Toren Atkinson’s Absolute Blog

The Thickets have a show in Bellevue Washington at the Penny Arcade Expo on the 26th of August. Or maybe it’s the 27th. Now I’ve confused myself. Now I had never heard of the Penny Arcade Expo (or PAX) before, but a lot of my nerd friends are pretty excited that we’ll be playing it.

We’re trying to organize t-shirts and stickers to have at the show, and we’ll also be bringing CDs down. Of course these are strictly promotional as we won’t be selling anything in the US (for obvious reasons). Of course whether or not the border guards believe that remains to be seen. We could have our products confiscated, or we could just be denied access to the border.

Even before the Bush administration, crossing the border was always a gamble. One time we played in Atlanta for DragonCon and Jordan got turned back at the border, so we had to have a fan drum for us.

The second problem is that of our bass player. When I was first asked if we’d play the show, I asked everyone if they wanted to do it. They all agreed. They all said they were available and would do it. That is, except for Jordan, our drummer. Nevermind though, our guitarist Mario is also our backup drummer, so he’ll sit in for Jordan. Recently, however, Bob backed out of the deal, leaving us high and dry on the bassist front. But wait - Mario has another band, and that band has a bass player named Aaron, who, I’ve been told, has played with us once before. So hopefully he’ll know our songs and, more importantly, agree to come down and play with us. I’ll be meeting him again this coming Saturday, and we can suss out what all is going to happen.

If we don’t have a bass player or one of our five band members is not allowed to cross the border, that would be sad. Even though PAX doesn’t have the budget to pay us to play.

The good news is, we’re working on new songs. Lots of them. I’m sure none of them will be ready for PAX, but Allen at Divine wants us to cut a new album, and so do we. And we’ve also decided that we’ll be spending the money we’re getting from selling our touring van on new costumes and merchandise. So now we’re trying to figure out what new costumes would be cool. Any suggestions?

I played tennis with Stephane today. I think it’s been about a year since I’ve picked up that racket. Since they tore down the tennis court right by my place I’ve been bitter and forlorn, but recently on my bike rides I’ve seen that the court at Heather & 18th hasn’t been as busy as I thought it would be, so I scheduled a game with Stephane. I’m pretty rusty, but I started to get some of the old moves (”supersmash!”) back towards the end. We played two regular matches and one short match - Stephane won, and it was very hot.

Today is my first day of a week long no-junk-food diet. I knew I was eating too much junk food, but I decided to go cold turkey for a week after I bought three large bags of Lays from Sunshine Market because they were on sale, and ate all three bags within the span of 20 hours. Actually the diet started last evening right after I finished the third bag. So far it’s been going fine, except that Stephane & Sheri wanted to go out for crepes after the match. I figured I’d get a healthy crepe. I asked for a cream cheese crepe because that was the cheapest of the savouries, but they didn’t have cream cheese, so I got a honey and coconut one. Not bad, I thought, but then when it came, it had a scoop of ice cream with it. I tried to give away the whole scoop but Stephane would only take half.

Then I went grocery shopping with Marlo at Safeway (the grapes are $1 cheaper at ’shines) and with the exception of some white bread (they didn’t have brown in that price bracket) I did pretty well.

And that was a really boring entry. Oh but then I ran over a puppy on my bike and it’s brains splattered into my mouth and it made me crash into Patrick Stewart who was wearing nothing but a housecoat.