Luxury.

Friday night the band played a place we haven’t played in probably ten years. Bossman told me, “I think they’ve cleaned the place up a little since then.” The creepy thing about that statement is that it implies that the place, in fact, needed cleaning up. Once I got there, I pretty much decided that “cleaning up” meant replacing the broken glass in the front door and moving the stage to another side of the room. I’m not that picky, though. We got paid, and the sound on stage was actually really good. I was a bit troubled by the bottle of Listerine I saw in the milk crate that held all the microphones. This antiseptic implies that the mics, in fact, needed cleaning up. I tried to keep my mouth away from mine. Fortunately, I’ve been at this a few years, and I handled it with grace and aplomb and still sounded like a million bucks.

Like the photo of the back room? It was either the band’s back room, or a storage closet for the Listerined sound equipment. Busted and completely filthy mirror in front of me, something resembling a busted paper towel rack on the right wall, and on the left wall there were a bunch of handprints made with what was either blood or red paint. I didn’t investigate further. The floor was special as well, but I was so exhausted after the second set break that I fell asleep on it anyway, keeping my head propped up with some of the drummers soft cases.

I live the life. I do, I do.