On The Road Again

I’ve been on the road a lot lately on my Tambourine Adventures, auditioning, and I am coming to the conclusion that life as we know it in the Northeast is not the norm. Not that life in the Northeast this winter has been anything “normal.” What with all the snow I’m considering expanding my house with an igloo, and giving Maverick that “man cave” he’s always wanted, but I’m afraid it will increase my property taxes. Consequently I do have a better understanding of why most Alaskans are alcoholics.

But first let me update you on my tambourining, as you are probably wondering if I’ve gotten any job offers. Well, not yet, but I can tell I’m getting close! For starters, I got hip to the fact that some of the bands I muscled my way on stage with were putting me in front of microphones that were turned off, or “dead” as we say in the music business. I am not positive, but I think they have may been doing that on purpose. As you know I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, so now that I’m hip to that trick, I make sure to sing into the same mike as the lead guitarist. But I know I’m really going places because a drummer last weekend handed me his tambourine to use, which was way better than mine. Clearly he recognized my skills.

I don’t know how many of you, my loyal readers, have ever driven into, and out of different time zones. Let me tell you, it’s very confusing. Sure, if you are a fancy pants and fly everywhere, the pilot is usually the one doing the math and telling you how and when to set your watch. But math has never been my forte, which is probably surprising to you given my expertise keeping time with my instrument. This I cannot explain. Anyway,  the navigation system in my car is great about telling me what time I am supposed to arrive at my destination (it would be better if it would take into account the number of times I have to stop to pee, or reward myself with a Milky Way Dark) but it doesn’t factor in the time zone and that is almost as annoying as wondering for hours on end when will I pass into Central Time and will there be a sign welcoming me to Central Time? and when you finally do pass into Central Time (yes there is a sign, but no welcome) and then the road goes around a big curve and you slip back into Eastern Time, and then curves again and back to Central (no sign this time) what happens to those few minutes that you were back and forth in between?? And if you stopped the car at the sign and got out and had a picnic there along the highway for an hour or more, what time would it be when you finished? You would think an hour difference is no big deal, but I’m serious as a heart attack when I tell you that you will need a calculator with algorithms to figure out how many hours you have actually been driving.  The problem is compounded if someone calls you from the Mountain or Pacific Time Zone and starts asking you questions like, “What time did you leave?” and “What time will you get there?” and they want the answers relative to their time zone, and are we in Standard or Daylight Savings time??  Unless you are some sort of math genius. Which begs the question, why you are wasting your time reading my blog when you should be figuring out how to fix our economy?

I finally got over the stress of doing all that math and was settling into Central Time when I was thrown for another loop. It was almost noon on a Friday when my entourage and I headed out for lunch. We rolled into a Chinese restaurant at precisely five minutes before noon, only to be handed a beeper by the hostess and told there would be at least a 20 minute wait. WTF? A peek around the curtain into the dining room confirmed that the place was packed to the gills with people already into their meals. Could this be some sort of Chinese food brunch trend that I hadn’t been aware of?? or were my math skills even worse than I thought and I was still a whole hour behind? or did I take a detour into Bizarro World? Perhaps I had been too sober for too long….So I said to myself, outloud, “D. Parker, why is everyone already halfway done with their lunch at 11:55?” And the bitchy hostess with the beepers turned around and said, with attitude, “Well, it IS noon!” To which I responded, “Unless your name is D. Parker, I wasn’t talking to you!” So there.

Nonetheless, folks were filing out of the restaurant with their doggie bags by 12:15pm. I had to ask everyone I met from that point on, if I was crazy or if it was weird to eat lunch before noon. I mean where I come from, the only reason to go to a restaurant before noon is if the bar opens at 11:30. But from what I’ve been told, it’s only me and THE REST OF THE EASTERN SEABOARD that’s crazy because everyone in middle America thinks it’s normal to eat lunch at 11am. Maybe because the food is so lousy they need more time to digest it. Or maybe they are just losers. Or both.

Something else that’s really sticking in my craw is that some of the less expensive hotels don’t have bathrobes.  They think we won’t notice because they load up the bathroom with a thousand hand towels, but it’s really difficult to try and wrap yourself in hand towels, especially if you are applying body lotion which you have better brought from home because the crap they have in the hotels with no robes is the consistency of milk.  Furthermore they don’t all have pay per view, but they do have the porn channel, which is strange enough, but not as strange as the eggs they serve at the free continental breakfast which are formed to resemble a yellow, nylon wallet.  And why on earth is the yogurt always strawberry banana, and never just strawberry or here’s an idea, PLAIN, so you can add your own banana if you want it?  even though the bananas they have are bruised, and they don’t have any strawberries at all.

I guess life on the road can be hard, and once I make it really big I’m going to have one of those fancy tour buses with room to transport my robe and my tambourine and a driver who will do all the necessary math for the time zone conversions, and who will keep me in the dark about what time it is when I’m eating lunch.  And now if you will please excuse me, it’s already 1pm Eastern Standard Time, and somewhere there’s a tuna sandwich with my name on it.