Sleepless In Montana

I had about four hours of potential sleep between returning from the gig and my wake up call this morning. I realized approximately 0% of that potential. The upside, as I sit in the Bozeman airport, is that I’ll probably sleep through the flights, reducing somewhat the drudgery of air travel. The downside is pretty much everything else.

There were a few reasons I couldn’t get to sleep. Of course my general tendency to get my AM’s and PM’s mixed up, mentioned briefly last blog, factors in. The fact that it was a gazillion degrees in the hotel room. That I was tremendously worried about missing my flight. That I had a nap in the van en route to Bozeman in the afternoon. But by far the biggest factor was that I got deep into the ‘bad thoughts’ part of my brain.

The starting point was reflecting on the gig. It was a private gig, and on the surface it was okay. Good food and drink, we were well paid, and the crowd was reasonably intent on partying. Should have been a cake walk, but for some reason it kind of soured within the band, and we actually had cross words with each other. Which is very uncharacteristic, but at the same time probably unavoidable from time to time. Realistically, it’s a shocker it doesn’t happen much more often. But what really got me, in reflecting on the gig, was the vague sense that at some point I had called out “I’ve Just Seen A Face” by The Beatles. That recollection brought to mind two questions: Why on earth would I have had us play that song? And why couldn’t I really remember playing it?

I had consumed some wine, but I didn’t think that much. I’m not a heavy drinker, tho, so I’m quite easily affected. Still, to not be able to recall that (and other things) just doesn’t make sense to me. I have this overall feeling that I didn’t even play the gig, that I only observed parts of it, and that I was similarly an observer, not a player, in the heated band conversations. It’s a very weird feeling, fuelled undoubtedly in part by my overtired state, but I don’t think fully so. In any event, I really don’t like it. In fact, I find it sickening.

Feeling sickened, then, my mind naturally produced a litany of concerns to correlate with how I was feeling. The usual suspects, you know? A (presumably natural) series of concerns regarding my pending fatherhood. Worries over the ridiculous and seemingly never-ending odyssey of hardship my parents have endured the past year or so. And worries about my ability to continue to earn a decent living.

I would, theoretically, recommend either of my current vocations to anyone (with the obvious and necessary caveat that there is some reason to expect some degree of profitably). I need to proactively remind myself of that, tho, cause I sometimes have occasion to think that in spite of the freedoms and exhilirations I get from my jobs, I’d be better off delivering pizzas. Or being a laywer. Or a mall security guard. Or, like Michael Scott opines in the office, living on a beach off a large inheritance.