive house on the beach and blog about it once a week for $100,000 a year. All of their tourism materials feature kangaroos and the Crocodile Hunter. They are doing it wrong. I’ve been here for less than a day and here is what they need to tell you, what they should have been telling me to get me here: It feels exactly like America. Accents aside you don’t know you’re in a foreign country. The pace and climate and flora all suggest that you’re in San Diego or, when a breeze comes up, San Francisco. The exchange rate is very favorable to Americans. It is AWESOME here. Finn and Andy and I go for a long walk. A loooong walk. Over a Very Big Bridge (The Story Bridge), into and through downtown to an outdoor mall. Find a patio bar to sit down. Even the chicken wings here are as good as a great American bar. Craig buys a round of beers. Andy buys a round of beers. I buy a round of beers. Galen, on his own separate walkabout, finds us and joins us. We have another round of beers. We start walking back. We stop at a liquor store and buy more beer. It is 85 degrees, sunny, and one big gray cloud in the sky sprinkles a little bit every fifteen minutes just to cool us off. It is perfect here. Shorts, sleeveless, no socks, feeling like a million bucks. High on sleep dep and jet lag and Victoria Bitter beer. We have another few beers on the patio at the hotel. I’m ready for a nap. It is 6PM and I haven’t slept in two days. I crash.Attn Aussies: Buy tickets & say hello to Dusty for us…