Commodore Ballroom,
Nitty
Some guys are meticulously groomed to look disheveled. This quality irritates me when it’s pulled off. Plaskett grips the mic stand and the spot lights come up. The guitar player, what’s his face, stands to the side. I take a piss and miss the first song. My cell phone hasn’t received a call in two days.
A few tunes in, something isn’t right. The resounding, gritty guitars from the Thrush Hermit shows have been replaced with hand claps and spotless harmonies. I spot a pretty girl in the corner. She gets up and leaves. “That’s it,” I say, “he’s fucking this up for me.”
Later, lying on my futon, I think about how lonely Plaskett looked on stage, tall, thin and vacant. Molded by a decade on the road in Canadian bars filled with the same adoring fans night after night. I bet he can’t give this up, I think. I imagine myself sending a text message to the girl from the show. I write, “have you ever been walking down the street and seen something shiny on the sidewalk and when you look closer, you notice that it’s a coin. But when you bend over to grab the coin you realize that it was planted in wet cement when the sidewalk was poured and now it’s locked into solid concrete, like a shiny, urban fossil? If you have, you may understand the slight disappointment I felt when you left the Joel Plaskett show. Ok, but I’m not merely talking about a quarter or a dime, but a sidewalk loony.” I imagine her closing her phone and deleting the text with resolve. Time to avoid going out at night alone, she’ll write in her diary.
During the encore, I drifted into a daydream. “Boo,” I was yelling in the dream. “You’re too tall and fake-scruffy and you did something to that guitar that’s making your good songs sound like the average ones and the average ones sound intolerably average.” People laugh in the daydream, but I regret making the statement. I realize that he’s cool. Cooler than me, earnest and professional. I wake from the daydream when the overhead lights come up. I look down and there’s a loony on the floor. I pick it up. It’s a loony that I’d dropped, but I smile at my false sense of good fortune and pretend it isn’t.