September 27, 2006 "100% of Nothing"

09/27/2006 Arizona State University - Phoenix, AZ
Other bands: none

I've probably said it before. Arizona is hot. Even in late September.

We rolled into the quad area in the middle of the lunch hour. I could feel the sun attacking my forehead skin like a blowdryer on plastic wrap. It was almost dizzying and I tried not to move much at first on account of wearing too many clothes.

We found a small half-built stage in front of what looked like an administration building, facing a student center commons area. A medium-sized rock inched its way down my esophagus and nestled in my stomach when I realized we'd be selling ourselves to a roaming organism of text-occupied nineteen-year-olds in the middle of their workday. We'd be a thirty-second novelty at best. Cannon fodder for restless and uncreative hecklers at worst.

The stage was fortunately tented when all was said and done. We had a single contact from the university, a girl who we rarely saw. She either worked for the school radio station or the programming board. The stagehands were anonymous and unspoken. We set up right alongside the credit card hawkers and poster sellers.

So we swallowed hard and cranked the amps and squinted the sun out of our eyes. I was becoming much more the hardened entertainer, saying all the introductory lines and pleases and thank yous, sometimes in earnest, sometimes without a shred of sincerity depending on how I gauged the crowd. Stage manners were to be employed no matter what the cost.

An older man came up to the side of the stage and did an old man dance to our set. One part Ian Curtis, one part Freedom Rock. And when one person comes up close amid a sparse horseshoe of onlookers like this man did, it's hard to not think you're being made fun of. So I jumped on his back from the stage.

I rode him around the front like a horse until he dropped me on the concrete. Turns out he just enjoyed the music.

No hard feelings.