Szcz??liwy Dzie? Niezale?no?ci!

That’s how you say “Happy Independence Day” in Polish. At least, that’s how we think you say it. Nobody in New York seems to know, or care, that tonight marks the 87th anniversary of Jozef Pilsudski‘s ascension from incarcerated Brigadier General to free-standing Commander in Chief of the once and future Poland.

Between our combined bloodlines and strategic political allegiances, Misha and I consider ourselves to be at least 30% Polish, out of a possible 200%. As a result, Misha’s been on the phone with every halfway Slavic public house from Green Point to White Plains, and I’ve been scouring the internets with a ziemniak comb, all in a futile attempt to find someone outside of this band to celebrate the holiday with.

We have so far found Lisa Toff.

This is a sad state of affairs. Don’t get me wrong – we love Lisa to death and treasure every golden moment spent basking in her love light, but she does not a Mazovian diaspora make. The official explanation we’ve been getting is that the holiday went underground during the Cold War, so nobody really knows how to celebrate it. We as a band are calling bullshit on this. IT’S INDEPENDENCE DAY. YOU’RE EASTERN EUROPEANS. At the risk of perpetuating unfair ethnic stereotypes, FUCKING HAVE SOMETHING TO DRINK, AND MAYBE ENGAGE IN SOME LIGHT, GOOD-NATURED PROPERTY DAMAGE. I mean, it’s November, guys. It’s cold. You kicked out the Germans. Let’s have us a pilsner and talk ‘stache maintenance, what do you say? Maybe light a trash can on fire? I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Dobranoc,
Dilnius

We are in Middlebury, VT tonight. If I had to make a list of my 20 favorite movies of all time, Super Troopers would surely be on that list. It’s not top 5, nor is it top 10, but it is solidly among the top 20 movies I’ve ever seen in my life, in terms of pretty much everything. Not a day goes by that I don’t somehow, subliminally reference it, and the same can be said of my bandmates.

Which is my way of Segwaying into the fact that I GOT FUCKING PULLED OVER AGAIN BY THE VERMONT HIGHWAY PATROL, this time for going 38 MPH on a state highway that was apparently marked 25. Long story short, I had the Speechwriter werewithal to rip off my fake moustache before Officer Whatsisnuts had the chance to shine his Mag Lite into my eyes and fucking breathalyze me, and I ultimately got off with a warning, which should be its own reward, but JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, I’ve been behind the wheel for approximately eight hours while in Vermont this tour, and I’ve so far been pulled over twice, in paramilitary operations involving no fewer than five squad cars, and, to be perfectly honest, I’m starting to take it personally.

But that’s part of being on the road, I guess. Middlebury proper has been amazing to us – no shortage of beyond-friendly undergrads leading us from party to party and letting us sleep on their futons, as well as tacitly ravage their iTunes for energy and listening material. (I got an iPod Shuffle at the beginning of this tour and it’s been pretty much the greatest thing on Earth – every three or four days I’ve been able to reload it with albums I’ve been meaning to listen to forever – it’s pretty much the single best piece of technology ever manufactured.)

Anyways, here we are. It’s insanely late, so I’m going to call it a night. But know that we love you.

We, as a band, spend a lot of time thinking about sleep when we’re on tour. It could be argued that we spend more time thinking about it than actually doing it. It could also be argued that, for all the time and energy we put into debating what qualifies as right and wrong in the world of sleep, we have no idea what we’re talking about.

Most people are taught, at some point, that eight hours a night is “standard.” Anything less will kill you, anything more and you’re probably a communist. Misha swears that anything less than ten hours leaves him groggy and irritable, while I was once told by a very powerful man that the secret to his success was getting exactly six hours a night. It gets even more confusing when you factor in the sourceless anecdotes that, for instance, sleep deprivation doesn’t hit you until two days after, or that eight hours of drunk sleep only count as four hours of normal sleep, or that the human body was originally designed to sleep for a few hours at night and then take an after-lunch siesta, and so on.

So I did a little internet research and figured I’d share my findings.

FINDING #1: Sleep cycles last roughly 90 minutes. It varies from person to person and can change over time, but this is important to know, because it’s apparently really jarring (both physically and emotionally) to be awakened in the middle of REM sleep, which generally lasts about 20 minutes and starts one hour after falling asleep.

FINDING #2: If you want to be a famous inventor or dictator, try using the Uberman Sleep Schedule. Bear in mind, however, that this is totally insane and could possibly kill you. But you will be awake and (allegedly) functional for 22 hours out of every day.

FINDING #3: The primary function of sleep is memory upkeep and mental organization, rather than physical recovery or energy conservation. Which I thought was kind of cool.

CONCLUSION: My personal recommendation, as a semi-popular musician and amateur sleep therapist, is that you shoot for at least six hours a night, let yourself catch up on the weekends, and use a dual-setting alarm clock whenever possible. Take naps when you need them and don’t freak out if it’s 2:30am and you have to be at work by 7 – just remember that it’s better to get three hours and wake up between cycles than it is to get four hours and have an alarm clock rip you out of REM sleep.

I think.

Carpe noctum, and caveat lector.
-D