[S] Accelerate.

Hello, friends! Rob here.

Day whatever. We are somewhere. We did something last night, and we're doing stuff today, tonight, and tomorrow. It is tour. It is a continuum. Days become nights become days. Life is twilight, experience is brackish water. Time is a slope, not a staircase. I look back on last month's blogathon and I honestly don't understand how I churned out twenty entries in twenty days. I've written like three drafts of this one, and each has been more unreadable than the last. This is by far the worst possible version of whatever I am trying to say right now. Sorry about that.

Working backwards, though, the last thing we did as a band was the Okeechobee Music Festival. What a time that was. My fiancée and I camped for two nights, which was a first for both of us (at least as far as music festivals go), and we didn't even break off our engagement halfway through the process of setting up our tent!  In a word, it was windy. In a few words, it was extremely windy. In enough words to adequately describe the experience, it was extremely windy, but also quite enjoyable.

Musically, the whole festival felt like a highlight reel, but my favorite set had to be Usher and The Roots. The Roots are already one of the best bands. Why are they teaming up with Usher? That's not fair, is it? Anyway, Usher. Hoo boy. Watching him perform, I know what he is doing. I know how hard it is to do what he does. To sing the notes, to dance the dance moves, to engage the audience, that stuff is hard. I know how hard it is.

But Usher makes it look effortless.

Have you ever absent-mindedly drummed your fingers on a desk, or jiggled one of your legs, or spun a pen around your fingertips? That's how easy he makes it look. It was truly inspiring. "I forgive him for Justin Bieber” is the joke Bruce Vilanch would make here, but honestly I think "Love Yourself” is a pretty great song.

Also, we had a Mardi Gras! We had it off, in fact! I can't remember the last time The Revivalists didn't have some sort of big-time Mardi Gras stompdown jamboree. We did some side project shows, but mostly the week was just a bunch of kickin' it. And now we're back on tour. We are in our third city right now, and that city is called Minneapolis. It is cold here.

Also, geese are freaking woke. In the world of animal genders, there appear to be four basic and informal categories: First you have animals like iguanas, where you just call them "iguanas” no matter what sex;  then there are animals like chickens, which have a common name ("chickens”) and specific names for both sexes ("roosters” and "hens”); there are animals like horses, which have numerous convoluted terms for their sexes based on their age and whether or not they've been castrated (really); and then there are animals like lions, where "lion” is both the generic term for the species and the term for the male of the species. Homo sapiens at the very least brushes up against this latter category- consider terms like "mankind,” "no man's land,” etc.

And then there are geese.

Geese are having none of that. All of the common terms for members of the anserini tribe* of the anatidae family (science talk for "geese”) are based off of the female nomenclature: "goose,” "geese,” "gosling.” Do you even know what a male goose is called? Exactly. Geese are more linguistically progressive than people. Rock on, sisters.

*: A footnote, in case I'm not the only one who thought to myself, "wait- Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species- my eighth-grade science teacher never mentioned 'Tribes!'” Apparently "Tribe” is a subdivision of taxonomic classification somewhere between Family and Genus. Supposedly it would be redundant to distinguish most animal species by Tribe, which is why it's not a household name in the world of taxonomy, but you and I both know it's more likely that nobody could figure out how to squeeze a "T” into some ribald mnemonic device and so it was omitted from generations of biology textbooks.

Anyway, welcome back to the blog. In case you had forgotten, it's like 30% band stuff, 70% whatever inconsequential non-sequitur horseshit happens to be on my mind today. Enjoy!