good morning ~

(click the link / french canadian falls to listen)

My Big BreakLes coupes de chutes

today’s track is extremely me gleefully fucking around with my sampler

I did not intend at all to take a full month off from this email writing project after my record with John came out, but that’s apparently what happened - glad to have taken a little caesura but let’s get back to it, okay?

speaking of my record with John, we’ve got two really sunbeam shows this coming weekend - - on Friday we’ll be at Troy Listening Room, a really beautiful old dance hall that’s been turned into like, the nicest possible version of a house venue. We’re playing with the duo of Adam Schatz and Booker Stardrum, should be a very good night of music - here are tickets.

then - weather permitting - we’ll be playing around the Saapato farm pond in Craryville, NY in the late afternoon as part of the StretchMetal spring fundraiser. Tickets will go towards supporting future StretchMetal programs and even if you can’t come you ought to donate and grab a download code or a hat.

Been wrestling a particular angel lately - routine blood test came back about a month ago showing that I had a medically alarming vitamin D deficiency and the lady who called me on the phone urged me to go pick up my prescription as soon as possible. I was attributing my profound need for afternoon naps and my inability to sleep all the way through the night to just your average, vanilla seasonal depression but no, it turns out I really had not gotten enough sun this winter. And now I have to take these brilliant, super green little capsules once a week that contain, somehow, 50,000 IU of vitamin D (whatever that means). They look like chlorophyll, they look like the moss at the bottom of a summer pond, and whether by science or by placebo belief they really seem to be helping. Plus I've been drinking coffee shirtless whenever I can find a sunbeam in the afternoon, that's cool, too.

But I still have seven or eight of my megadoses left and I'm still not quite all the way energized, feels sometimes like I'm running in sand. So when we were gifted the opportunity on a perfect spring day in Quebec we leapt at the chance to drive north another 90 minutes and up into the hills. An outdoor water circuit awaited us, carved right into the side of a mountain and dotted with budding trees, the smell of woodsmoke swirling through the air. Sauna, cold plunge, jacuzzi, sunshine - these were the cycles of my life for five remarkable hours, time that absolutely blinked right by me. I cut myself loose from emails and messages, from calendar alerts and clocks. And both the language barrier - we seemed to be the only people speaking English - and the rigorous silence maintained throughout the baths meant that I floated in a kind of fog of unawareness. No algorithm, no advertisements, just gauging whether or not I had gotten too hot sitting in this steam room or the next one. And outside the sun felt just powerful enough to dry my swimsuit, a little crinkle of crisp still in the air. Never have I felt so held by the rays of the sun. I'm sure it was like 98% psychosomatic but I could feel my body singing as it singed - just a little bit of color to my cheeks when we left, kissed.

On the way home Leah suggested that we forego any highways and take surface roads all the way back to Mile End and so we wound our way through golden fields of grain on tiny two lane roads, driving past a surprising abundance of newly built apartment stackers and horse farms. We stopped for a brief but meaningful interlude at a park with a surging waterfall and watched its spray of mist dancing in the air (the French word for "falls" particularly satisfying to learn - chutes). My two companions in the truck screamed when we drove past a little farm store offering jams, slapping different parts of the cab interior and hooting for a u-turn. We pored over every inch of their offerings, taking with us what are perhaps the most delicious donuts I have ever had in my life (small, dense, flavored with maple, made of mostly potato flour and potentially fried in some kind of animal fat). When we got back into city limits our non-highway route had us driving exactly parallel to the highway for a good chunk of the ride - all the noise and dirt of the freeway with stoplights, feels like there's some kind of metaphorical thing in there but I'll leave that to you to figure it out.

After a 20 minute nap we made our way to Pichai, a restaurant I am very comfortable calling our favorite in North America. At this point, blessed as we are to keep having fun opportunities to drive to Canada, we've eaten dinner there at least a half a dozen times. Notably it was over dinner at this restaurant where Gracelee and I first told two of our friends we were gonna get married. Lots of crying, feelings of abundance, when asked about dessert we famously asked for one of each. And the food always slaps. I was very pleased to see that since we last visited they added a chef's tasting menu, which was obviously the vibe we were going for. Cocktails, too, hell, we could walk back to the apartment. We were rapturous about it all, needed the server to understand how delicious we found it all to be, fried chicken for the ladies, a damn fine papaya salad, sticky rice, we applauded when the whole fried fish - redolent with some kind of tamarind sauce - came out in this complicated stainless steel double decker contraption. I felt like a king, like a grand eater of old picking fish bones from between my teeth, felt like I needed to unbutton something. At the end, a dessert of fried hand pie, sparkler impaled, throwing chiaroscuro lighting onto the faces of the servers and the eaters. They honored the birthday, then they also honored my offhanded comment that I was so full I was going to need an amaro digestif, placing three generously poured shot glasses on our table (is that not the most charming thing you've ever heard?). We ate all we could (which was everything). We paid the bill, they gave us stickers and a branded wine key, then we bought t-shirts and rolled out the door.

It was a particularly quiet evening, no one out and about, we guessed correctly that the Canadiens had lost their playoff game. You've gotta hang your hat on something, you need a north star in your firmament, why not the local hockey team? Go Habs.

Too full, too richly had we lived. We took spoonfuls of yogurt before going to bed, wished it was a cigarette. Is the cup that overflows tormented by its running? Les coupes de chutes.

But what about you? Are your blood test results looking okay? Are you wrestling any particular angels these days? When was the last time you paid attention to only one thing?