I'm currently trying to avoid the Stupid Bowl. God I hate sports.

Anyway, Richie played a gig in Palm Desert yesterday. I think I have seen the future of America and it's there. Imagine a town almost completely comprised of people over 65. Several Indigenous American tribes have land near there so the town is ringed around with "Indian Casinos." We were inside one of them...Richie, a married couple who are friends of ours, and I were perhaps the youngest people inside there who weren't working there in some capacity. At every one of the slot machines, you saw a "seasoned citizen" shoving in bills and pulling the lever or pushing the buttons. In a way, it was even weirder than Vegas. In Vegas, you have this frantic vibe there and you get this massive sensory overload effect. At Casino Agua Caliente you get the massive sensory overload effect when you walk into the room, that's inescapable with a room full of noisy and brightly flashing slot machines. Hell, you get that same effect walking into a video arcade. But the vibe is about as frantic as the one at a Wayne Newton concert.

It seemed like every single person in Palm Desert who wasn't over 65 was at the show. Saccharine Trust headlined, with Yawning Man, Ornament and Lower Lip. The venue was a bar and it was packed. ST has a big following because it was one of the original SST Records bands. This really doesn't make much difference with local gigs because so many LA area bands came out of SST and the label signed just about everyone and their brother between 1985-1988, but just get out of town for a while and you will see that there is instant interest in a band if their lineage goes back to SST.

Unfortunately we ended up with car trouble...it's either alignment problems or something more sinister. I'm hoping it's fixable. If not, all the money I was going to put into paying down our credit cards will instead go into another vehicle. Dammit!