I'm not a big believer in the afterlife, but if there is one, I will kiss the good lord's purple tentacles if it's anything like Austin, Texas: a paradise of pork and whiskey, great music, and the friendliest people on Earth. After months of juggling four jobs at once and trying to live and party in NYC on less than a hundo a week (harder than it sounds), I couldn't wait to get to South By Southwest and I felt like Austin was waving me in with welcome arms. By some fluke in the weather it even made our plane land three hours early -- who has luck like that? Oh cloven-footed Gods of Austin: how many cute and fuzzy woodland critters must I sacrifice to show my thanks?

My buddy Hersey and I flew down to stay with one of my favorite people on the planet, Jessi Cornett (buy her jewelry), the wonderfully talented Tara McPherson (buy her new book from Darkhorse Comics), and the lovely April Mirvis. Two months ago we had a dinner party in my dark little Brooklyn kitchen and I served these ladies roast pigeons that I had purchased in Chinatown. Amazingly, they are still my friends.

Our first night in Austin, Hersey and I got to see H.R. from Bad Brains, and The Circle Jerks - who I've been a fan of since I saw "Repo Man" in high school. The frontman for The Circle Jerks is 53 years old, and still jumps around the stage like he was 18. It was one of the better shows I've seen in years. The Circle Jerks recorded a song with Debbie Gibson (yeah, that Debbie Gibson) in the 90s, and I was a little bummed she didn't leap on stage and belt one out with them. I think my heart would have popped out of my chest like in Alien.

At 5 A.M. that night, I *somehow* managed to get a head wound at Jessi's house, which has since turned into a pretty awesome scar. It was an insanely lame and hilarious accident which I will not recap here out of shame, but we quickly decided to come up with a story to cover the real truth about what happened. The new story is that I was hit in the head with a flaming log at The Circle Jerks show. But you should see the other guy. That's my story and I'm stickin to it, and lucky for me I have friends who have my back. I was chatting with some tattooed guy at an afterparty one night and he was quick to ask where I got my scar. Tara just smiled and looked and me and just said "Circle Jerks". And we all clinked beers. Love her.

South By Southwest is something everyone who is interested in music should experience. I'm not a big fan of the Lollapalooza breed of festival where you need binoculars to see your favorite band. SXSW is held in tiny bars and clubs around Austin, which is a far more intimate way to see your favorite bands. In just 24 hours I was able to see my three favorite songwriters, Andy Falkous (of the Welsh punk band McLusky), Lou Barlow (of Sebadoh and Dinosaur, Jr.) and Daniel Johnston (Netflix this film immediately) all from less than 10 feet away.

I'm realizing that this post has quickly devolved into the lazy rantings of a music geek, so I am going to cut it short. But if you would like to see some pics from one of my best holidays in recent memory, they're up on my Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27780059@N07/sets/72157616107276446

I spent a good chunk of my life poisoning my brain to the point where I can barely remember what I was doing before I started typing this (kids, it was fun and totally worth it). But lately, I've found myself awake at 4:30 in the morning, staring at the water stain on my ceiling and trying to figure out what nefarious act I might have done to piss off the Sandman so much. Is there a murdered prostitute in my past? Did I run over a homeless person on my way to the Piggly Wiggly? Did I accidentally pull the lever for Bush in '04?

This insomnia started exactly a year ago and haunted me up until January. The first few months of this year was like a vacation -- I'd forgotten what it was like to have a full night's sleep filled with pleasant dreams. Ones where I wasn't being eaten by a python with the head of my old boss, or being torn apart by wild packs of ex-girlfriends. I was finally having sweet dreams again - dreams of flying, falling in love with strangers, playing with my dear departed dog again, rainbows, beaches. You get the idea: sugarplum fairies and shit. To my dismay, tho, for the past two weeks this goddamned insomnia has returned.

But this time I have a plan.

Last weekend I took the bus down to Virginia to visit my family, and spent Saturday night at my sister's place. I always have fun when I visit, because down there I get to be Uncle Drew to my niece and nephew. I get to have lightsaber battles, watch cartoons, wrestle on the floor, eat potato chips and cupcakes on the couch and burp and fart and make them giggle. Being Uncle Drew is kind of like being Weekend Dad - it's like having all of the fun of being around the kids with none of the mess.

Whenever I come down for a visit, my niece graciously lets me sleep in her bedroom while she shares a bunk-bed with my nephew. Let me tell you people: this bed is magic. My niece is going to grow up to be the most relaxed woman on the planet, because it is virtually impossible to have a bad night's sleep on this thing.

The bed is this big white marshmallow of an island in the middle of a room with pink walls. As my niece is crazy about mermaids, her parents put a blue mesh netting around the bed dangling from the ceiling, with cutouts of little starfish and shells and what-not. And there's a little blue light that dangles in there that projects shadows of these undersea creatures all over the walls. After 30 seconds of lying on those fluffy pillows, staring at the shadows on the walls, surrounded by plastic unicorns and barbie dolls, you slip into a perfect nine-hour coma filled with the best dreams of your life.

Waking up in this bed is even better. This is how great a father my brother-in-law Brian is: I'm convinced he ventured into the forest and single-handedly hunted and killed fifty Care Bears with his bare hands to make stuffing for this mattress. He must have, because when I wake up from it, let me tell you: I feel like a fucking princess. As soon as I wipe the crust from my eyes, the windows swing open, a rainbow shoots into the room, and tiny animated birds fly in and sing zippedy-doo-da into my ear. It is the absolute greatest feeling in the world.

So, that's my plan folks. I'm going to try to recreate my niece's room in my crappy little railroad apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I'm going to paint the walls pink, find the fluffiest mattress in creation, surround myself with My Little Ponies and Pound Puppies, and have fancy blue netting surrounding me as I slumber. So, it's not the manliest plan in the world. So, it might freak people out and I'll never get laid in my own apartment again, but there wasn't much danger of that happening, anyway.

I'm ready to do whatever it takes. Get back here, Sandman.

Damn you!

1. Get out of debt

2. Finish writing that book by May 22

3. Lose 10-15 pounds

4. Impregnate famous person

5. Master the art of french cooking

6. Master the art of french tickling

7. Spend three weeks in Australia eating steaks and drinking beer

8. Spend one week in Tangiers smoking hash on big fluffy cushions

9. Stop player-hating (But ooooh players make me so fuckin mad sometimes)

10. Hug a llama

11. Get that writing career started

12. Eat a llama

13. Clean my bathroom

14. Pick up dry cleaning

15. Master the ukulele

16. Give up the ukulele

17. Go to the gym 4 times a week

18. Have dinner parties every single Sunday

19. Pick up the ukulele again

20. Find true happiness

There's been a lot of chatter in the news lately about the "fall of Iceland". I think that nearly anyone who has visited there has been saddened by the news. My best wishes to our friends overseas.

* * * *

It was December of 1999, and the Millennium New Year was looming before us like a big blade at the end of a conveyor. It was clear to many of us: the world was going to come to an end in some grisly fashion at the stroke of midnight on the 31st (time zone to be determined). Every conversation was rife with speculation. Perhaps men brilliant enough to split the atom lacked the foresight to tack two extra digits to the counters on their missile launch systems, dooming us all to nuclear annihilation. Others had it in their head that Jesus was going to make another appearance and beam his favorite people up to heaven where they could play with their dead pets, while the rest of us were left to fend off fiery demons on earth (rude). To quote the late Pope John Paul the Second: "There's just no two buts about it: some crazy shit is going to go down on this muthafuckah." So, a few days after Christmas, I hopped a plane to Reykjavik with a handful of my buddies to ride out the Apocalypse at the edge of the world.

One of my best friends at the time was an Icelandic house music DJ and composer named Holmar -- one of the funniest people I've ever met. Holmar loved to speak about his homeland, and when he did he would paint a picture of it that belonged in a storybook for small children on psychedelics. According to Holmar, Iceland is a place where magic mushrooms grow wild on highway mediums -- kids could just wander down the street and pop them in their mouths on their way to school, tripping their way through class. A place where every now and then polar bears would drift over on icebergs from Greenland and run amuck across the countryside, gobbling up people's dogs and cats. Where 90% of the population lives in one city. That Iceland had a 100% literacy rate, the highest number of artists and writers per capita, and as their ancestors were vikings who kidnapped most of them from Britain and Scandinavia: it was home to the most beautiful women on the face of the Earth.

Could such a place really exist?

I remember being over at Holmar's apartment and seeing an envelope with his sister's name on it. Holmar's last name is Filipsson, but his sister's last name was written Filipssdottir. He explained that in Iceland, a person's last name was their father's first name with "son" or "dottir" tacked to the end. I had to ask: "So, if everyone in Iceland has a different last name, how do you know you're not fucking your cousin?" "Drew," he said, "there are only 300,000 people in Iceland. We are all fucking our cousins."

Getting off the plane in Reykjavik, I would never have guessed it. The people were unbelievably gorgeous. Let me tell you: no matter how good looking you think you are: chances are you're the ugliest person in Iceland. I had known this to be true for some time. Every single one of Holmar's Icelandic friends that I'd met in New York were good-looking, incredibly artistic, and partied like rock stars. They were all extremely nice, and as soon as you'd meet them they'd embrace you like an old friend.

On this trip, however, we found most of Iceland to be in a very bad mood. We weren't the only foreigners in town that week, it seemed. The streets of Reykjavik were overrun with people from all over the globe, flooding the bars and restaurants, and their welcome was wearing extremely thin. No one seemed happy to see us, and many of the folks we encountered were downright belligerent.

Most of the animosity from the locals seemed to be focussed on my buddy Al like a laser. Al is one of the sweetest dudes on the planet, but he has a unique sense of style that people notice right off the bat. Al is sort of the Accidental Hipster. He looks like he's from the future: rail-thin with a shaved head and spectacles, and while we were there he sported a long puffy winter coat that looked downright womanly. We weren't out of the cab two minutes when a carload of kids rolled by screaming "Faggot!" at him. In English, no less.

This was not an infrequent occurrence on our trip. I befriended some rough-looking local fisherman at a bar that afternoon. They were raucous but welcoming, and we hoisted a ton of pints together, sharing dirty jokes and learning local songs. At one point, however, a dude put his arm around my neck and said "I like you, Drew. You're a good guy. But is this guy your friend?" He pointed at Al, two seats away. "Yeah," I said. "Well, it's a good thing, because if he wasn't we would kick the shit out of him." I put my drink down and we scrambled out of there.

During the day on New Year's Eve, we fled Reykjavik and took a tour bus to the countryside. Our moods were downright rotten because of our previous encounters, and no one was excited about returning for the celebration. The negativity quickly melted away once we left the city limits. Iceland was breathtaking. We visited inactive volcanos. Frozen waterfalls. Geysers in the middle of nowhere. We passed fields of cows that looked alien, with long hair like Snuffleupagus. It was a four hour trip that I wish could have lasted for days.

We returned to the city that evening not knowing where we should go. Holmar had invited me to a giant party at Bjork's house, but I was only allowed to bring two friends with me and I wasn't about to play Sofie's choice with all of my travel buddies, so we wandered the streets looking for something to do.

We were outside a bar having a smoke, when a random Icelandic kid chatted us up. He could see that were were having a bad time in his country and was determined to show us that our encounters with the local bigots were just flukes. "You will come and spend the evening with my family," he said. Most of us were pretty skeptical. We're New Yorkers, and it's not very often that a total stranger invites a group of ten foreigners back to hang with their family. But what did we have to lose at that point? We hopped into some cabs and drove up to the hills overlooking the city.

His family's house was nothing less than a palace on stilts, with the most perfect view of the city we could have hoped for. We were a bunch of freakish Americans, with piercings and weird haircuts and everyone at his parent's house were decked out in suits. They were just unbelievably hospitable. A bottle of champagne was put in each of our hands and we were introduced around the party like celebrities. This was the welcome we so sorely needed.

As the countdown to the New Year approached, we all gathered on to the large balcony overlooking Reykjavik. Our new friend patted me on the back. "Now you see how Iceland celebrates," he said.

At the stroke of midnight, from every single back yard in the city for as far as the eye could see, rockets shot into the air, choking the cleanest air on earth. I have never seen so many fireworks go off at once. In one blinding minute the entire sky over iceland exploded into a million plumes of light. The partygoers hooked their legs into the balcony railings, standing tall and showering us with champagne, just ROARING in celebration. These people looked mighty. These people were vikings.

The world, it didn't end then either.

I had a real Teen Wolf moment about a month ago. Do you remember that scene where Michael J. Fox woke up one morning and looked into the mirror to discover that he had fur and fangs -- that he was not the sweet, ordinary guy he thought he was but in fact really just a big, stupid dick with bad hair?

Same thing happened to me.

I was at a party recently and had about four too many drinks and wound up blurting out something pretty hateful -- just this bubble of pure vitriol -- about another partygoer who had wronged me in the past but was making an effort to be friendly again, only to discover that person was three feet from me and had heard everything. I can’t really describe how bad I felt. I was just paralyzed with shame. It was like all of the negative energy in the universe just came shooting into me at once. Like I’d just lopped the noggin off the last Highlander. In that instant I became the Biggest Asshole In The Universe (action figures to come, patent pending).

Have I always been this way? I had always fancied myself as the nice-guy, but have I always had this great penchant for evil? In the interest of self-flagellation and other SAT words that only a true bonafide jerk would use, I figured I’d hop in the Wayback Machine and see where all of this started. I knew right away my first stop had to be Brian: the fat kid I almost killed with a lawn dart.

In 1986, on my small, crescent-shaped street of townhouses in Reston, Virginia, I pretty much ruled the playground. I was an awkward twelve year-old. This skinny, bony kid with a head two sizes too large for his frame, and didn’t really fit in with kids my age, but for some strange reason, all of the younger kids really looked up to me. Especially Brian.

Brian was the chubby kid that no one could stand, with a finger that seldom left his proboscis. He was two years younger than me, a spoiled kid who picked on anyone smaller than himself (which was everyone). But there was something sad about Brian that I had always sensed. His mother was very young, and his dad was nowhere to be seen, and it was very clear that he was troubled. No one in our crew of neighborhood hellraisers could stand him, but I felt the need to be nice to the kid, so I was always sure to include him in our games.

One day, however, we were playing superheroes, and as the oldest, I was divvying out roles. We needed heroes and villains, and I’d be damned if anyone else was going to be Wolverine. I pointed my finger at each kid, anointing each of them with a power and a name, “You be Batman … you be The Hulk .. you’re Scarlet Witch…” And I don’t know what it was that made me say it -- I knew it was incredibly cruel before the words even left my lips -- but I raised my finger and pointed at Brian and said “You can be The Blob.”

Something happened to Brian’s face over the seconds that followed. It turned from a pale white to a chimney red, and began to start rearranging itself right in front of me. Water began to squirt from eyes, and a slow rumble built up inside him until his entire mug just exploded into this wailing vision of pure anguish and snot. With a few words, I had destroyed the kid.

Brian ran into his house, and all of the neighborhood kids just stood there staring at me, mouths agape. I had crossed a line and they all knew it. Brian’s mother burst through the front door and came storming up to me, furious, shouting “What the HELL is wrong with you, Drew!?”

I had no idea.

Skip forward a few weeks into summer, and things had settled. I was in the middle of a field with my friends playing lawn darts. The sun had begun to set, and my mother had already called me in for dinner, but damnit: I was Voltron that day, and I had Ro-beasts to slay.

One of the smaller kids decided to challenge me to see how high we could throw our lawn darts. I let him go first. His was a clumsy throw that went more outward than upward and I knew would be no trouble to beat. So, I made a show out of it. “Stand back,” I said. Dart in hand, I began twirling my arm until it became a magnificent whirring pinwheel and I launched that fucker right into orbit. We all stood with our heads tilted back watching the glorious ascent, until we heard a tiny voice from across the field shout:

“Hey guys!” It was Brian, running towards us, a blur of elbows and jiggletits.

As the dart finished its climb and began to arc downwards, I knew exactly what was going to happen. Brian was directly in the path of the falling dart. Time slowed down. I thrust my hands forward to try to get him to change his course. All of the kids screamed “Noooooooooo!” as we watched that spike of plastic and metal careen down towards Brian’s unsuspecting head.

I knew that the dart would kill him. Either that, or it would bury itself into his skull, leaving him to live out his days a drooling, pooping mess with a spike of metal embedded in his squash -- perhaps his only chance at happiness being if some trailer walrus married him to get better television reception.

CLONK!

I’m not a person who’s been blessed with a lot of lucky turns in his life, but this was one of them. You see, these particular lawn darts were built with a small plastic cup at the end of the spike, to blunt the tip against such catastrophes. It was one of the only times in my life I was truly thankful for child safety laws.

The dart bounced off his noggin and Brian fell to the ground clutching his head, and screaming.

I heard his mom’s voice once more. “What the HELL is wrong with you, Drew!?”

I just have no idea.

Brian, if you’re out there, I’m truly sorry. If there’s any chance there is a God and he gives us all another turn around this wheel, I promise you, brother:

Next time, you get to be Batman.