Maybe so. But you can never swing it. Even with a nap, you can't hang with the night-owls. And you're not good with crowds, either. Just a few weeks ago, your buddy Mark Larue (he was your designated mailbox mate in the English department at the University of Houston from 1987-1989, and, quite possibly, one of the funniest men alive) made one of his regular treks from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Houston to see one of his favorite bands, Camera Obscura.
Mark often travels quite far to see bands he likes. You remember him mentioning driving to Austin several times to attend concerts, and the whole concept mystifies you. For starters, you would never in a million years even drive from Houston to Austin--or San Antonio, or Galveston, or even downtown--to wait until at least 11 p.m. to stand around with a bunch of young women wearing smock-y type frocks with empire bodices that make all of them look pregnant (as quite a few seem to be chubby and proud of it) and waif-y young men wearing skinny jeans cropped and rolled slightly below the knee.
That's a big detractor for you, the standing-up-stuff. It might be a little better if you could sit down. But at the Camera Obscura show (you always consent to attending these shows with him, as he's traveled far to see them), you arrive too late to obtain a seat, so you find yourself practically curled in the fetal position in a corner behind the girl who's selling tote bags that look like they might be sold on Etsy.
And this is where you stay through the whole show. It's an okay show, you suppose. To you, the whole lot, after a while, strikes you as a tad repetitive, despite the fact that you really do like this band. Tracyanne Campbell has the voice of an angel, but the acoustics at the Meridian Studio really suck some major ass.
You suppose it's better than when he took you to the Pretenders show at the House of Blues and some insufferable ass in a white button down shirt screaming, "Play Back on the Chain Gang" doused you with his bourbon and soda.
You know you're a curmudgeon, but really, why all the standing up at these things? People are rarely dancing. When Mark took you to Radiohead, where you positively insisted on having a seat (not knowing that the tickets for the seated area would cost as much as feeding a Zambian family for a year), you sat there wondering why people didn't just sit the fuck down. Radiohead's hardly a toe-tappin', can't stand-still kinda band. Those dudes sure can play their instruments, and the acoustics at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in what should be termed Hell, Texas but is simply known as the Woodlands, are more than swell.
Why, you wonder, can't people just sit the fuck down and listen to the shit? My God, the couple in front of you that night, who were obviously deeply in love and couldn't bear the idea of not joining their massive girths together in a bold, Here we are, the manager of a Winn-Dixie and his loving head cashier havin' a night on the town gesture, simply afforded you the view of their Wall-Of-Winn-Dixie backsides, rather than that of the band.
And they just had to be smooching up a storm.
But anyway, you've never liked crowds. Once, when you were 17, your father took you and your sister to see the Rolling Stones Some Girls tour at Soldier Field in Chicago. Between the lines to get in and the wait for the Stones to come onstage, you and what seemed like a million other people waited for what must have seemed like ten hours. You and your sister and your dad actually passed a joint back and forth, although you've never figured out who it came from. After hour 8.5, a very large bearded man with a long gray ponytail in dirty overalls seated somewhere up in the bleachers behind you obviously overindulged and wound up falling on top of you and vomiting on your leg.
This could very well be the origin of your crowd fear and hatred, but you're no psychiatrist. You can't be sure.
So anyway, no crowds, and no late nights for you. You've always felt kind of bad about it. But you hit the hay at your decent hour and wake feeling just fine, so that acute sense of being a total squid temporarily melts away. Lately, though, you've made friends with someone in an earlier time zone who also happens to be a late-nighter. You'd love to chat, but even if you stayed up late, it wouldn't be late enough to accommodate this other person's schedule. Once again, you feel ridiculous and uncool.
This feeling's acute. You consider, in all seriousness, gasp!, taking a nap so you can stay up a little later. You feel compromised. Dirty, even.
But justification and redemption often come along when you most need them and least expect them, and in the oddest forms. This, for you, came in the form of one of your most favorite public personalities, Christopher Walken.
You've always been a fan of Christopher Walken, but this morning, when you read a brief bit about him in a rumpled New Yorker, you are mesmerized. This is off-topic, but you think that you would do anything to just sit around and listen to this guy. Not meet him, necessarily. You wouldn't want to hang around like some star-struck fan. But you'd love to be a fly on the wall. Everything this guy says, even in print, seems like something out of Beckett: There I was, just a couple of months old. Lying on a table. The window was open. I looked to the side and saw a fried egg on a white plate.
The man is a living work of art.
That, and an early riser. According to the article, he retires at 10 p.m. and rises at 6 a.m. Every morning. Man after your own heart. And he's cool. Christopher Walken's cool. Is anybody gonna argue that? You think not.
So, phooey to all you hipsters. You, you know, shall continue to rise with the sun, and feel no further remorse. You are a lark, after all, and not an owl.
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