Can’t sleep won’t sleep. Didn’t sleep. Now I don’t have time to sleep. At around 2am I realized it was going to be a problem. By 5am I just got up and started doing stuff. Kind of worried about how the rest of the day’s going to treat me as we’ve had two out door multi-hour gigs in a row in 95+ degree weather and we’ve got one more tonight. Somewhere over the course of the night I start fiddling on my guitar, working on a song, but quickly realized my fingers were feeling kind of tender – five hours of playing over the course of two days is not generally a problem – but five hours in hot and humid weather just seems to get under your calluses somehow and I’m almost wishing I’d be able to bring my electric guitar tonight instead – but that’d be way too weird.
Had breakfast at 6, made gazpacho, made coffee, tried to take a bit of a nap, but didn’t get anywhere with that. Read a book. Played Fallout. Made the mistake of tuning into Facebook which made me feel like a) the world is failing around me and b) I’m a failure in the world. Thought about doing some more things under the moniker “The Lily Army” and found that “The Lily Army” was a fundraiser for a little girl in Illinois. Even though there’s no other BAND called that, maybe it would be wrong of me to edge in on that? Not sure. Discuss. Watched the sun come up, listened to the cicadas, chased crickets, watched the sky cloud up and the wind pick up – and now it’s only 11am and I’m thinking about lunch.
It’s been hard to write recently. I’m aware that I’m writing a lot of political stuff, and I’m putting it in a place where not a lot of people will read it. But politics are saturating the world, everyone’s Facebook feeds are filled with angst and surety, and especially in the last month it’s just been one high-profile attack after another. And then if you tune into the news closer to home (which as far as I can tell, few people do) it’s been shooting after shooting after shooting. In the last week almost as many people have been gunned down in West Baltimore as were killed in Orlando, but it’s not high profile because the people dying are too dark for people to care and the people doing the killing are too dark for people to call them terrorists. That’s me theory anyways. That and no-one’s running around catching it on camera, I guess. Last night it was cops vs a guy with an “AR-15 style rifle”, whatever that really means. Cops won. Decisively. No trial there. Freddie Gray’s trials stumble forward but no-one seems to care about that anymore as our attention span grows shorter as our affection for hyperbole grows greater… and generally even I’ve been trying to tune out. Just to take a break.
Without sleep I get depressed and indecisive. It’s going to be a long, long day – and tonight’s gig is going to seem even longer (though perhaps not as long as the drive home). It’ll be a good night to have a set list lest there’s a WHOLE lot of rob rambling (and rob wrangling) tonight!
Friday July 8th found us up at SteelStacks in Bethlehem, PA. This was a place I ran around in college – but it’s been reimagined into an arts centre of truly staggering proportions…
