Watch out for 3hree Things every Tuesday, where Riley Breckenridge,
drummer of Orange County's favorite local alt-rock band Thrice, gives
his take on life in Southern California, being an OC native and, of
course, music.
I'm lucky (and eternally grateful) to be able to travel as much as I do for work, but to be honest, I'm not much of a traveler. I'm a hermit. I love my house, I love my own toilet, I love my favorite local restaurants, and I love my bookshelf, magazine rack, and home studio/internet portal.
The rub is that I can't take all of that with me when I'm out on tour, waking up in a new city every day. Since the advent of the smartphone (an ironic name, because it's actually made me dumber and less resourceful, but that's a tome for another day) the absence of creature comforts has become a little easier to cope with. And since there's an app for everything but getting iPhone users to shut the fuck up about their new phones, I present you with the following three essential apps that have made traveling/touring a whole lot easier for me.
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1) Sit Or Squat
Those of you that are familiar with my oft feces-riddled Twitter account
and prior blogging efforts are well-aware
that I have a mild obsession with poop and it's kin. I'm realize that
this may come across as immature, given that I'm a 35-year-old man, but I
assure you that this obsession (read: my inner 12-year-old) does not
exist without good reason.
You see, on tour, I've realized (based on
independent, unprofessional studies) that roughly 23 percent of my waking hours
are centered around finding a suitable place to donate the previous
day's dining and drinking adventures to whatever lucky city's sewage
system I happen to be in. That's a hefty chunk of my day. If playing
music is priority No. 1 on tour, poopage is No. 1b.
It used to be quite a
challenge, this toilet search. I'd wake up every morning in an
unfamiliar place with fuel burning in the pipes (prairie-dogging,
having-one-on-deck, needing-to-do-some-paperwork, whatever the preferred
euphemism might be) and with load-in a few hours away, I'd be left to
fend/find for myself. Thankfully, I was introduced to Sit Or Squat on
this last tour, and it's made my morning duties far less stressful. It's
a directory of functional public toilets laid out on google maps,
complete with reviews, ratings, and tips (on how to access the restroom
and what amenities are available, not on how to conduct your business.
You're still on your own for that.) It's a life-saver and a
game-changer, like having a poopy Sherpa in your pocket.
Other options:
a)
Auto-Intoxication (aka Death By Constipation)- Currently No. 2 on the
Least Noble Ways To Perish list (that I just made up) behind Yawning To
Death.
b) “Shibagging It” (aka shitting in a trash bag)-
This is essentially a what an assertive hobo would do, and if you
(read: not a hobo) do this on a tour bus or in a van, you're headed for
your bandmates' shit list.
c) Running around town,
striding carefully, cheeks clenched, sweating, hoping and praying that
you find a public establishment that won't give you the stock, “We don't
have a restroom” line- I KNOW YOU DON'T WORK AN EIGHT HOUR SHIFT
WITHOUT GOING TO THE BATHROOM, YOU LIAR. I WILL COP A SQUAT ON THIS
COUNTER AND GROW A STINKY TAIL NEXT TO YOUR CASH REGISTER.
Serenity now…serenity now…sere-
2) Yelp
I'm
sure that most, if not all, of you are familiar with Yelp. I was
probably less familiar with it than most, because at home I tend to rely
on word-of-mouth, food blogs, and print articles to get restaurant
reviews, and only turned to Yelp on tour because I access to my usual
cache of print and online media is pretty inconsistent. The common, and
legitimate, gripe with Yelp seems to be that it's hard to get a
legitimate review because you're forced to sift through hundreds of
bullshit reviews written by people with varying levels of uselessness in
order to find anything of value (a phenomenon that was excellently laid
out in this must-read Urlesque piece entitled, 13 Useless Yelp Users, And How You Can Avoid Being One – A Field Guide.)
On the other end of the problem spectrum, if you end up in a small
town with very few Yelp users in it, you get stuck in the “3.5 Zone.” That's where every single “restaurant” in the area, from McDonalds to
Applebee's to the family owned Italian joint, has a 3.5 rating. The
problem with this is that you never really know what you're getting, but
you do kind of know that you're choosing the lesser of all evils, which
makes selecting a restaurant basically come down to choosing what color
diarrhea you'd like to have. Again, see app suggestion No. 1.
Other options:
a) TV Diner
– an app that maps out restaurants that have been featured on Throwdown
with Bobby Flay; Diner, Drive-ins, & Dives; Man vs. Food; PBS's
Sandwiches You Will Like; and PBS's A Hot Dog Program. All of which are
high-risk dining experiences and further necessitate the Sit Or Squat
app. Use at your own risk.
b) Relying on the local crew
for suggestions – “I think there's an Arby's a couple blocks away.” Beef
should never be best described as “green.” Pass.
c)
Wandering around town trying to judge a restaurant that is worthy of
your patronage by it's storefront- Wandering is a killer, because on
tour (or if you're on a business trip) you're usually on a pretty tight
schedule. In the time it takes you to wander, find, and settle on
something, you could have used Yelp, sat down, and had a quality meal in
a relaxed atmosphere. Judging a restaurant by it's looks won't cut it
either. Example: Chipotle looks like shining beacon of brushed steel,
brick, hardwood and plump burrito-ey goodness, but it'll run through you
like a pint of Drano. And Gabbi's,
just south of the Orange Circle, is virtually nondescript from the
outside, but has some of Orange County's best Mexican food on the
inside. Don't do it with books. Don't do it with restaurants.
The Scrabble aficionados I know are a bit sour on this app because while it's similar to Scrabble, it isn't actually
Scrabble. Go figure. (Apparently, the official Scrabble app is
apparently not much like real Scrabble either, and is bogged down by
freezing, unnecessary rule changes, and slow-loading pages. These are
the things that keep Scrabbologists up at night.) The rest of us,
including WIRED readers that voted it the Favorite app of 2009, love it.
I've been playing for a little over a year, and I'm still hooked. It's a
fantastic time-consumer while you're attending to the business that is
made so easy by Sit Or Squat (case in point, the number of push
notifications [“Your move with Dictionarybreath666!”] that I get once
the venues doors have opened for load-in and our crew and tourmates have
made their mad dashes towards the venues facilities) and it's easy
enough to use that you're not waiting five minutes for sign-in screens
and multiple pages to load. It's also a fantastic time-waster if you're
using public transportation, waiting for a flight to board, waiting for a
table, bored, or have no friends.
Other options:
a) Angry Birds – Who doesn't like breaking things, blowing stuff up, cartoon birds,
physics, and logic? It's the No. 1 paid app in 60 countries for a
reason. Proceed with caution, this one is a soul-sucker.
b) Reading a book – God forbid you actually feed your brain some literary goodness and exercise your imagination.
c) Socializing with living, breathing human beings – Wait, what? Real people? Can't I just use the Facetime feature on my iPhone 4?
