MtH #22 Alternate Reality
The Passage
It’s like a separate universe. Ten or eleven times a year I get on our airplane de mois in Toronto, wedge myself into a cramped nook formed by the seat, my backpack and the wall of the jet and promptly fall asleep. I wake up sometimes and realize, after a puzzled moment or two, that I’m in a metal capsule going more than 400 miles per hour at an altitude of six or seven miles above sea level and suddenly every iota of my intuition screams “what the f**k are you doing?”
Then, generally, I just go back to sleep until I’m on the ground in The Other World.
The Other World
The thump of landing gear hitting tarmac is my wakeup call. I open my backpack and start digging. Passport, hotel itinerary, ……
Where’s my freakin’ GPS ???…… I hallucinate it sitting strategically on the little table by my front door so as to be extremely difficult to overlook…… and then overlooked. Thankfully, seventeen times out of twenty, it only takes a total dumping of the contents of my bag on the rental car floor to find it. As for those other three times? That’s what Best Buy is for.
Customs and Immigration. Do Not Get Off The Plane. Ignore this directive and risk being shot with a tranquilizer dart, electrocuted with a taser and roughly probed below the belt by the marijuana dog. The customs officials come out to the plane, ask a few questions, invite us into the office, look at our passports, sign a few papers and we’re in. Quick! Jump in the rental cars. We’re running out of time.
Check in to the hotel. Ninety minutes, tops, to do the Inn-code check list. A few examples:
Has yesterday’s guest left anything behind e.g. stale smoke? BO? Worse?
Has yesterday’s guest left?
Will the mold in the AC wall unit spawn a two week migraine?
The small dark objects in the bed sheets, do they move?
Do the drinking glasses appear to have been rinsed in the toilet?
Does ten seconds of running the shower take five minutes to drain?
Did someone drink the $4.00 bottle of Evian and replace it with tap water?
Time to go to the gig. Where’s my freakin’ GPS ???
Arrive at 3:30. I have half an hour to force the keyboards to work. A complicated confusion of wires and pedals and modules and computers, every night is a crap shoot with the odds thankfully stacked slightly in my favour that I’ll squeak through another show.
The Deli Strut
I’m lucky today. I have five minutes to make a sandwich from our delicious selection of “stuff I don’t eat”.
When I was younger I didn’t care. But I started figuring that just as a human heart has only so many successful pumps of sodium laden blood substitute, so too there must be a limit to how many long-dead, smoked, pickled and genetically altered animals we ingest before our children get gills.
Next…….The Matinee
For those of us who sit and play, Barry, Carter and myself (although Carter does get up and dance from time to time), the pre show “show” aka the sound check and affectionally the Matinee, the 90 minutes from 4 until 5:30 is at once: a back stiffener, sphincter puckerer and sleep inducer.
Speaking of sphincters, now is as good a time as any to explain the image at the top of this post.
An Open Letter To The Scum Bags Who Steal My Stuff
The cover picture for this post is Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s drawing of an asshole. I imagine this to be an appropriate photo ID for you. Leave my stuff alone. Get your own truck, keyboards and electronic drum pads. So far, I’m down about six grand. I want it back.
Next……….Dinner