so it's saturday night & i'm getting ready for the south bend noise fest, scheduled for the following day. i get an email from bobby vomit mentioning that amy from the people bomb is supposed to be spinning at some house party that night (sat), & that the bt crew is also invited to play some records. so i get my shit together & head up to muncie, though by the time unszene, vomit, & i show up, amy has long since stopped alientaing indie rockers with her records. we hang around in the front yard drinking for awhile until bobby vomit decides that he wants to play. so he played for awhile, then i played for a bit until it's 3am, most the party has left, & the people bomb want to pack up their turntables. we return to la casa de vomit & eventually go to bed.

the noisefest was scheduled to start at 5 & we estimated it as being a 3-hour drive, so we left pretty early. the path to south bend from muncie is convoluted: it involves several state roads, us highways (virtually no interstate), & driving through a bunch of small towns.

getting to south bend proves easy. we approach the town with plenty time to spare, yet somehow overlook our exit. the next thing i know, we have arrived at the michigan border. we turn around and head back toward indiana, but by now it's after 5pm and we know that the show has probably started.

we get back to south bend and this time, manage to take the wrong exit. we don't have a proper map, just directions vommy printed off from randmcnally.com. the directions say we want Business US-31 (Michigan St), but don't state a direction, so the first time i see a sign for biznatch 31, i take it... but there is no michigan st to be found. this sets us back 10-15 minutes before we stop at a gas station & bobby v goes inside and checks a map (but doesn't buy one). he determines that we are at the complete wrong side of town, but suggests (among other things) that we should be able to just take bidness 31 south to the south side & find our exit.

it turns out that the two ends of business 31 don't seem to meet each other, at least not that we can find. we manage to get lost, but eventually see main st. because there's a main st on our micro-map, we turn. main st ends and branches off in a different direction. then that main st abruptly ends and we are almost totally lost. by this point mr v is rather upset: by this point we have clearly missed emil beaulieu, who was supposed to play at 5pm sharp.

eventually at about 6 we see us20 & jump on that, which takes us back to where we had first gotten lost 80 minutes earlier. this time we find the michigan st exit (whose signs do not say business us-31, although it clearly is bus us-31 once we get on it). we are home free; the directions from here are clear.

at about 6:20 we roll up on the venue, after more than 4 1/2 hours in the car.



above pic is bobby vomit standing by the door to the venue. the sign says it is temporarily closed by city of south bend, & although it's hard to make out, underneath that it says that the noise festival has been cancelled.

we just kind of laugh at the situation (bobby v is at least relieved that he didn't actually miss emil beaulieau), take a couple pics to prove that we were there, & get back in the car to look for somewhere to eat. we end up going to burger king, then driving back 3 hours to muncie. back at the casa de vomit, we watch belly on vhs and listen to the sound experiment on the radio, then i drive back to indy.

i had asked for today off work, with the option of going in to work in the afternoon if i got back early enough. clearly i was home in time, but when i got up today at 11:30 i wasn't quite motivated enough to get ready in time. maybe i'll go run some errands in a couple hours so my day off isn't wasted.  ¶ 12:10 PM