Theatrical Muse Reboot - #48 - Describe the best 24 hours you ever had.
I feel like there is a certain amount of redundancy to this. I was asked not too long ago to describe my concept of a perfect evening, and I suppose since it was more or less a recounting of actual events, I could very well just go back to the previous journal and copy all of those little words and thoughts over here and call it a day--fastest I'd ever get to seven hundred and fifty words, let me assure you!--but that feels a bit like cheating even to me. I suppose part of this exercise is to keep the old creative machine lumbering ungainly in a forward direction, so if I'm going to take that opportunity for what it is worth I think it means I need to actually take the opportunity instead of phoning it in. I've made a living out of sort of vomiting my thoughts up in musical format for others to listen to, so I really shouldn't balk so hard at doing the same thing on paper. Even if no one reads it, I guess I don't really care. That isn't the point, at the end of the day.
Let's see. What would I call the best day I've ever had? We're going to go casting back a pretty far way, here, kids, so bear with me. Do me a favor, even, and imagine a fancy special effect and that tell-tale wobbly fog at the edges of your vision which always means you're in the process of a flashback on television shows.
I was seventeen, or maybe just past eighteen at the time. I had Changed a few months ago and while I felt like I was starting to get a hang of this whole werewolf thing--I wasn't scared any more, I hardly ever experienced involuntary shifting--it was all still so new to me that the experience was exciting and wondrous rather than so mundane that I hardly give it any thought like it's become now. My sleep schedule was completely shot to hell because not only was I constantly kept up by the fact that I could be a wolf and go smell everything in the world and hear a mouse's heartbeat, but because Anomaly had just pressed Modern Cannibalism in some indie studio and we were busting our asses trying to get it supported. I think I woke up in a van, which honestly doesn't sound like it's the start to anyone's best day ever, but there you go.
When you're crawling all over Southern California and Nevada trying to get people to believe that you have some talent, you basically live in the van and spend as little money as possible renting hotel rooms long enough to rotate the band through the shower so you don't get manky. In our case that also took shifts with one of us standing around looking bedraggled and put-upon in wolf form while one of the others hosed us down. You cut corners where you have to. So anyway, here I am, all elbows and knees and dredlocks and clutching my little shower kit against my chest as we're filing into the hotel room to take a couple hours' breather and scrub down with steel wool to get the road funk smell off, and Tim comes bursting into the room. Let me tell you when Tim comes into a room it is always impressive, but Tim coming into a room at speed basically makes you dive for cover. So after we all crawled back out from beneath the bed and someone cleaned up the puddle of wee on the floor, Tim let us all know exactly why he was so excited.
While we'd been driving all night in a goddamn Van to get to Fresno or where-ever we were, Tim'd been making calls. And that was the day that he announced to us two things. One, he'd gotten us a gig as the opening band for the tour of a major--I mean MAJOR--headliner's North American tour, and if we did well enough they might take us along with for the international gigs, and two, because we'd gotten the gig, he was giving us all a small cash advance. 'Small' was relative then and he handed each of us something like fifteen hundred dollars and we all felt like fucking millionaires. Which, I guess, is ironic looking back on it.
I honestly don't remember most of the rest of the day. I think it was most of it spent in triumphant howling, the hunting of stray cats, the hasty washing of teenaged bodies in whatever form so that we could pile back INTO the van and get on the road as soon after our gig that night as possible so that we could get to the right place and time for the tour. The only other thing I remember with significant clarity is that this was also the first time I had sushi since we all decided we were going to go out and celebrate. I guess two great loves of mine that really started taking off at the same time. My music career, and toro. Hah!