Today was our big mind fuck day. All week I’ve been feeling the setup. Eighth and clearly worst position in the Immunity Challenge. No time in the interview schedule for BurnDown. Strange inuendo from crew. They’ve done it to Blaxmyth before. They want to see us sweat a little. Create the drama. Now that being said, we may have lost our focus and bearing a little in Austin so maybe a gut check wasn’t such a bad thing. The competition is definitely heating up and if we don’t get back up to speed we may get left behind. So here’s the scene…the eight remaining bands gather in the shadow of the Capitol Building after a long night of partying to hear the news. This is by far the weakest location so far. The camera angles are all out of whack so they need to reset every other take. We’re getting used to the protracted shooting schedule but a number of the fuses in the band were short. Not necesarily the best way to enter what is probably the most stressful part of this contest. So, of course, to compound our general agition, they send everyone to the buses except for BurnDown and The Mood. It’s been a long shoot already and they’re really starting to drag this one out. They detail a litany of criticisms heaped on us by the judges. Song selection, band size, the dreaded samness label, they even lay into me, esentially implying that I had stepped outside my role in the band by putting down my guitar to sing the first song. Now there’s only so far you can allow outside forces to influence how you make your art but I was definitely feeling what they said. Since we had been forced to play two songs instead of the four we had planned, not everyone was able to rock the mic. Because of previous comments praising my contribution to the sound of the band, we decided to play two songs that I sang on. I felt personally responsible for getting us through this round and I may have oversold my performance. Whatever. If you can’t take chances when the pressure is on, then you’re scared. I’m not going out like that but there are a couple lessons here. You do you. Play within yourself. And don’t let judges comments define the direction of your band. So anyway, when they get done trying to shake our confidence, which has probably read like cockiness, they deliver the verdict we had expected the whole time. The Mood was going home. Nothing against the lads. They are very good for their age but BurnDown is simply on a different level. There are seven bands left now. I can honestly say six, including ourselves, have a legitimate chance to win this cometition. Shit is just STARTING to get real. This where the fun begins. We push off for Las Vagas in the morning.

You can mark today as the day production lost control of their talent. Disguised as a challenge to play eight different clubs on and around Sixth Street, the actual challenge turned out to be more of eating contest a la “Fear Factor.” Perhaps they needed to provoke the clowns to get their circus going. The producers released the eight bands simultaneously in front of eight different clubs ostensibly to play a song and move along to next, eventually playing eight songs at each of the venues. Not necesarily a real-life scenario but a clever idea. Unfortunately, the bands needed to ingest whatever was presented to them; pizza, cheeseburgers, nachos, vitamin waters and eventually alcohol. Not that we got far enough to taste the alcohol, or the cheeseburgers, or the pizza. So many things I was grateful not to have done. That doesn’t include the alcohol, of course. Yours truly vomited for one of their beautiful high definition cameras. I feel like I really killed that shot. I’m really getting the hang of this thing. So apparently after hours of bands cycling and vomiting through all the top clubs in Austin’s Sixth Street area, two bands remained standing. Barely. Idle Red and the madmen from Fall From Grace earned a dubious honor as winners of the Endurance Challenge. We didn’t make it past our second club. We were glad to have been eliminated so quickly on this one. Three distinct times I vomited in the span of about a half an hour. An assault to my dignity and my voice . What I won’t do for my brothers. Anyway, there was fairly mutinous wind pervailing as bands returned, defeated to the buses. This is the tax taken in the world of reality show notoriety. Free exposure never comes free and no one is trying to make boring TV. The post challenge shoot was a testy one. For the first time this trip I drank to get drunk. Suddenly I was unsure of the nature of my current “Reality”. What exactly have we gotten ourselves into here? Having pondered this questions over a number of drinks I figured no one ever really controls his or her own environment and the illusion of control is a good one to lose. Especially if you are the PRODUCER of a reality show. yameen? But who do they think they are? Our very own Illuminati class. They got us caged like animals, bugged like criminals and can never manage to get our money or our food to us in a timely fashion. Mechanisms of control are most effective when unseen. “It just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter…”