4 A.M....Yikes.  Late night. Early call. Alarm rings. Once. Twice. Three times. You finally get up. Get up and stumble over a beer bottle and a few mystery lumps. You don’t even care that the mystery lumps have bad breath and snore. You take off your clothes that you just slept in. You lay them across the  “ergonomic executive desk chair” to keep them from getting wrinkled. The irony of that action totally eludes you. You shuffle off, bleary eyed, to the bathroom, and start to take a leak…and then realize it’s your closet. You force stop after only a few drops have squirted out. Man, that hurts! You wince and make a weird noise, but finally make it to the toilet. Your pee comes out in two streams, one on either side of the toilet…* NOTE: Don’t worry! That happens sometimes, especially if you fall asleep with the TV remote smashed between your legs.

Too painful to restart again, so you kind of lean to the left so that the bigger stream shoots in the toilet and the smaller one dribbles mostly into the garbage can. You finish, shake it off, wipe up the floor a little bit, and head to the shower.  You look at the high tech, modern, shower handle, and you’re not sure what to do next. You get confused because, at home, you have two old fashion shower handles, one for “hot” and one for “cold.” Most of the hotels you’ve stayed in for the last 3 months have shower faucets designed by a biophysical, nuclear, physicist… Or maybe a video engineer...Anyway there are so many colors, arrows, dots, lines and inscriptions that you began to wonder if somehow, after spending way too much time in the bar last night, you ended up in some kind of alternate reality, like a mystery movie. Yeah. Like The Da Vinci Code or something. Yeah. You half expect Da Vinci Code Tom Hanks to get up off the lumpy floor and ask  “Hey, do you think my fake black hair looks like a bunch of black Sharpies exploded all over it?” But, what the heck, it’s 4: 06 A.M... and all this faucet confusion…it’s WAY to complicated! Just give me one “righty tighty,” and one “lefty loosey” handle thank you very much! …So, after you burn a 3-inch hole in the top of your head, you decide it’s maybe not so bad, because it will give you a good place to stash the TV remote… If you ever find it again.

…Show is finally over. No bar tonight. No sirree. You’re not totally stupid. Besides, everything in moderation, you know? You get back to your room and finally find the remote, stuck on the underside of your crotch pillow. You wipe the crud off. You hope it’s just some kind of cheese. And, as you’re wiping, you realize you don’t know what most of those freakin’ buttons do. Kind of like a light board you get stuck with because your producer wants to use what’s already available at the venue. NOTE: Come on, be honest, who uses all those buttons anyway? You know as well as I do, that once you find out a few dazzling tricks, that’s pretty much what you use all the time. You never have enough time to program anything new anyway, right?  One time, you made the mistake of letting some good-looking festival chick get to you. She asked you “What does this button do?” and instead of being honest and telling her that you didn’t have a clue. And that you never even noticed that button before because it’s usually hidden behind your beer cup… (Hey, she did have shiny red hair and most of her 6 nose rings were in the same nostril.)… Instead you made a little lighting joke, “It doesn’t do anything yet. That is a very special spare button that will only be used once ALL LED FIXTURES can produce a decent white light that doesn’t look like melted purple crayons.” BUT, like I said, she was really good looking and you wanted to show off a teeny-weeny little bit. Plus, you were too proud to admit that you were kind of an idiot and really only knew enough just to get by. So you said, “Here. Look. I’ll show you.”  You punched it and watched as ALL your lights go into some kind of strobing, frenetic, iris chase, while the talent is just sitting at a piano, singing a quiet, soulful ballad. STUPID MACROS!!! What kind of moron makes a macro like that anyway without at least a Post-it Note warning?!! The festival producer runs up to you flapping his arms like a bird and calling you a douche bag. He may be flapping like a bird, but he certainly doesn’t fly away. Oh, no. He just kind of hovers over you for the entire rest of the show and occasionally lets his poop fall out on you. The good-looking chick giggles as she clips in another rose ring, and quickly slinks over to the sound guy. She tries to ask him a question, but she trips over his spittoon** NOTE: When I say “spittoon,” all I really mean is an old sliced up Dr. Pepper bottle that the sound guy occasionally spits some brown slime in.

The slime, or spit, or whatever, spills all over the place and then she falls right onto his lap. Of course, the sound guy never even wakes up. You’re briefly concerned that he might even be dead. “Too bad,” you think.  ... So anyway, back in your hotel room with the incomprehensible shower faucets, you stare at the TV remote and suddenly understand that your life is good. Because, deep down, you realize you really LOVE having a bunch of useless buttons around. Yes, even the dangerous ones! Yes, in a very strange way, it somehow makes you feel powerful. In fact, it makes you glad to be alive. Yes! ALIVE! You can’t contain yourself. You start to sing, “Feels Like the First Time. ” You stop. You decide you’ve had enough moderation for one day. You carefully place the TV remote in a very special place that you will never remember, and rush out to the bar with everybody else.