There’s something about leaving a city at 5:20am when you’ve slept for 2.5 hours that’s liable to make you question your life choices. Seven hours later I’m arriving at the Richmond hotel, where I’m immediately identified as Canadian by asking where the washroom is, as apparently, that’s called a bathroom in this part of the U.S.
This, combined with me sharing that I’ve had next to no sleep and just got in from Asheville, sees the front desk seeing if my room is ready. Am I three hours early for check-in? Yes. Is my room ready? Yes. Do they waive my parking fee? Also yes, which was a complete surprise and nice bonus. I’m so grateful to this stranger that I could hug him. I’m not a big hugger, I’ve got a decently large personal space bubble with people I don’t know! But at finding out I’m going to be able to sleep? Incredible, day made. I immediately go and pass out, not even getting around to unpacking.
It’s a day off, so after waking up I go to find dinner at a nearby restaurant and order enough food that the waitress confirms it isn’t a to-go order. I let her know it isn’t, and spend the next 90 minutes making my way through a lot of veggie dishes, and slowly beginning to feel like a person again. You know when you’re playing The Sims and their needs bar slowly increases from red to green? It felt like that in real time.
By the power of nutrition, hydration, and rest, you too may feel like a functioning person whose brain is capable of coherent thought!
My only plan for the night is to get more sleep, so when Pax messages me later on asking if I’m ready to go out and party, I stare at my phone from where I’m curled up in bed with my book and go “wow, I do not want to move but… sure I’ll go.” I tell him I can be ready in 15. He tells me he’s joking and the sigh of relief I let out before rolling myself back into bed was profound.
Ten hours of sleep later and I feel almost like myself again! Head out to do some errands, namely picking up rubbing alcohol as I got confirmation that running The Shirts through the wash did not remove the sticky residue, and now this battle between The Shirts and I is personal.
After errands, I head out to do my fun thing: the Edgar Allan Poe museum! I’ve been a fan of Poe since eighth grade, where I wrote a biography about him and had the first realisation that if I went to University I could spend much more time researching this man and his work, and being very excited about that. I thought this meant majoring in English! Turns out digging into the lives of dead people is much more in line with a History degree.
The museum was fun! There was a cat who lives on the grounds. I think, honestly, what I remember most is spending a good few minutes circling the block looking for parking and getting increasingly nervous as the only places I was seeing were tight. Thennnn I realised I could park right in front of the door, and just hadn’t read the signs properly. I still half expected to have been towed when I left, and was quite relieved when that wasn’t the case!
… Even more so because I’d offered to pick Jonathan up from the airport. Finding him was a breeze as he was the only person at Arrivals, something I’ve never seen at an airport before. Dropped him off at a restaurant near our hotel, and then went to drop off the rental. In the time it took to do that, which, please understand, was maybe twenty minutes, I realised I was, in fact, exceptionally hungry. I ask Jonathan if he’s still at the restaurant. He is – great! He… spilled his water all over his computer. Not great. Now, at this point I’m in an Uber heading back towards the hotel, but ask if he needs rice (he does), and start looking up nearby grocery stores. I’ve been in this city for 26 hours, and already managed to go to a Walgreens that isn’t a proper Walgreens (it was just a pharmacy counter, I needed the… everything else part), so I don’t particularly trust my ability to just “find one.”
It’s great timing that I’m arriving with the rice as he’s getting back from the restaurant, at which point rice and computer go into a packing bag and we’re both pretty optimistic about the outcome. It wasn’t that much water, and Apple computers are apparently meant to be resistant to this sort of thing – it’ll be fine! I really believe this as once upon a time my phone fell out of my pocket and into a toilet bowl and, after two straight weeks of sitting in rice, turned itself back on. Were photos forever funny looking? Yes, but this was pre-smartphone era so not much was lost, and I got another 3 years out of that phone!
Head to soundcheck and Mercury being in retrograde is making itself known, leading me and the lady working soundcheck to have a quick, fun conversation about weird things happening around that and their exclamation that they’re glad there’s an astrology person on the crew – I do not have the heart to explain that that’s about the extent of my knowledge and, to illustrate this point further, I only put together in mid-April that Sagittarius is a Fire sign. I’ve been telling people my Moon and Rising signs are both water for over a year, okay? Sorry to everyone I’ve lied to. Scorpio is Water and starts with ‘S’ so obviously Sagittarius is also Water based. Truly, that was the logic.
Richmond is one of the venues where we get a meal ticket, and when I’m instructed to go and grab mine from Twin Tribes’ dressing room, where they’re currently having their makeup done, it takes everything in me to scurry in and grab what I need. I know, technically, I’m allowed in the green room and, in this case, have just been given explicit instruction to get this piece of paper from there, but I’m still half expecting someone to tell me I shouldn’t be in backstage areas.
Unrelated: tour is glamorous! For example on returning to the hotel after soundcheck I enter my battle with The Shirts. The rubbing alcohol works, and the sticky residue is vanquished! The downside? After doing five my wrist is in absolute agony, so while it’s great to know these backup designs are salvageable, I am very much okay with not being the person cleaning up the rest of them. There’s band shirts hanging to dry across several surfaces and the smell of rubbing alcohol is, to me, verging on overpowering. Thankfully it doesn’t linger long!
Tonight’s venue is close enough that I can walk back, which is always a bonus! I arrive, and there’s already a line for merch so it’s very much me dropping my bag and immediately jumping into chatting with people. Richmond has good people energy. People are friendly, and I’m having a great time chatting with them. Such a good time that it takes me two hours and checking in with several friends to realize that one of the women I’d been having a fantastic chat with was, more likely than not, flirting with me. I immediately experience a moment of deep gratitude for my obliviousness as I am certain my brain would have stopped working had I realized during. For femme presenting people especially I need a sign that reads “interested and oblivious.” (The best example of this, incidently, is someone talking to me about their lip gloss and going “it makes my lips so nice and soft, see?” and pursing their lips at me, resulting in me leaning in and going “oh wow, yeah! They look so soft!” and her then telling me she’d been hoping for a kiss. Y’all. There’s no hope for me. My friends laughed at me. You should too.)
Richmond is also where I experience my first very drunk person who arrives with, I’m assuming, her partner, and tells me she wants to buy me a drink or two, or as many as I want – see, that? That I pick up on! Her partner’s expression suggested he was sorry about all of this, but not so sorry as to, I don’t know, make any effort to wrap up this interaction that I didn’t know what to do with or navigate. Ultimately, I thanked her for coming out and told I hope she got home safe.
Tragically, despite being so brave and getting my meal ticket from the dressing room, I never did get my dinner which wasn’t ideal. We headed to Fallout for an afterparty where I got veggies and hummus, and descended on my plate like a plague of locusts. After five hours of being the most social version of myself, my social battery is completely drained. That, coupled with not having spent much time in bars since I stopped drinking, sees me taking awhile to actually relax.
After watching a few rounds of pool, and Alejandro – who is part of Twin Tribes’ crew – making sure I ate something, I wind up on the dance floor. The surprise is palpable when the guys are leaving and see me there, with Kevin and Pax both having thought I’d left hours ago, and Jonathan believing that I’d been bored out of my mind. Honestly? Me having taken off early was the most likely scenario, so!
Want to keep up with Urban Heat? Check them out on TikTok , find them on Instagram, or join the “This is the Place” discord!
That’s all for this week! Until next time, stay cozy, and if you want to join your companions around the cauldron, signup for email updates below!
The Cozy Cauldron 