Day 9
Shall I compare thee to day 8?
It’s the day of the last show of our East Coast leg.
I’ve noticed in writing these entries that I tend to flutter between past and present tense, but not today.
Today I’m locked in, I’m in the moment.
We’ve decided to try a second crack at this beach, and this time we’re gonna see something! I’m sure of it!
It’s windy. It feels like it’s windy pretty much everywhere these days. When I’m by the ocean, I chalk the wind up to the fact that we’re by the ocean. But then, why is Toronto so windy? It’s so god damn windy. Who spat in the face of Boreas and cursed us with this perpetual bullshit?
Seriously though, wind fucks everything up. It makes everything colder, it blows things over, and for some reason, I struggle to breathe in a headwind - always have. Not sure if that’s normal, but it’s just the way it is. I remember when I was in preschool, my whole class got to go out on some sort of Coast Guard pontoon speedboat, and I almost passed out. Couldn’t breathe at all. Just not something I’m good at.
Anyway, we weren’t going to let a little wind stop us today. We were going to live out our Portrait of a Lady on Fire fantasies, staring out at the beautiful Atlantic Ocean.
The dirt road that leads to the beach is home to the piping plover. An endangered bird that makes a terrifying beeping sound. According to Wikipedia, there are approximately 7800 of them in the world today, and I’m pretty sure almost all of them live right down the road from Liam’s house.
It is so loud, and I feel bad because Elliott told us it’s mating season and they’re not into voyeurism, so we’re not really a welcome presence.
On either side of the road, there is a beautiful and eerie marshy-lakey type thing (see picture above). The evening prior, when walking past the same spot, it really reminded me of that one scene from The Lord of the Rings where Frodo gets pulled under the water by dead people.
The scene where Frodo gets pulled under the water by dead people also really reminds me of that scene from Harry Potter where Harry Potter gets pulled under water by dead people.
Quaint.
Anyway, this was nothing like that; it was actually a very beautiful little jaunt.
We crest the sandy climbs of the northern PEI dunes and once again experience the colossus that is the sea. It’s marvelous when visible. I have half a mind to walk into it and let it take me in its briny arms. I want to be held by this miraculous force.
We spend around ten minutes just looking at it, I can’t speak, I’m catatonic. This shit is insane. Then it’s time to head home, we’ve got music to make.
So it turns out that eternity we spent at Long & McQuade yesterday was for naught, as the mic clips we rented don’t even match the fucking mics. Slow and steady does not always win the race, and the tortoise should not always be a vaunted moral cipher. Luckily, Elliott is a genius, and also much faster than a tortoise, so he uses his hare-y thinking to rig up an alternative mic stand setup, and within less than an hour, we have a fully functioning recording studio in Liam’s parents’ solarium.
In the spirit of our first EP, we do a live take of the record off the floor. Seb films it, and it looks great! We’re very excited to share it, after we release the rest of the songs off the EP, of course (cue stay tuned for new music announcement moment here).
Finally, it’s time to pack up and hit Charlottetown.
I have a few feelings about this gig that I’m not sure I can fully parse at this point. What I will say is the bill was great, and we met a lot of great people. The venue was great as well, in fact, it is the one place I’ve ever been to in Canada where you can smoke cigarettes on the patio, and you can believe I took heavy advantage of that. What a fantastic and liberating experience it is to be able to drink a beer and smoke a cigarette at a bar.
But the vibes just kinda felt off, and it was exacerbated every time we left the venue and walked onto what I imagine was the busiest street in Charlottetown.
We’ve noticed on this tour that you can tell a lot about a town by the kind of college-aged men who live there. Kingston has Queens, so unfortunately, they have to deal with some pretty messy boys, but I did not expect Charlottetown to be the victim of a similar situation. College boys - well, not all college boys, Guelph University people tend to be incredibly warm and intelligent, and also I’m pretty sure we’re all boys and went to college and we turned out okay - but college boys of the baseball hat wearing variety just seem incredibly fucked. The brain does not develop properly it seems, and it begs the question: what the fuck are they being taught at these colleges?
Anyway the town was sizzling with this particular kind of fuck that night and although Baba’s seemed a haven of cool and alternative people it was just dissapointing to see people of bad intention walking around what I assumed was a tiny island paradise town. Fuck, I honestly thought you couldn’t even buy cigarettes in PEI that’s how quaint it was, but that’s clearly not the case.
We left the venue around 2 am and drove by two men in their fifties wrestling in the grass in front of a church. This place is strange, but I tell ya I stand by what I said about the sand and shit, there’s some magic on the island still.
Tomorrow is our last day here, we’re going to drink beers, write songs, and then prepare ourselves for an incredibly long slog back to Toronto. It’s gonna be great!