Time to Start Being Afraid

Yeah, I think the time to start existentially fearing for my musical life has come.

My band’s next gig is a private party.  That private party just happens to be my (and Mike the Bass Player’s) 30th high school reunion.  The date in question is a little more than a month away.  I’ve known that this particular gig would be more terrifying to me than any other as my high school fears and hangups were bound to come flooding back to me and mess me right the hell up.  Fortunately that was all sort of hypothetical before.

Now that the date is getting close though… panic time.  I’m going to make an utter fool out of myself at this thing.  Notice I said I, and not we.  The band is going to be fine, it’s just the fat ass guitar player who is going to die a brutal on stage death (again, existentially not literally).  Everything that can go wrong will.  All of my gear will fail.  In over 30 years I’ve never broken a string on stage.  At this thing I am going to break them all… twice… at least.  My ears are going to stop working and I won’t be able to hear myself playing everything in the wrong key.  My fingers are going to stop working.  My central nervous system is going to stop working and I am going to stand there in front of everyone with my arms limply hanging by my side as a steady stream of drool falls from my useless face.

It’s going to be bad.  I’m going to be bad.  At graduation I won the award for being the top student in the music department.  In my yearbook I got the most musical male senior superlative.  All of my fellow classmates who remember useless shit like that are going to laugh at me and then take those awards away.  “You suck,” they will yell as they take that little music department trophy that is in a closet upstairs at my parents house (I think) away from me.  It’s going to be a nightmare that I will never wake up from.

Damn, I need to start practicing.