Fighting The Fog

Thursday August 14th, 2008 - Lake Villa, IL

Today I paid the price of paying back the favor I paid back yesterday. Payback’s a bitch. We decided to leave right after the show last night to get that long boring drive over with rather than go to sleep and get up later than expected and waste the whole day driving.

On paper that sounds like a good plan but getting behind the wheel is another story. I’ve been making drives like this my whole life and it has come to a point where I don’t care if I ever make another one. This one is especially boring because there aren’t any highlights to look forward to along the way. The stretch from Duluth to Eau Claire is a desolate run.

There isn’t anything thrilling after that either and by the time we hit Eau Claire I wished I had made some different choices in life. I don’t mind paying back a booker but it would be a lot better if I either got more money for it or had some more gigs to do in the region.

Driving up for one night in Duluth isn’t worth my while anymore and today proved it. It was a long drive that was made even longer by a stretch of thick nasty fog that started just after Madison and lasted until we got home. I had to slow WAY down and it was egghells and pins and needles the whole way trying to pass semis going even slower. What a mess.

It reminded me so much of where my life is now. I had just driven about 800 miles total and done a show and had been up going on 24 hours and THEN the fog patch hit. I was as tired as humanly possible and that made everything harder and the whole day feel wasted.

I dropped J.T. Newton off at his house and then went to get some breakfast at the Red School House because I was too tired to sleep. I was fatigued beyond belief and felt like I had jet lag. To make it even worse the waitress cutie I have the hots for wasn’t working.

Then the guy who was ended up cooking because the cook was on break and he burned my breakfast beyond recognition. It was horrible but I didn’t feel like complaining so I ate it and shut up. Then I went home and laid on my bed and stared at the ceiling for a minute and the next thing I knew I was 5:30 in the afternoon. I’d wasted the whole day anyway.

This is not what I need to be doing right now. I’m glad I could pay Chuck back but now I need to pay ME back for all the sacrifices I’ve made throughout my life to get where I’m at today. I’ve done good and bad and smart and stupid things and all of them added up are where I am today. There’s a limited amount of days in anyone’s life and mine are waning.

I feel like I’m a total bust out and haven’t accomplished a damn thing in life. I’ve made a ton of mistakes and am trying to recover from them but it sure isn’t easy. Driving a long way for low pay in fog is not what I envisioned I’d be doing all these years into comedy.

Something’s missing from my mix and I wish I could nail it down and find it and get on the path I did envision. I want to do Comedy Central specials and work full houses in nice venues for crazy money and then I’ll give most of it to worthy causes. Right now I’m one.