...trouble it was.

Put my "Smells Like Teen Spirit" rendition in the books. It's done.

As a veteran of the stage, I'm quite familiar with the finer points of live performance. A showman should be in a mode of constant assessment and adjustment during an act-- reading and reacting. I usually know my own physical limits for a given set within the first three minutes. If I'm only feeling 85%, I might skip that triple drop fill at the end of the bridge, dig? If I'm feeling 95+, I just might try something brand new, something nasty. Read and react.

Well, I was running at about 18% tonight-- that was clear from the giddy. I'd been working nonstop from 7:15 to 5:30 without a break, unless you call typing a break. I felt like Peter Gabriel trying to play a show at the AbabaDome after doing 12 hours of humanitarian work out in the desert. Or Pete Doherty trying to play a show, period.

There's the cosmic irony here... I was performing karaoke completely sober for maybe the fifth time in my life, and I felt like a Bowery souse. I sang the entire second verse lying on the floor. I finished the song plane crash-style ("searching for the tarmac"), with no reported casualties. Call me the Sully of song.

I'm getting too old for this silly shit.