Toronto, Canada, Saturday through Monday
Aug. 24th, 2026 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
suitably_heroicSziget had been a trip to remember. Even without the memory of groddy early-00s videos downloaded through squeaky modems. It’d been a capstone on a great tour and a promise of what they might be able to achieve if they kept going like this. Whatever misgivings Jill might have about taking the band bigger seemed to have cooled.
Not that Jack was expecting anything. He was, and probably always would be, fundamentally incapable of expecting the best. The best he could do was to let himself enjoy the present.
But that had been a week ago, and their last gigs of the summer laid across the ocean. Here, in Toronto. A place he’d been scared of for so long that landing on Pearson International Airport had felt like an anticlimax. The wheels touched down, the shoddy plane shook, but the only thing in the air was the lives of millions of Canadians Jack had never met and had no intention of going out of his way to meet.
The thing about some revelations was that they just kept re-revealing themselves. You could be acutely aware of letting go of something five, six times in a year; it came to you in the little moments and in the big ones, reminders of what you weren’t thinking of bringing you back to the thing you hadn’t been thinking of.
They were in Toronto now, and Sparkle wasn’t here. It made sense in every way but what the feverish mind of a terrified, traumatized guy could conjure up: this wasn’t that universe, wasn’t even a universe adjacent to it. That guy had worried about this moment for years. That guy, said the reminder, was gone.
“You’ve been pretty zen for August,” Dane said, nudging up his giant sunglasses. He had his bag slung over his shoulder, an overly-floral band shirt resting on his frame, his eyebrows crawling up almost above the sunglasses. “Especially for August in Canada.”
“‘I will stand in the darkness and laugh with my heel on its throat’,” Jack muttered, glancing at his arm.
Dane chuckled. “Is that an answer or a mantra?”
“Both,” Jack said. He dropped his own bag on the ground, squinting at the road. Tab and Trent should’ve been back with their rental van by now, but no. “I don’t know. I’m in the ‘I keep waking up feeling like I should be feeling like crap about something but not feeling like crap’ stage. I didn’t know that was even a stage.”
“All the world’s a stage.”
Jack looked at him. “You’re tired,” he said.
“I’m not tired. I slept on the plane.”
“You’re quote-associating,” Jack said. “You’re tired.”
“Is that even a word?”
“And arguing with me about semantics.” Jack pushed his too-long hair out of his face. “Very tired.”
“Fine,” Dane said, craning his neck to look in the same direction Jack’d been looking. “I could use a nap.”
“Mhm, you’re telling me,” Jack said.
The van came careening around the corner. They went to the hotel. Dane had a nap. And Jack stood on the balcony, staring at the city, letting himself feel all of it. There’s a sky full of lights, and none of them stars, he thought to himself, and murmured, “Not everything means something, honey,” to them all.
—
Three shows in three clubs, one bigger and two somewhere down the middle. A good showing for their first foray into Canada. It felt a little more familiar than Europe had, though the smoky, fragrant belly of the kind of music venue that would let a weird metal band like the Fools play was the same anywhere.
Jack watched Tab go outside to smoke with a sense of forlorn nostalgia, but he ignored the urge to join her. He had suffered to get out of that habit and he wasn’t planning to suffer winding back up into it.
“Are you as ready to be home as I am?” he asked Trent instead, leaning back against an amp while technical staff busied around them. “None of these hotel rooms are cramped enough to keep me in the manner to which I’ve grown accustomed.”
“There’s not enough litter in Toronto,” said Trent, scrutinizing the strings of his bass like he expected one of them to step out of line at any time. “Everything smells like maple.”
Jack squinted at him. “That feels like a weird and yet oddly specific stereotype to slap onto a city we’ve been in for 24 hours,” he said.
“What?”
“I don’t smell maple,” Jack clarified.
“You should probably see a doctor,” Trent advised, lowering his bass.
Jack nodded. He didn’t know what he’d expected. “Good talk,” he said brightly.
“But it is about time to go back to New York,” Trent continued. “I could sit on my sofa for at least 48 hours straight.”
Huh. That was a surprisingly normal observation from the bassist. “Me too,” Jack said, releasing a breath. “I guess that’s what home feels like, huh.”
“That and cheap ramen,” Trent agreed, “And at least five trash bags on the curb.”
“Make it seven,” Jack decided, “And someone else’s sofa.”
—
“So I have a sad announcement to make to all of you,” Jack said, repositioning the microphone until it managed to match his sense of feng shui. “We are, as of this summer, officially a band with too many songs to cram into the time slots allotted to us. So if you have a favorite that we’re not playing tonight, I guess you’re just going to have to come back tomorrow.”
“Aww,” Dane and Tab sighed into their microphones.
“On the other hand,” Jack added, “That does mean you guys get to hear some of the stuff we’ve been working on. Later.” He cleared his throat. “For now, well, we’re in Toronto, and I used to know somebody around here. I once wrote a song dumping on one of their favorite pastimes,so it feels right kicking this thing off with that one. It’s like the musical equivalent of burning sage.”
He waved at Trent. “Mr. Bassman?”
And in kicked the music, the building bass riff, which would soon give way to cheerful, satirical melodrama in the guitars. Jack leaned into the mic and grinned. “I fuckin’ hate Broadway tunes, and I’m grateful you do too…”
The crowds were bigger here than what they'd gotten at their club shows in Europe. More people knew the lyrics. They roared when Jack slid up to the microphone to announce, “We want to dedicate tonight’s cover round to a true Canadian gift to the world, Devin Townsend!”. Local covers always hit different, and 'Bastard' was a nice slow stage-setter for what was to come.
Which was the new songs, the ones that tapped into something louder, faster, stronger than their usual work. Jack kept track-- of what people responded to, of what got them staring at the walls. What got them to react. He'd been doing it all tour, though. He was starting to get a feel for it.
By the third round of 'Pick a hero, lift him on our backs/the deader the better', they were all hollering the deader the better, the deader the better! back at him in tune, and he thought about August, their little memorial up on Bear Mountain, and roared through the chanting horde, “Don’t worry! It’s righteous this time! Let's bask in the rage that wallows in the wind!”
—
“Don’t we have too many songs for the new album already?” Tabitha asked, her pierced eyebrow arching at him as she leaned casually against the wall.
“Who says I’m working on anything?” Jack asked. He was curled up in a chair in the corner of the lounge.
“Your friends call this your ‘gremlin writing pose’,” Tab pointed out, shrugging. “I figure they know what they’re talking about.”
He looked down at the scribbles on his pad. “Okay, maybe, a little,” he said. “We still gotta figure out the track list for it anyway, so I figure I can do whatever the hells I want.”
She shook her head, looking amused. “I’m glad about the punk vibe on this one,” she offered. “Makes for a nice change from all the fancy-ass metal arrangements. Started to lean a little overkill.”
“Hey,” Jack grunted, mostly not offended. He put his pen down. “Blame Dane for all of it.” The fancy and the genre shift. Nothing to do with him. Nope.
“What was the name you guys came up with for the new album again?” she asked.
Jack shot her a wry look. “‘You Shouldn’t Have Left Us Alive’,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” she said, grinning. “I like it. I’ll shove it in my old frontman’s face when it’s done, yeah?”
—
The second venue was back to being a little smaller, but that was fine. They did the breakdown from ‘88’ in the middle of ‘Another Body’ and waited to see if anyone would notice. (They did.)
Then they did ‘Fire in the Night’ to a couple hundred people, and that was rougher. Jack’d written that song at the start of letting go and it was a weird reminder of how far he’d gotten, sure. But he found himself going subdued on his way through the last few lines of the song– Let it burn, let it burn; scrub the embers from my mind.
Maybe it was time to let the song go, too.
“You’ve been a median audience tonight, thanks,” he said. “Now, we usually finish this up with a TSOL cover, but I’ve been working on a thing that’s more of a tribute to it, so I’m using you to see if it works. Can you live with that?”
He held up the microphone.
They screamed “Yeah!”.
So they played it.
Remember
If you need–
I’m with you in the darkness, waiting.
—
“One more show, and home,” Jill groaned. “I can’t wait to collapse on my sofa and stare at literally nothing for at least three days.”
“Eat real pizza,” Trent agreed. “Smell garbage.”
“And piss,” Tab mused. “And exhaust.”
“Not me,” Jack said. “Work for five days, then we’re heading back up into the mountains.”
“You two crazy hermits,” Jill sighed, kicking the crappy little sofa just close enough to Jack’s leg to be dangerous. “What’s the matter? Don’t you miss civilization?”
“I like civilization,” Dane offered. “I like clean air and a good view even better.”
“And I just hate people,” Jack added. “That’s why him and me work.”
“I’m so glad I don’t have to see either of you again for over a whole week,” Jill said, but she was smiling.
“You’ll miss us,” Dane said.
“It’s not mutual, though,” Jack added. “Because you’re a person and not clean air.”
Jill snorted, sitting back. “But I’m a great view.”
—
“This is our last show this summer,” Jack said. His fingers were on the keys. His smile was up against the microphone. “We’ve got a couple more songs for you tonight, new and old, but I wanted to be an old sap for a second and say thank you. Thank you to Jill, and Tab, and Trent, you guys made these miserable few months worth living. Thank you to our incredible tour manager, who somehow kept us all alive, and thank you to Lana, for choosing to come here and be family, even when you’ve got more serious things to do somewhere else. Thank you to you guys, for showing up and not leaving us standing here like a bunch of pretentious losers.”
He glanced aside.
“No thanks to Dane,” he said. “Fuck you, you’re the worst.”
“He can’t be earnest for more than half a minute at a time or he combusts,” Dane told the audience. “So he takes it out on the person he loves the most.”
Jack shook his head, thumbing at his bottom lip. “We’re going to do something in a genre that’s a little different than you’re used to from us,” he said. “But it’s a song we care about, so fuck you if you have an issue with that. Here’s ‘The Deepest Sighs, the Frankest Shadows’, thank you and fuck off.”
And that was the last step of letting go: no more reminders. No more references. No more stolen glances in the night. No more what-ifs.
“If everything is temporary, I will bear the unbearable, terrible triteness of being.”
Just the living of it all.
[[ and he's going on the backburner for a bit. open to phone calls, post-show visits, mid-show visits, etc etc ]]
Not that Jack was expecting anything. He was, and probably always would be, fundamentally incapable of expecting the best. The best he could do was to let himself enjoy the present.
But that had been a week ago, and their last gigs of the summer laid across the ocean. Here, in Toronto. A place he’d been scared of for so long that landing on Pearson International Airport had felt like an anticlimax. The wheels touched down, the shoddy plane shook, but the only thing in the air was the lives of millions of Canadians Jack had never met and had no intention of going out of his way to meet.
The thing about some revelations was that they just kept re-revealing themselves. You could be acutely aware of letting go of something five, six times in a year; it came to you in the little moments and in the big ones, reminders of what you weren’t thinking of bringing you back to the thing you hadn’t been thinking of.
They were in Toronto now, and Sparkle wasn’t here. It made sense in every way but what the feverish mind of a terrified, traumatized guy could conjure up: this wasn’t that universe, wasn’t even a universe adjacent to it. That guy had worried about this moment for years. That guy, said the reminder, was gone.
“You’ve been pretty zen for August,” Dane said, nudging up his giant sunglasses. He had his bag slung over his shoulder, an overly-floral band shirt resting on his frame, his eyebrows crawling up almost above the sunglasses. “Especially for August in Canada.”
“‘I will stand in the darkness and laugh with my heel on its throat’,” Jack muttered, glancing at his arm.
Dane chuckled. “Is that an answer or a mantra?”
“Both,” Jack said. He dropped his own bag on the ground, squinting at the road. Tab and Trent should’ve been back with their rental van by now, but no. “I don’t know. I’m in the ‘I keep waking up feeling like I should be feeling like crap about something but not feeling like crap’ stage. I didn’t know that was even a stage.”
“All the world’s a stage.”
Jack looked at him. “You’re tired,” he said.
“I’m not tired. I slept on the plane.”
“You’re quote-associating,” Jack said. “You’re tired.”
“Is that even a word?”
“And arguing with me about semantics.” Jack pushed his too-long hair out of his face. “Very tired.”
“Fine,” Dane said, craning his neck to look in the same direction Jack’d been looking. “I could use a nap.”
“Mhm, you’re telling me,” Jack said.
The van came careening around the corner. They went to the hotel. Dane had a nap. And Jack stood on the balcony, staring at the city, letting himself feel all of it. There’s a sky full of lights, and none of them stars, he thought to himself, and murmured, “Not everything means something, honey,” to them all.
—
Three shows in three clubs, one bigger and two somewhere down the middle. A good showing for their first foray into Canada. It felt a little more familiar than Europe had, though the smoky, fragrant belly of the kind of music venue that would let a weird metal band like the Fools play was the same anywhere.
Jack watched Tab go outside to smoke with a sense of forlorn nostalgia, but he ignored the urge to join her. He had suffered to get out of that habit and he wasn’t planning to suffer winding back up into it.
“Are you as ready to be home as I am?” he asked Trent instead, leaning back against an amp while technical staff busied around them. “None of these hotel rooms are cramped enough to keep me in the manner to which I’ve grown accustomed.”
“There’s not enough litter in Toronto,” said Trent, scrutinizing the strings of his bass like he expected one of them to step out of line at any time. “Everything smells like maple.”
Jack squinted at him. “That feels like a weird and yet oddly specific stereotype to slap onto a city we’ve been in for 24 hours,” he said.
“What?”
“I don’t smell maple,” Jack clarified.
“You should probably see a doctor,” Trent advised, lowering his bass.
Jack nodded. He didn’t know what he’d expected. “Good talk,” he said brightly.
“But it is about time to go back to New York,” Trent continued. “I could sit on my sofa for at least 48 hours straight.”
Huh. That was a surprisingly normal observation from the bassist. “Me too,” Jack said, releasing a breath. “I guess that’s what home feels like, huh.”
“That and cheap ramen,” Trent agreed, “And at least five trash bags on the curb.”
“Make it seven,” Jack decided, “And someone else’s sofa.”
—
“So I have a sad announcement to make to all of you,” Jack said, repositioning the microphone until it managed to match his sense of feng shui. “We are, as of this summer, officially a band with too many songs to cram into the time slots allotted to us. So if you have a favorite that we’re not playing tonight, I guess you’re just going to have to come back tomorrow.”
“Aww,” Dane and Tab sighed into their microphones.
“On the other hand,” Jack added, “That does mean you guys get to hear some of the stuff we’ve been working on. Later.” He cleared his throat. “For now, well, we’re in Toronto, and I used to know somebody around here. I once wrote a song dumping on one of their favorite pastimes,so it feels right kicking this thing off with that one. It’s like the musical equivalent of burning sage.”
He waved at Trent. “Mr. Bassman?”
And in kicked the music, the building bass riff, which would soon give way to cheerful, satirical melodrama in the guitars. Jack leaned into the mic and grinned. “I fuckin’ hate Broadway tunes, and I’m grateful you do too…”
The crowds were bigger here than what they'd gotten at their club shows in Europe. More people knew the lyrics. They roared when Jack slid up to the microphone to announce, “We want to dedicate tonight’s cover round to a true Canadian gift to the world, Devin Townsend!”. Local covers always hit different, and 'Bastard' was a nice slow stage-setter for what was to come.
Which was the new songs, the ones that tapped into something louder, faster, stronger than their usual work. Jack kept track-- of what people responded to, of what got them staring at the walls. What got them to react. He'd been doing it all tour, though. He was starting to get a feel for it.
By the third round of 'Pick a hero, lift him on our backs/the deader the better', they were all hollering the deader the better, the deader the better! back at him in tune, and he thought about August, their little memorial up on Bear Mountain, and roared through the chanting horde, “Don’t worry! It’s righteous this time! Let's bask in the rage that wallows in the wind!”
—
“Don’t we have too many songs for the new album already?” Tabitha asked, her pierced eyebrow arching at him as she leaned casually against the wall.
“Who says I’m working on anything?” Jack asked. He was curled up in a chair in the corner of the lounge.
“Your friends call this your ‘gremlin writing pose’,” Tab pointed out, shrugging. “I figure they know what they’re talking about.”
He looked down at the scribbles on his pad. “Okay, maybe, a little,” he said. “We still gotta figure out the track list for it anyway, so I figure I can do whatever the hells I want.”
She shook her head, looking amused. “I’m glad about the punk vibe on this one,” she offered. “Makes for a nice change from all the fancy-ass metal arrangements. Started to lean a little overkill.”
“Hey,” Jack grunted, mostly not offended. He put his pen down. “Blame Dane for all of it.” The fancy and the genre shift. Nothing to do with him. Nope.
“What was the name you guys came up with for the new album again?” she asked.
Jack shot her a wry look. “‘You Shouldn’t Have Left Us Alive’,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” she said, grinning. “I like it. I’ll shove it in my old frontman’s face when it’s done, yeah?”
—
The second venue was back to being a little smaller, but that was fine. They did the breakdown from ‘88’ in the middle of ‘Another Body’ and waited to see if anyone would notice. (They did.)
Then they did ‘Fire in the Night’ to a couple hundred people, and that was rougher. Jack’d written that song at the start of letting go and it was a weird reminder of how far he’d gotten, sure. But he found himself going subdued on his way through the last few lines of the song– Let it burn, let it burn; scrub the embers from my mind.
Maybe it was time to let the song go, too.
“You’ve been a median audience tonight, thanks,” he said. “Now, we usually finish this up with a TSOL cover, but I’ve been working on a thing that’s more of a tribute to it, so I’m using you to see if it works. Can you live with that?”
He held up the microphone.
They screamed “Yeah!”.
So they played it.
Remember
If you need–
I’m with you in the darkness, waiting.
—
“One more show, and home,” Jill groaned. “I can’t wait to collapse on my sofa and stare at literally nothing for at least three days.”
“Eat real pizza,” Trent agreed. “Smell garbage.”
“And piss,” Tab mused. “And exhaust.”
“Not me,” Jack said. “Work for five days, then we’re heading back up into the mountains.”
“You two crazy hermits,” Jill sighed, kicking the crappy little sofa just close enough to Jack’s leg to be dangerous. “What’s the matter? Don’t you miss civilization?”
“I like civilization,” Dane offered. “I like clean air and a good view even better.”
“And I just hate people,” Jack added. “That’s why him and me work.”
“I’m so glad I don’t have to see either of you again for over a whole week,” Jill said, but she was smiling.
“You’ll miss us,” Dane said.
“It’s not mutual, though,” Jack added. “Because you’re a person and not clean air.”
Jill snorted, sitting back. “But I’m a great view.”
—
“This is our last show this summer,” Jack said. His fingers were on the keys. His smile was up against the microphone. “We’ve got a couple more songs for you tonight, new and old, but I wanted to be an old sap for a second and say thank you. Thank you to Jill, and Tab, and Trent, you guys made these miserable few months worth living. Thank you to our incredible tour manager, who somehow kept us all alive, and thank you to Lana, for choosing to come here and be family, even when you’ve got more serious things to do somewhere else. Thank you to you guys, for showing up and not leaving us standing here like a bunch of pretentious losers.”
He glanced aside.
“No thanks to Dane,” he said. “Fuck you, you’re the worst.”
“He can’t be earnest for more than half a minute at a time or he combusts,” Dane told the audience. “So he takes it out on the person he loves the most.”
Jack shook his head, thumbing at his bottom lip. “We’re going to do something in a genre that’s a little different than you’re used to from us,” he said. “But it’s a song we care about, so fuck you if you have an issue with that. Here’s ‘The Deepest Sighs, the Frankest Shadows’, thank you and fuck off.”
And that was the last step of letting go: no more reminders. No more references. No more stolen glances in the night. No more what-ifs.
“If everything is temporary, I will bear the unbearable, terrible triteness of being.”
Just the living of it all.
[[ and he's going on the backburner for a bit. open to phone calls, post-show visits, mid-show visits, etc etc ]]
no subject
Date: 2026-08-24 09:12 pm (UTC)Right now, though, she was enjoying the music, enjoying the fans, and had merch-selling down to a (finely-tuned and efficient) art.
"Forty-five," she told the guy in front of her, smiling. Then pointed at the one to her left, adding, equally cheerful, "Lift that pin, I break your fingers. Next!"
no subject
Date: 2026-08-25 03:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-08-25 03:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-08-25 04:12 am (UTC)Okay, so maybe that sip was nice.
no subject
Date: 2026-08-25 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-08-25 05:01 am (UTC)His all of two days in the mountains, but whatever.
no subject
Date: 2026-08-25 03:48 pm (UTC)She wrestled merch, not band members.
no subject
Date: 2026-08-25 05:50 pm (UTC)"I'm the reprobate?" Jack asked, indignant. "Me?!"
no subject
Date: 2026-08-25 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-08-27 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-08-28 02:39 am (UTC)