Clearly I am too old to lead the gigging life. Last night I drove an hour and a half home from a poetry reading, got into bed at midnight, got out of bed at 5:30 a.m. because the boy has a cross-country meet in Presque Isle today, which is way-the-hell-up-north in Aroostook County, and then I will be performing from 5 to 8 p.m. tonight, which means I'll leave here at 2:30 and get home at 10 or later if the Presque Isle bus is pokey about getting the cross-country team back to the high school, and then Sunday, blessedly, I can sleep till whenever the cat lets me sleep but will have to get out of the house at 12:30 or so for a gig lasting from 3 to 6 p.m., which means I'll be home by 8, with just enough time to help the boy memorize 18 lines of Chaucer, and before I know it, the alarm will go off at 5:30 a.m. and it will be Monday, and I will have spent two days playing the violin with a terrible clumsy cheap bow and eating bar food at weird times of the day and kicking myself because I forgot to sing the third verse of "Powderfinger."

In case you were wondering, the structure of the previous sentence exactly reflects my state of mind.

Anyway, yesterday's poetry reading was lovely: lots of writer friends in attendance, plus afterwards we went down the street to the Wharf Tavern and listened to a band called the Boneheads and Baron and I shouted back and forth to each other about Philip Roth novels over raucous covers of Creedence songs.

Meanwhile, the real bow, the fairy-princess bow, is winging its way to Michigan, to a bow restoration specialist.