tequila sunrises + tour dates + tonz 'o' gunz

on the road with Cypress Hill

square one.

This was the typhoon of my middle twenties. I’d been making life decisions for myself since I was 14 so by 27 I was a young wife who believed (as I believed for years) that I was placed on Earth to help everyone become better versions of themselves. To be the cook. The refiner of other people’s messy essays, or messy lives. This is a cool trait, and it placed me on a path to being an excellent editor. But no matter how it looked, I was floundering. Suffocating, and desperate for a life I could barely articulate: secure, fun, peaceful, loud, interesting, and free.

When I decided, finally, to take my writing seriously, I experienced results. For a kid who grew up in world where most anything anticipated with glee was purposefully destroyed, a universe in which the logic of practice leading to success was sneered upon, these results put the dope in dopamine. I was ready to write, and — even as a ball of anxiety — I was ready to go.

I knew Oakland (born), Los Angeles (teenage years), as well as Berkeley (school) and San Francisco (fancy retail, and newsweekly work). I’d been to the San Diego Zoo. Played in the American River and Lake Berryessa. Sucked on tacos chicharron in Tijuana and listened to music students on the plazas of Guadalajara. I moved to New York City from the Bay Area to go further. So when Rolling Stone asked me in October 1993 if I was ready to hop a plane to Houston where it was four thousand degrees, deal with soap-bar-sized water bugs and murderous mosquitos, and then climb on a bus with Cypress Hill for the 377 highway miles to New Orleans, I was like, I been ready.