Interlude.

I’m sitting on the train from Montreal to Toronto.

It’s Tuesday.

I spent the last two days in Montreal, surprising my brother for his 28th birthday. On Sunday, the band woke up in Charlottetown and drove 13 hours to drop me off here. They then proceeded to drive the rest of the way back to Toronto in record time. Liam’s an even better driver than I, so it seems.

The train has come to a complete stop somewhere in the vast distance between Oshawa and Kingston. Trees and tall grass line the rails, and we sit here and wait for some sort of traffic to clear in front of us. How there can be traffic on a railway always surprises me; it seems like there would be some pretty tightly controlled systems in place to ensure only one train could be making use of the extremely limited resource that is the rail that the train sits upon.

But I am no conductor.

These tracks seem old.

We’ve come to such a standstill, such a deadening of inertia that I stare at the clouds above and am appalled by their speed. Massive white sky cotton hauling ass in the direction I just came from. Earlier, I saw a plane emitting what some people refer to as a chem-trail, and I still don’t understand what that’s really all about, but it looked beautiful as a static line in the sky slowly being enveloped by bunches of speeding candy floss.

Yesterday I walked to my brother’s house and passed the first apartment I lived in when I moved to Montreal about a decade ago. It’s a large, ugly, blocky building that sits guarding the railway bridge that crosses Papineau just east of Rosemont.

I became, in that moment, filled with the strangest sense of melancholy, enveloped in nostalgia about a place that I never liked. I think the whole apartment was 80 square feet. Just enough room for a bed, a desk, and then a big window that looked over the previously mentioned bridge.

Sometimes I felt like a troll.

Actually, I often felt like a grubby little troll in my little troll cage of an apartment.

My troll cage.

I never encountered another person when I lived in that building; there must have been 80 units, but I never ran into a soul. However, the building manager - her name was Alma - would always be sitting at a desk in a little office by the lobby whenever I came or went. She was nice. I couldn’t speak any French at all when I got to Montreal (thanks for nothing, French immersion), and she helped me translate some documents a few times. And the apartment cost 500 dollars, so it wasn’t all bad, but I was pretty pleased when I finally moved out of that place.

Twenty minutes later, I was at Shane’s apartment. He and Kenza had lived there for over a year now, but I’d still never seen the place. Funnily enough, Elliott had though. He actually stayed with them last summer when he played at Osheaga. So I wasn’t the first member of Dumb Crush to see my brother’s apartment, but I was glad to finally check that off my list.

I’m the only member of my family who lives in Ontario, and I don’t think about it often, but sometimes I do, and seeing my brother and mom is definitely a reminder. Obviously we’re not physically close, but my relationships with my family are really important to me, and I want to work harder at maintaining them. I’m terrible at phone calls, as anyone close to me can attest to, but seeing as physical distance is my reality, I think I just have to learn to get better at them. Or maybe I’ll start writing letters. I’ll think of something.

I paused this article for about a day, trying to flesh out the above paragraph, but it’s probably best to save that for another time. Also, my dad lives in BC, shout out dad.

I asked for a cup of water an hour ago when somebody came by selling white bread sandwiches and snacks that have been invented by the twisted minds at Via Rail.

Turns out that’s not an option on the train anymore. You have to buy a bottle of water.

I understand this is a played-out criticism and that, at this point, we all know that any plane, train, or sometimes even automobile that can monetize your hunger and thirst has long since thrown any ethical concerns out the window. But I mean, come on, water? This is against the Geneva Convention. This is a capital C Crime.

Not to mention it’s really embarrassing to ask for a cup of water in the first place. “Can I have a cup of water?” ew, no dude, cringe.

I put myself out there. I wore my heart on my sleeve, and was vulnerable, and I still had to pay $3.50 for something that is definitely not sourced from a natural spring.

Watching the Habs game with Shane and Kenza at Trois Brasseurs. It rained a lot and they lost in overtime. Good day, though.

On Saturday, the last day of the first leg of our tour, we packed up Liam’s house and visited the ocean one last time. We had grown very fond of the Cameron Winter album “Heavy Metal”, and in our collective burnout, we spent a lot of the day playing the first four tracks on the album on loop.

To further emphasize our little tour fatigue, we watched “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” again. Still holds up, I may try watching it a third time over the next week - see how many times I can watch it before I go insane. How very Clockwork Orange-y.

On our 13-hour drive from Charlottetown to Montreal the next day, we experienced what I think can accurately be described as gale-force winds. In fact, we bumped our start time an hour earlier because we were afraid the bridge to New Brunswick might close under the conditions, leaving us stranded in the fever dream that is PEI with no exit strategy. What if the wind never stopped blowing?

The wind was so bad that Liam and Seb both spent hours completely white knuckling. You couldn’t so much as grab your coffee with one hand without the car doing everything except lifting off the ground like a massive four-door hatchback kite.

For me, though, the wind was annoying because it was loud.

And today I was riding shotgun, which meant I got to pick the music. And boy, did I have some stuff planned. Boy, was I gonna cook today. Oh yeah, I was gonna earn my stripes.

Unfortunately the fucking hurricane outside completely overpowered the dodge grand’s pretty good sound system and we were left listening to only the higher frequencies of a handful of This Is The Kit albums for the first few hours. Embarassing and frustrating.

Otherwise, it was a beautiful drive.

I’ve noticed on this tour that I seem to in my old age have become afflicted with an ailment that I have coined “ass disease”, which is to say that I am having an increasingly hard time sitting down in a car for 10+ hours at a time. My legs cramp up and fall asleep, my ass hurts. I feel like this is as much a wake-up call as any that I need to do many more squats. I simply don’t have the support I need back there.

And now, as our train car slowly picks up speed again with another hour or two of the journey left before we reach god’s country again (god’s city? who cares dumb joke anyway), I am praying that I don’t have to sit down for a long period of time ever again. The pain - my god.

Unfortunately for my ass but fortunately for me and my deep love, passion and desire to play and perform music for the world, we’re getting back in the van this Thursday to finish off our tour. I’m really looking forward to these shows, especially Toronto. I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished and the music we’ve created, and there’s nothing better than being able to experience and share that with your closest friends.

I’ll see you this weekend.