Bonjour Everyone,
David McKerracher (“Dave”) here. It’s 3:25 AM in Paris, but 24 hours ago I was in the U.S. and habituated to a timezone where it is currently 7:25 PM.
I am not experiencing “jet lag,” which Google defines as “extreme tiredness and other physical effects felt by a person after a long flight across different time zones.”
No, I’m feeling great, actually. I just can’t sleep! I went to bed at something like 10:30 PM and then woke up feeling fully rested at 2 AM.
I probably caught a lot of naps between Boise to Seattle and Seattle to NYC as Nance and I were shuttled along our journey. Besides an oddly cold night flight over the Atlantic, the flights were about as comfortable and smooth as can be. Nonetheless, by the time we arrived on the East Coast we were feeling pretty haggard.
The worst thing that happened so far was undoubtedly at the JFK airport. We found out that our camera gear crate was 30 pounds over their weight limit. We were on a short layover and needed to get through international TSA still, and the luggage store downstairs was closed at that time (10 PM) so we were in a pretty stressful situation where we had to reorganize everything.
Nance had to throw away a pair of his shoes, we transferred a bunch of clothes into the gear case, and transferred a bunch of gear from that case into our carry ons… which then became too heavy to be carry ons and had to be checked. That was not cheap.
If it wasn’t for an amazing anonymous patron who is making so much of this European tour possible, gifting us an emergency $480+ to us that night, then we would have been screwed. We wouldn’t have our gear with us right now! (If you don’t have that kind of money to help us out, but would still like to be a small patron of Theory Underground, consider making a pledge at the TU Patreon!)
Normally we would be traveling really light, but in this case the gear includes camcorders, cameras, power strips, computers, laptops, lenses, microphones, and all the kinds of things needed to make possible our hybrid events on our book tour.
About the book tour. It’s a lot more like a band tour than a book tour. Kinda feels like a new genre is emerging from all this. I’ve organized all of the tour stops with people who just love what Theory Underground is doing and want us to come to their city. The content is not just the books, but is a multi-media artistic and intellectual DIY enterprise.
Here is the most recent version of the poster in case you haven’t seen it:
So many aspects of this tour are still coming together. When I first got to our hostel yesterday I pretty much went straight to bed while Nance explored on his own. I got a few hours of decent sleep, but it was far from solid.
My dreams were full of the things I need to do:
The book orders I still need to put in for some of the stops on tour.
Getting back to
on the recent course proposal info he sent me.TOUR STUFF
Communicating with organizers, hosts, guides, volunteers, and participants at all the different stops on this tour. I’m behind on emails and texts with a lot of people, so thank you everyone for your patience.
I actually just got this one completed: The QR Code on the American Idiots Tour Posters was actually on a “free trial” because the website that generated it was deceptive in how it pitched its services (to continue using what I thought was a free QR code would have required at minimum $30 per month for the next three months!!!). So just now I had to generate a new QR code using a different website, and send that updated poster out to everyone.
The role construction and allocation for patrons, students, and subscribers in the Discord server. We did this call-in session about the changes to the subscription benefits and access for different tiers seven days ago, but I have yet to get the changes implemented. I feel bad about that because it has led to some confusion for some of my subscribers, and it is also just bad business, as I’m sure the old information is misleading and less appealing for potential new subscribers. The issue is that it’s a huge task and doing it right requires window shopping and comparing all these different setups and “bots” to help set things up on the back end. That’s actually what I was just doing before I decided to write this update. I’m hoping that by taking a moment to send out this update it will buy me a little more time to do the setup correctly.
TU Book Publishing:
Scheduling serial posts to publish on this Substack from the Underground Theory volume.
Proofing Mikey’s book, making its cover, and getting it setup on the website so people can make pre-orders.
I’ve got a bunch of articles that are in draft mode that I would like to finish… so that I don’t have to keep thinking about them!
TU Video Publishing:
I have an amazing backlog of videos that need to be uploaded and scheduled to publish over the next month — mostly these are the stand-alone episode versions of interviews, conversations, and converdictions that took place during epic marathon streams this year.
I need to make an updated American Idiots Tour promo that I can add into videos that are getting published while we’re on tour.
Those are the things I was dreaming about, which is why my sleep was decent but not entirely solid. I’ll be working at them all throughout the tour, but hopefully I make some significant progress on the most demanding tasks soon.
All of that and I would also like to enjoy myself while here.
“Enjoying myself” of course includes the Lacanian sense this term now bears, i.e. feeling intensely (what often gets misunderstood as “stress”) about all the things I’m supposed to be doing while productively procrastinating these obligations against one another—as I'm doing right now. But it will also hopefully include some genuine solitude and solicitude, i.e. quality time spent with myself wandering, and likewise quality time just being with others on this tour.
Immediately, I’m most stoked to meet
in real life and hang out in Paris with him and Nance - starting today! Stay tuned for more updates - but don’t expect them, because I’ll probably be too busy doing the stuff I was just writing about.Au revoir!
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