Blog #16: Probably my last tour diary entry (Patreon)

As you've probably heard, I've cancelled tonight's show in San Diego for health reasons. I'm sorry if you had tickets and were looking forward to the show, you will be refunded soon. The illness my crew and I have been battling since arriving on the west coast has finally gotten on top of me enough where I'm running a fever and simply cannot perform. This tour has been too dense, I've had no time to rest, and doing a two-hour show that involves so much physicality every night is not how you recover from sickness. I won't be touring so hard ever again, it's just not healthy and it's just not sustainable. Based on the trajectory of my crewmates' illnesses, I should be well enough to perform in Tucson for the most attended show of my career thus far, but there's a chance I might have to skip the meet & greet. I'll let you know if that ends up being the case. If you don't hear from me on that, all is going according to the original plan.

Last night about halfway through the show the fever started to kick in, and by the time the show was over I was aching all over and it was an emergency to get to bed. I knew fairly quickly that I was going to need to cancel the next night's show, but if I'm going to be perfectly honest with you, I would've known it even if I hadn't been too physically unwell to do it. Even if my throat wasn't on fire, my head wasn't too full of snot to breathe, and my body wasn't screaming with aches and chills - San Diego was going to have to be cancelled. The health I'm looking out for is mental as well.

If you were at last night's show in Anaheim, I hope you still were able to have a nice time despite well, yknow. I won't go into detail, there are too many details, and I don't want to be going on and on talking about every incident. Last night was all incidents, there was hardly a moment of non-incident, so nothing in particular is worth getting into. I can't even tell you a complete list of examples because it was so constant and varied in nature and they were so on top of each other that I couldn't even tell what was happening or what they were saying for much of it, I just know it was insulting, distracting, and disrespectful to their fellow fans. I am SO sorry to everyone whose experience was ruined by the person next to them last night. I hope you were still able to enjoy it; the show was for you, not them.

By the time it was clear that I was not going to be able to power through and do my show though, I was too far into the story to just abandon ship, run a backup setlist and call it early without disappointing everyone and it being super weird. Next time that's what I'll do though, even if it's awkward. I'm not going to push myself through illness to do two hours of physically involved standup and belting over piano if the show isn't being wrecked, I'll just play for an hour and twenty and go home.

And look, that's hardly a fate worse than death for me, but it's comparatively boring for both me and my audience, this is the most work I've ever put into a set, and audiences who have gotten to actually see it have made it clear they feel it's the best application of my skill set I've managed, so I hope I get to perform it for real tomorrow night.

If you are coming to a future show, please be respectful of your fellow audience members. There were too many to kick out last night, it was at least a few dozen people, but as the announcement before the show says, venue staff and my crew do kick people out for disruptive behavior. If a member of your group starts behaving badly, please help the rest of us by giving them a nudge. If you can't bring yourself to behave respectfully, please do not attend.

To be perfectly honest, I would much rather not perform at all than perform for audiences like that, so I'm really hoping this sort of thing doesn't continue, because if it does I just don't have all that much interest in touring.

I'm going to rest up so that hopefully I'm not too feverish and congested to perform decently tomorrow.

Maybe I'll check back in when the tour is over. Take care guys.

Thanks,

Will

p.s. random aside - its weird to have a joke kill and then have audience members cheering saying things that show they thought I was making the opposite point. Like what the heck bro how did the joke even make you laugh when you didn't get it? bonkers lol