Jaimee Eat World

Lots of clouds out today. Windy, too.

So I Reached Out

I’ve had a bit of a challenging year and I feel like I say that too often lately given how this one has been so far, but it is what it is.

Through the ups and downs of the first few months of 2026 I’ve been doing a lot of deep thinking about where to take myself and I do mean that quite literally. I knew when I came back from B.C with Dakota that our time was limited, but nothing could prepare me for how difficult that loss continues to be for me.

I’ve had to think real hard about what my life looks like without him and what changes or steps I’d need to take to get myself to a better place; mentally, physically, and spiritually.

I kind of stuck it out in certain industries for a while because they gave me the flexibility I wanted to be able to spend as much time with him as possible knowing that it wasn’t necessarily the best approach financially or if it was even what I really wanted to stick with more long-term. I’ve always gone back and fourth about what roles I want to play, partially because of battling a certain degree of imposter syndrome and partially because I just have a lot of interest in learning new things – I don’t like to feel confined to one area, like I used to be.

While grieving Dakota I decided it was still best if I pursued my dream of moving west even though the obstacles that come with that continue to mount. To put myself in the best position to have success with that, I decided to continue my freelance tech work, but to come at it now much stronger. The type of live events work I do is quite seasonal and summer is where all the work comes in, so I got myself ready to take on as much of it as possible.

I’m no slouch – I work very hard, I just don’t always see much reward from my efforts.

So I did another thing – I started advocating again for higher pay and positions that would be better for some sort of life balance and to achieve my end-goal. At this stage in my life frankly it pisses me off when I find out that some dude who barely knows anything about working in live events as a tech is getting paid more than me and I had enough testimony that proved that was exactly what was happening again.

Fortunately the conversations actually seemed to turn to my favour, so I was feeling much better about my plan and the potential of this summer’s work.

I Felt It All Inside

My schedule began to fill up quickly with barely any days off in sight. Up until last Tuesday, I was booked solid, sometimes back-to-back and with a lot of long days. No problem, it’s nothing I haven’t done before, so I took it in stride day-by-day. It felt good to be busy and it helped keep my mind off my grief.

On the Monday I worked a very cool call which had me helping out with a bands tour prep. They were coming to town and would be doing a few days rehearsal before they fully hit the road. This is the type of call I haven’t had a ton of opportunity to jump on until now and it really reinvigorated my love of this side of the industry. When I’m on other tech jobs, say for corporate events, I’m happy enough to do it and see the value in the work, but it’s just not as exciting and fulfilling to me as working with original bands always has been.

I had a great day. It was long and I was busy, but I was totally on my game and left the day excited for when I’d return on Wednesday for more of the same. As I drove home I thought about how I knew if I could just figure out how to get on a more regular touring tech gig or similar band work, I’d be plenty happy to stay in the industry and work towards becoming an even better tech – this wasn’t something I was nearly as stoked about in a lot of the other work I’ve been doing and has had me looking into big career changes. Slowly in the background I have been working on getting my security license because I thought maybe I’d pivot into something more secure and less dangerous like 911 dispatching. I love to help people, but I could never work in medicine which is one of the only other big industried really actively employing people these days in Canada.

But suddenly I wasn’t so sure that made sense. I’ve spent so much of my life working in tech so that’s what I’m most confident in and I’ve always been apprehensive about abandoning it completely – it’s sort of who I am. Maybe I’d finally found the right little niche I had been looking for after all. I mean, I always sort of suspected I’d love to be on tour and have talked about it a lot, but now I got a certain taste of it and knew. It felt right.

I got home around 9PM and pretty much went straight to bed, excited to think more about all this later in the week, but first I needed to be rested for another busy day.

By 9:45AM Tuesday morning, things changed.

Say Anything You Will

I don’t think I have any sort of physic powers or anything, but I’d been uneasy over the last few weeks with a bit of a premonition.

I had this terrible feeling for a while that either I or someone I worked with was going to suffer a bad accident at work.

I would say the majority of the people I work with are mostly pretty safe, but I’d be lying if I said I’d never see them act unsafely. And for whatever reason, just as things were ramping up for the season, I found myself more outwardly vocal that everyone needed to chill out and slow down on site. There were small things happening and bad attitudes surfacing that were affecting how I felt on site and I just knew if it kept up, it wouldn’t be good for any of us.

It turns out that the person it would be the worst for was me.

I got to work for 9AM that day and by 9:30AM the first of our two trucks arrived. Nothing new to see here, I’ve offloaded more trucks than I can count at this point and I consider myself pretty adept at the process.

But then some of those bad attitudes started to surface from just a couple and I could feel the energy shift in the crew. Suddenly people were rushing, moving too quickly, getting unnecessarily frustrated and little mistakes started to happen.

A dolly being pushed too quickly down the first ramp nearly tumbled but I and the driver grabbed it – one wheel wasn’t in line with the ramp when someone hastily went to grab it. A close call, but one that aggravated me enough to again exclaim that everyone needed to slow down before someone got hurt. My opinion was largely waved off – everything was under control, they said.

Then someone got their finger clipped between a ladder – an unpleasant injury that took them away from the truck for a few minutes while they nursed it, but not too bad otherwise.

And then the second truck came and that horrible feeling I had just wouldn’t quit.

It shouldn’t have happened but it did. A dolly of stage decks was rolled onto the gate lift and the lift safeties were only applied on the side I was standing. The hands holding the dolly let go and there was no one on the other side to brace it from rolling.

And so it rolled off the lift, to my side, smacking me firmly in the head. The impact was so hard my head started to ring and it pushed me down and into a railing beside me. That impact was hard enough to knock my jaw out of place and as the blood started pooling in my mouth, I thought I’d at minimum lost a tooth. Fortuantely, I didn’t lose consciousness at all and the ringing dissipated quickly.

Because the dolly fell from a lifted gate and hit the railing, it knocked me over but the entire dolly wasn’t able to land completely on top of me – a lucky break, I think, because I’m not sure how my body would have taken that impact if it had. Stage decks are heavy. And they’re heavier when they’re strapped together on a dolly.

I sort of fell half down and immediately got back up again and walked straight into the venue to find someone to take me to the hospital. You don’t have to tell me twice when I need to see a doctor – I know.

As I left, I yelled at the crew to slow down. I was pissed and hadn’t even realized how bad my own injury was yet.

Multiple ice packs, a CT scan and over 7 hours in the hospital later I now knew I had severely fractured my jaw in multiple places and needed to see a specialist. Fortunately they were able to refer me to a surgeon at Mount Sinai for the next afternoon where I learned I didn’t actually lose a tooth. “Are you sure? I can feel a huge gap?” (I didn’t want to look inside my own mouth at this point). “No, all your teeth are accounted for, but the fracture is pulling your jaw so far that when your mouth isn’t firmly closed, it creates a gap.” Fucking, ew, but I guess this is better news than losing a tooth on top of everything?

They froze my mouth and then added some wire in to help with that. It’s awkward and uncomfortable and the bit of wire that hangs in front keeps scraping the inside of my cheek, but it makes me feel slightly better than I did before with nothing holding it at all. Every day I wake up happy that it’s still holding strong.

I have still a few days to go now before my surgery which is scheduled for Friday afternoon and I can’t do much but continue to contemplate now, what life looks like after jaw surgery.

There has always been risk in the type of work I do, but accidents like this have a way of forcing you to rethink things.

What I can tell you though, is it has reinforced the idea that I need to try to move out west. For myself, because I’ve always wanted to, and because you just never know what is going to come at you next. There are a lot of places I have been hoping and planning to visit and I think I’m more than ready to allow myself the opportunity to visit them now even if it doesn’t feel like “the best time,” or if my finances are not in the state I hoped they’d be in by the time I do. Being out west makes some of those places easier to travel to.

The longer I stay in Toronto, it feels like things just kinda keep getting worse in more ways than they’re able to get better and I’m a little tired of waiting for circumstances to fall in my favour. I can’t be sure they were ever going to or ever will.

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Please Say No was orginally released with the Damage album, but there have been some minor changes to the recording and the mix.

One of my fears when this accident happened is how it’ll affect my ability to sing, because I’m not sure how or when I’ll get full-range of motion back in my jaw and I kinda need that.

When I pulled open this mix early this morning, there was at least one part of the vocal I wanted to correct so I whipped out my knockoff SM7 and tried to give it a go since this is a pretty tame song to sing, I wanted to see if I could pull it off.

I was elated when I really liked the corrected phrase, but the SM7 sounds way darker than my old AT2020 that this was originally recorded on, so I pulled that out instead to see if I could get away with a new recorded part without re-recording the whole track.

It seemed okay, but because I was so stoked I could still sort of sing and liked the new tone in my voice, I opted to re-do the whole track.

And then I cleaned up the mix a little bit and presented it to you as you hear it now. The guitars are the same as before, I just gave them a nicer reverb.

Here’s the old recording for comparison if you’re into that sort of thing: