Mike Inez and I have had a long running tradition of verbally
insulting one another.

We say some absolutely vile and horrific things to each
other, and we both enjoy it tremendously.

We also like to augment the insults with the threat of
grievous bodily injury.

This tradition has been going on for years, and it’s a lot
of fun.

But usually it’s confined to the bus and dressing room.

Well, last night in Seattle Mike was coming over to the side
of the stage to swap out his bass for the next song when he saw me crouched in
his tech’s area with my camera.

We’d been lighting each other up pretty good that afternoon,
and apparently Mike still had some ammo in the clip because he took one look at
me and uncorked a quick burst of @#$%*&^%.

If anyone happened to see it from out in the crowd, they
probably wondered why the bass player was briefly yelling at the bald guy with
the camera. Then if they were any good at lip reading they wondered how the guy
with the camera could get away with calling Mike a son of a bitch and telling
him to shut up and go play his bass.

But if they kept watching they would have seen us both crack
up laughing afterward.

This is all juvenile and stupid, but it keeps us
entertained.

And it gets so much worse.

I’m not sure why we get so much pleasure out of telling each
other to commit an anatomically impossible act on an almost daily basis, but
this is just how we choose to interact out here.

This isn’t exclusive to just Mike & I, although Jerry
& William don’t usually crawl down in the gutter with us.

But occasionally they do, and last night was Jerry’s turn to
jump in.

If the mood hits him right, he can uncork a pretty good
insult from time to time, and last night on the bus he hit me pretty good.

He also had the element of surprise on his side, because he
does it so infrequently that I was dumbfounded and I didn’t have a comeback
ready.

Finally, after realizing that I had no kind of smartass
reply whatsoever, I just said the first thing that came to my mind, which was,
“You caught me off guard. You usually take the high road.”

To which he replied, “But when I take the low road, I put it
in 4 wheel drive and roll right over you.”

Zing!

At another stage in the conversation Sean piped in and shut
me down with the simple five word sentence, “Your points are all pointless.”

Yes!

Destroying each other (mainly just me) verbally is just one
of the things that make life on the road so much fun.

So the band played their first show in almost six years to a
ravenous hometown crowd, and instead of chronicling that, I wrote about the age
old tradition of male bonding in the form of blistering hot insults and emasculating
comments.

Welcome to life on the road with Alice In Chains!