2002-12-05 -

Hey God, Where's My Steel Cage Match?

Ugh. I was ass-tired all day today, and tomorrow is not shaping up to be a whole lot better. How do I always end up so far behind on sleep?

It wouldn't be so bad if my morning attempts to sleep in hadn't been cruelly mocked by fate. I was supposed to take my car in for service at 8:30am. Getting in from the Peter Gabriel show after 1am made it clear that no early AM activity would be practical. I got up at 8, phoned the dealership, and cancelled the appointment. I reset my alarm for 11am and went back to bed.

Then I got woken up by an automated phone-calling sales machine. And then the UPS guy came to deliver a package from Amazon. And then I got paged. And so forth. A nice three-hour nap turned into a discordant series of tossings, turnings, and stumblings. Sheesh.

The show was really amazing, though. I've never seen a performer do so much on stage. I go to a Rush show and all I want is for them to play my favorite songs and play them well. I love Rush enough that just hearing the music live does it for me. With Gabriel I don't have that much affection for the material, but he more than made up for that. Bouncing around inside a huge inflatable ball, walking around the set while upside-down and suspended from a tether, riding a bicycle... I stopped trying to guess what would happen next. After seeing it all, I understood the high ticket prices completely. All that stuff had to cost him serious coin to move from city to city, set up, and take down. I imagine that the need to rearrange during the show also increases his bill for the stage hands quite a bit.

The only downside, for me, was the first opening act, the Blind Boys of Alabama. After their second or third song, one of them told us that they "didn't come all the way to Michigan from Alabama just to find Jesus. We brought him with us!" I immediately flipped him the bird, and silently wondered why they didn't just roll the old fucker on stage with them. I despise people who talk to me about their Christianity, and I despise them about a hundred times more when they do it at an event I paid $85 to attend.

If they ever establish a community where religion is socially discouraged, I might just move there.

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