Heaven is Close When You're Around

1. A blog post which delicately talks about my place in the world during the COVID-19 pandemic.

2. A post that makes light of the situation and provides some levity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I'll be real folks, I just don't know what to say. Everything is crazy and I don't even know all of the craziest things.

Being 6 days into my social distancing, I can at least say that I'm handling it well. I'm lucky to have Rebecca, a big dumb dog, and a small dumb cat around to keep me sane. In a past life, I would have put pressure on myself to write a lot each day, to finish all the songs that are lying around, to write an entire novel, but now I feel okay in not accomplishing that.

Maybe it's because I have school to (somewhat) guide me during this process. As much as all routine and schedule has fallen out of the world, I still have some things I need to stick to. I still need to research and write and do whatever my teaching has turned into now.

I think I'm starting to return to the state of mind where I'm not so intimidated all the time. It's so easy in academia to get caught up in what you think everyone else is doing and how you aren't matching that. Last week a colleague asked about my writing and I showed him the Wordpress and told him about IMU and he was flabbergasted. Little ego boosts like that are a nice reminder that I have in fact written things and also that it's okay that I don't devote every second of my downtime to it.

Some new music for you: Lonesome Valley by Mundy's Bay.



The first show I went to in Montreal was to see Supercrush and Mundy's Bay in a very cool venue called La Sottorena during August. It was under a Spanish restaurant and the layout felt a lot like the basement shows that I went to in Ontario. Maybe every basement show looks the same all over the world. That's a nice thought, right?

I was so surprised to see how packed the show was. There wasn't even enough room in the place to fit everyone in and that seemed entirely due to Mundy's Bay. A huge group of people were there to specifically watch them and there was an immediate sense of community around the performance. They were also really good! It's a mix of post-punk, shoegaze, and synthpop, and though that combination of sounds has recently become popular, they are the ideal iteration of it. Imagine if Turnover had a bigger sound with cooler influences and better lyrics. Bam.

Are they my new hometown favourites? Seems that way.