welcome to toronto, walkers!
I have a laundry tip for you. It's good enough to seem obvious in retrospect, but I don't think it's as basic as something like, "heh, here's a tip for you noobs out there: separate your whites from your colors." In fact, despite having tinted an item or two in my day, I think the threat level from bleeding colors has been largely exaggerated, and science more or less figured out how to make your reds and your whites play nice decades ago instead of curing cancer or finding out a way to purge carbon dioxide from our atmosphere. Anyway, here is my laundry tip:
Keep your dirty socks separate from the rest of your dirty clothes. When it comes wash time, only wash your socks with things they can't get all caught up in, like jeans or towels. When you have to wash socks in a mixed load, put them in a mesh bag so they don't wind up all jumbled up with your undies. Don't worry about mixing color, because, as previously established, that's just a media scare. Just put your socks in places where they can't up and disappear on you. Because socks yearn to taste freedom. They are the Andy Dufresnes of the laundry world, and t-shirts and boxer shorts are their Raquel Welch posters. Given the slightest lapse in vigilance, your socks will absolutely spend nineteen years spooning out an escape tunnel and run off to Mexico with Morgan Freeman.
Hello, friends! Rob here.
One of my favorite things about traveling abroad (other than occasionally stumbling into scenes of historic political unrest) is that they have potato chip flavors we can't even begin to imagine here in the states. Some of the more worldly individuals have doubtless heard of Canada's ketchup-flavored potato chips, but what about Australia's bold-yet satisfying Honey Soy Chicken? Or the delightfully understated Chilean varieties, like Oregano and Cilantro-Lime? What about England's famous Eggs 'n Beans, which- I swear- I thought I was throwing in as a joke, but turns out is actually a thing? There's a whole world of flavor out there.
EDIT: In my fruitless search for photos or links to product pages of the above exotic flavors, I stumbled upon this exhaustive list of worldwide Lay's variants, and apparently during our all-too-brief European tour last year I somehow slept on a Belgian specialty called "Cucumber and Goats." Time to book a flight back to Brussels.
EDIT^2: Never mind, apparently it's a mistranslation of "goats' cheese." BORING.
Also, it's tour. I'm sorry, that sentence should be "it's tour!", but what the heck, I'm gonna be straight with you- the first couple days of a long tour can be a little bittersweet. Like, don't get me wrong-this isn't my way of announcing that the years on the open road have finally run me down, and it's time to find somewhere warm and slow where I might grant these weary old bones some well-deserved rest. It is profoundly rewarding to get out and play for you. I've always thought one of the best things about this job (and, by way of the transitive property, one of the most unfair things about a lot of other jobs) is that as musicians we get to see the results of our work unfolding up close and in real time. We get to see smiles. We get to see moments. A few nights ago, there was what I assume was a mother and her young daughter directly in front of me wearing matching dresses. At one point during the show they were both on their phones at the same time, taking virtually the exact same video. It was adorable. It struck me: this is probably going to be a memory that sticks with that kid for a long time. It's incredible to get to see that kind of thing unfold. I literally live for this shit.
But at the same time, I'm not going to see my wife for almost a month. That's hard, especially coming off of the un-busiest four months this band has seen since, well, maybe ever. We had a tornado of a Mardi Gras- two weeks of visitors and breakfast beers and 19,000-step days and jello shots from strangers and raw vocal cords and sensory overload- and then I had one day to catch my breath, clean the house, and pack a suitcase so large that a few days later two random women on an elevator would remark, unprompted, "you could keep a body in there." It's a violent little turnaround. It's been about ten days away from home, and I'm only just getting over the hump.
Here's a thing I've been thinking about since we got back from Toronto last week: By no means is Celsius objectively bad, but I do feel the need to point out that its major selling point- that it marks the freezing point of water at zero degrees and the boiling point of water at one hundred- is actually pretty weak. I mean, sure, freezing is a useful benchmark when deciding how many layers to put on before leaving the house in winter. That's why anyone who is accustomed to measuring temperature in degrees Fahrenheit has committed Fahrenheit's freezing point to memory with the help of this well-known mnemonic device: "32 degrees." That's it. That's the whole mnemonic. It's a two-digit number. It's not hard to remember.
I'm sure it's a bit easier to manipulate Celsius in a laboratory setting, but what is the practical, everyday appeal of knowing that sixty degrees is sixty percent of the way from ice to steam? It's not like you're sticking a thermometer in your pasta water and going, "eighty-nine degrees! Almost time to throw the rigatoni in there!" Twenty degrees isn't actually twice as "warm" as ten degrees, because that's just not really how temperature works. (Unless maybe if you're using Kelvin- which, ugh. Don't even get me started on Kelvin.)
Celsius basically elbowed its way into the Base Ten Club (is it really that much more "base ten" than Fahrenheit?) and has been riding the coattails of objectively superior units like meters and grams ever since. This is kind of appropriate, considering that Anders Celsius actually conceived his temperature scale with freezing at one hundred degrees and boiling at zero- like the kind of utter maniac who would put footwear on in sock-shoe-sock-shoe order or remove eggs from a carton symmetrically to "keep the weight balanced"- and what we call "Celsius" today is really Jean-Pierre Christin's independently-developed Centigrade scale with Celsius' name slapped on top. Celsius is just a GLORY BOY trying to get some spillover juice from other metric measurements that actually have a distinct advantage over the English system due to the relative ease of scaling between units. Again, none of this is really Celsius' fault- Fahrenheit just doesn't have the same baggage as, say, the English units for length, where everything is broken into butt-ugly fractions based off of barleycorns and human feet:
By 42CrMo4, Christoph Päper - English length units graph (PNG), CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
IT ALL MAKES PERFECT SENSE
We're in a good rhythm on this tour. A good tour needs the right amount of days away from the bus to keep you from fraying without getting out of the zone. You just gotta find that balance between grinding and recharging. I find I do some of my best work when I'm just a little bit tired. Not so much so that the fiber-optic cables connecting my brain to my fingers devolve into carrier pigeons, but just enough to where I get out of my own head and I have to make a small, conscious effort to "push through" or "dig deep" or whatever coachspeak you care to use. Some really good stuff can come from that place.
We're coming off two recharge days here in St. Louis. I've pretty much been laying low and trying to catch up on a few real-world responsibilities, but I did have a minor adventure on Sunday trying to find a laundromat walking distance from our hotel. The first one I tried was a small space for a laundromat, like maybe 300 square feet, (or one rod by four fathoms if you want to get precise with it) and was empty but for a single customer who was smoking a cigarette inside while waiting for his spin cycle to finish. They didn't sell detergent there, so I went to the next closest place and everything was fine. I'm proud to report I didn't lose a single sock.
