Sept 19/97
Moist spend the morning exploring the innermost reaches of extreme fragility and traveling to Cleveland, Ohio for a festival show presented by The End at Nautica Stage.

At this point any sound above that of a carefully drawn breath is, at the very least, unwelcome and at most, grounds for summary execution.

This is unfortunate as some of the more easily brainwashed members of the band seem to have sustained damage to that part of their brain that controls the act of bursting spontaneously into song and someone or other insist on sharing their favorite moments from some of the greatest musicals of our time in an annoyingly loud voice that sounds not unlike a rusty chain saw attempting to cut through a wrought iron fence.

Following sound check and a sort set we’re back on our way to Montreal for a week off.

Oct 18/97
Whether it’s the fact that we tend to get back to our bills and laundry far more regularly than at nay time in the past or our collective and fervent belief that reality will, if yelled at long and hard enough, piss right off rather conveniently in moments of crisis or social discomfort, THE ADJUSTEMENT BETWEEN HOTEL/BUS/GUTTER AND HOME SEEMS TO BE GETTING EASIER AS TIME GOES BY. Still, after a certain amount of touring, home becomes a relative concept in that any place with plumbing in which the band spends more than twelve hours will do. This results in no small amount of confusion; home being, in some ways, not all that different than being on the road and while it’s unlikely that you’ll have to deal with border guards, petty municipal bureaucrats with decibel meters and drunken morons who for no good reason at all suddenly decide that you’re their new best friend in the comfort of your own living room there is still the phone company, the lunatic who lives next door, and of course, your family.
Similarities notwithstanding , there is a bit of a road hangover that takes any time from two days to three weeks to shake off, and manifests itself in several insidious ways, any one of which is guaranteed to drive any one who must, by virtue of choice, marriage indentured servitude, or sheer bad luck, spend a fair bit of time near you, to the point of beating you about the face and neck with some appropriately blunt object and then strangling you with your own tongue.
The important thing to bear in mind when returning home is simply that you are no longer in a hotel and no matter how benign your intentions, any attempt to maintain your "on tour" life style once back in your apartment will fail dismally and will most likely result in your partner, spouse, or roommate sticking a fork in your eye. To avoid this and other sundry expressions of discontent a few elementary rules must apply.

UPON RETURNING HOME

1. Do not dial nine before every outgoing call. Eventually you’ll find yourself staring at a phone shaped hole in the wall, with a bundle of useless wires in one hand and largish clumps of your own hair in the other.
2. If you choose to ignore rule #1 at least try to withstand the temptation to run screaming down to the front of the desk, full of piss and vinegar, muttering incoherently about shoddy service and ancient technology, hell bent on teaching someone or other a swift lesson to learn in hotel management. There is no hotel. There is no front desk. There is no lesson to learn save that brain cells, once destroyed do not come back. There is just you, your own stupidity and your downstairs neighbour who in all likelihood (see rule 4) isn’t all that fond of you anyway.
3. There’s nothing worse than coming home in mid January to a lightless deep freeze, except maybe coming home on a stinking hot day in August to find that the small quantity of fresh vegetables you left in the fridge two months ago have become a festering soup of furry green slime and that your apartment smells only slightly better than a fresh mass grave at high noon in a heat wave. Whatever the season, pay your bills.
4. Laugh at your own stupidity. If you take a two and a half hot shower with the shower curtain open, use every towel in the house, flood not only your apartment but everyone below it and then leave the whole mess to rot and mildew along with the leftovers from three consecutive days of take out and then react with shock and venomous cruses when you discover that housekeeping is nowhere to be seen and that you’re still living in your own filth well…
5. Be prepared for the eventuality of extremely light technical support coupled with increased personal responsibility . Say for instance your television blows up. Dialing zero and screaming blue bloody murder at the disembodied voice of an innocent operator for 45 minutes will do nothing to solve your problem nor will impassioned cries of I’ll never stay here again. No ONE CARES. YOU’RE A MORON. GET HELP.

Shortly after this small bout of fall touring Moist decide that it’s high time we started work on writing their next album and that aside from some touring in America, we are resolved to doing absolutely no more Canadian tours until such time as we have some new material… so, It’s really no surprise that we ended up in Mexico filming a new video and back on the road in November for the Gasoline tour.
More on this in the next newsletter.
Until then, thanks to all those of you who came out to our shows in November belated merry ho ho, happy new year and …
Nauselbaum.
MOIST