Rites of Spring

🌼🌷🌺🌻🌸🌹😝

Merry Sunday, squad! And what a lovely Sunday it is, at least here in Hamburg. Sunny, perhaps a bit brisk, but we’ve come to expect as much from that mercurial calendar-chunk March, eh? “I think it’s still winter… actually, maybe it’s spring; okay, a little snow won’t hurt…” March just can’t decide, right?!

Wait a second. It’s April!

This kid just read about how it’s April now. (Photo by Ben White on Unsplash)

Damn, when did that happen?! I’m positive that just a couple days ago I was looking at at my book calendar, like the Hamburgian child pictured above, and I read about how it was March. What’s going on…???

Ah. Okay. I just read my book calendar. Um… it’s April 2nd guys. So, like, April —but barely. As in: we’re two days into it. As in: yesterday was the first day of the month. As in: yesterday was April 1st.

April 1st… hold on… 🤔

Okay, this might sound weird, and I might just be having one of those neurological episodes like when you’re at the zoo and you keep saying “pinniped” over and over — “pinniped, pinniped, pinniped” — and it starts to sound like a made-up word or something, but… is April 1st some kind of holiday? Wait, is April 1st Easter?

Ah, no, no — flipped through my book calendar and no, Easter is different. Huh. April 1st isn’t one of those new fake holidays, is it? Like “International Bonobo Monkeys Fucking Day” or whatever?

Hm. A stumper. Well, let us know in the comments if you’re aware of any holidays or even traditions practiced broadly on April 1st. We’d ask Chat, but we’ve been temporarily banned for “monopolizing Bing Chat’s time.” This is going to be annoying until we figure it out…

Anyway, April it is, and that means we’re in Deutschland🇩🇪! Our show in Köln two nights ago was a sensational success, and we expect nothing less from Hamburg tonight. Over the next week we’ve got Berlin, Leipzig, and Nuremberg, then we push east to Prague, Bratislava, and Vienna, before turning our van’s wheel all the way to the left for the first time on the whole tour, and heading back through Munich, Wiesbaden, and finally Lille, where we will complete this European leg of SHOW LOBES, hopefully fully intact if somewhat bedraggled, because if you come to the end of a tour and find yourself well-rested, that means you didn’t go hard enough. It means you could have carved out an even greater spectacle, but instead you decided to rest your carving arm, and as we all know, Michelangelo did not create the David, or even any of his lesser but still very fine sculptures of seals and otters, by resting his carving arm. Indeed — so the legend goes — even when he napped, Michelangelo’s carving arm was a blur of motion, continuing to hone and polish a flipper while his mind visited corners of the globe that his own eyes never beheld, such as the public square two blocks from his studio, or the sea shore, which lay just half a kilometer from his studio.

So come on out to a show. And if you can’t make it this time, well, don’t worry: we plan on being around for a long time yet.

Some slobs.

💗&🧨