Epistemic humility, motherfuckers!
Museum Monday: Reflections at 67
Touring is a mindset and a way of life, you get used to the push beforehand. You embrace the sleepless worry and try to turn it into proactive problem-solving energy. You don’t solve all the problems (you cant!), you just make enough room to deal with the more meaningful ones. And you enable the magic—and hopefully joy—to come.
Tour mode is a clenched-fist stress position: waiting for the punch in the gut, arms taut and crossed in front of you, trying to deflect the meteorites / bags of shit / self-doubt / exhaustion / imposter syndrome and everything else that comes with the territory.
Then something happens at the end of a tour.
It’s as though the rubber band inside a wind-up toy finally gives out. It has perished. There is no snap left. Except the toy is you. Spent. Empty. Paradoxically emotionally full—but completely gassed out.
That is usually when the sickness comes. It’s as though my ADHD warrior body and brain have spent the whole tour saying, “Not now, motherfuckers,” to every virus floating around. Then, when it’s over I lay out a trail of Valentine’s Day rose petals leading directly to the bedroom, welcoming all of the germs inside myself for a party.
I’m just now realizing that for the last 5.5 years of the museum, my body has been in one long stress position tour mindset.
My psychic defenses. My gift shop tote-bag-stock-level alarm system. My social battery. My adrenalized sandpaper screenprint creativity. All of it has been permanently in tour mode.
It’s easy to look at the museum and track the data: founders, visitors, contributions of every kind, reviews, feelings, vibes—and the trajectory is growing exponentially.
But then there are months like this one:
Two sold-out conversations with David J. ,Twin Tribes helping us build a bridge to the newer artists coming through. A great summer with twelve interns from all over the map—literally and academically: sociology, anthropology, music, music and more music. Dave Hill booking a show a day ago that has now sold out. Steve Silver telling stories. Eric Zimmerman taking the time to send us a video remembering the filming of “Head Like a Hole.” everyone actually SHOWING UP.
It was good.
Then last Tuesday, Duff McKagan stopped by with three-fifths of Guns N’ Roses.
That was a calm, exciting and slightly surreal three and a half hours—with security outside and a frizzle of “What (TF)’s going on over there?” texts circulating around the Bridgeport neighbourhood.
And I’m finally getting to one of the points I want to make.
The museum has given me an appetite for having my preconceptions dismantled. It continually reveals the limits of what I thought I knew, and that has become one of its greatest gifts.
Ironically, for a museum situated inside an old funeral home, it is not a mausoleum for memory. It is a living, intergenerational feedback loop, with a surprise—and usually a lesson about human connectedness—waiting around every corner.
My assumptions are continually being corrected. Not painfully, but productively, by people, generations and connections I could never have anticipated.
These things all sound great Martin, but what the fuck do you actually mean?
Duff, guitarist Richard Fortus and drummer Isaac Carpenter came through the front door. Before we had even made it into the museum, just two steps into the foyer, Duff looked up and said:
“Oh, Bill!”
There is a signed photograph of Bill Rieflin and Chris Connelly hanging there.
