Stuff I Care Enough About To Write Down

Sometimes bands my husband is friends with pass through our city and need a place to rest their greasy heads. Understanding the grueling life of the touring musician, we offer our couch and floor when we can. Most of the time our guests are great, sometimes they ain’t and I often think that a list of house rules will keep me from wanting to take a shit in their backpacks while they sleep.

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Welcome to our home! We hope you enjoy your respite from the motorized fungus farm you have been traversing this great country in. Here are some pointers to ensure that your stay with us is as successful as your record after next will be.

1. Stop & Take Stock

What do you notice? Do your surroundings say an incredibly affable woman spent days of toil to adorn the walls with a gutsy combination of ironic and vintage art? Select throw pillows that are elegant yet comfy? Who shampoos the rugs biannually? Do you see three awesome, well adjusted cats with stellar personalities yet do not smell them? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you probably have quickly surmised that this ain’t no Ho-Jo and therefore cleanliness is next to godliness. Which brings us to our second point…

2. Take a Fucking Shower

Lord knows your matted taint hair is a rat’s nest of gas station toilet paper and pasty ball guff. I don’t care if you’re sleeping in your own rotten sleeping bag on a pillow you have had since you were 12 and have not washed in as many years. I don’t care that you like the way your hair lays after a year of not washing it. I don’t care that being on tour and looking like a time traveling 70s drifter and smelling like vomit, garlic and sriracha in your mind equates to “living the life.” The only life I am aware of that requires such low expectations is that of a goddamn transient. Wash your body. All of it. Use soap. Lots of it.

3. Don’t Leave Food Out & Clean Up

Saving that roast beef sandwich for later by leaving it on the dining table will only result in one of our three cats ripping through that meat like Katie Morgan at a blowjob contest. It’s modern times, brosefs, put that sammie in the icebox. If you decide not to eat like a barbarian and use a dish, cup or utensil, count your blessings that your hands are not broken and wash up anything you have used. Any take out bags should promptly make their way into the trash can. Yes, we recycle. No you can’t leave a soda can “draining” in the sink. If there is no one around to find out where to put the recycling, throw it in the garbage and be comforted by the fact that one dolphin getting an aluminum can stuck in its blowhole is nothing compared to the number of dolphins the Japanese round up and murder in cold blood every year.

4. Don’t Dribble

Hold your lil’ snake firmly when you go pee-pee. If you over shoot onto the toilet seat or the floor, grab a swag of toilet paper and get to wiping. It may not be until you are halfway to Philly before I notice the havoc you have wreaked, but when I do, hell hath no furry like a woman who has to wipe up dried pee from the bathroom floor. Getting urine anywhere but inside the toilet, means you are incapable of being a functioning adult let alone a traveling musician and should pack your things and catch the next Greyhound back to your parent’s house.

5. Turn Off the Television

Watching television is a great way to wind down after a long day of travel and a face-melting show in front of twenty people. Dozing off to a marathon of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives at 3AM will make that $300 guarantee that magically morphed into free drink tickets and a blank stare from the promoter seem like a distant memory. Before y’alls hunker down and start questioning your chosen career paths for the up-teenth time, be sure as a band you appoint a Remote Captain. This person has the esteemed responsibility to make sure the television volume is at an appropriate level and that it gets turned off right before ni-nights. If I wake up at 7 AM to get ready for work and the TV is still on, someone is getting kicked in the head. And by someone, I mean everyone.

6. Don’t Worry About It, Dude

If you hear this phrase, it probably came out of Matt’s mouth, and therefore should be ignored. Anything you take out, move, use, disrupt, turn on, shift, soil, messy, touch, breathe or shed on, should be “worried” about. Everything needs to be put back in proper order or I will ruin you. No longer will you be Mr. Buddy Bass Guy or Brooding Kinda Cute Socially Awkward Lead Singer. Your entire identity will be systematically erased and replaced with that of a murderous pedophile. On the lam for the rest of your days, you will ping pong between Bakersfiled and Lodi, eating and sleeping in dumpsters behind Chevrons and Taco Bells. The worms reproducing at breakneck speeds in your bowels will be your only friends. You will die one foggy February morning when you are dumped and subsequently crushed in a garbage truck compactor as you slumber in your dumpster cave. Your mangled body interred for eternity amongst bloated baby diapers and old tires in the county landfill.

All I am trying to say is real men/women handle their shit. If any of the above offended you, you should probably go suck your mom’s tit-tays. Baby.

Xoxo,