A music festival is a kind of collective hangover in which people who are cooler than you compete to win a special kind of lanyard so they can get into a special tent with unlimited free Gardetto’s. The only food available to the non-lanyarded hoi polloi is expensive garbage dispensed resentfully from a shack, which is how I found myself, in 2010, sitting alone at a picnic table in the press area of the Sasquatch! Music Festival, sweatily consuming a $45 Domino’s pepperoni personal pan pizza and a Diet Pepsi and hoping nobody noticed me.
Someone was interviewing the band YACHT at the next table, and I was sort of dispassionately staring at my phone, pretending like my friends were texting me even though they weren’t because I think they were all back in the free Gardetto’s area playing VIP four-square with Santigold or something probably. I watched the woman from YACHT do her interview for a few minutes before I remembered that we’d gone to college together, where, even before experimental pop fame, she’d been an untouchably cool and talented human lanyard who was also beautiful and nice. I chewed my oily pork puck.
A little gust of wind picked up and blew my Domino’s napkin off the picnic table and onto the ground. No big deal. I leaned over, nonchalantly, to pick it up. Gotta have a napkin! Can’t be a fat lady eating pizza with red pig-grease all over my face! Unfortunately, due to my intense preoccupation with not drawing attention to myself while eating a Domino’s personal pepperoni pan pizza in public at a music festival while fat, I misjudged the flimsy plastic picnic table’s center of gravity.
When I leaned over to grab the napkin, the table leaned over too.
I fell in the dirt. The pizza fell on top of me. The Diet Pepsi tipped over and glugged out all over my dress. The table fell on top of the Pepsi on top of the pizza on top of me. The napkin fluttered away. EVERYONE LOOKED AT ME. The music journalists looked at me. The band YACHT looked at me. In an attempt at damage control, I yelled, “I’m really drunk, so it’s okay!” which wasn’t even true, but apparently it’s better to be drunk at ten in the morning than it is to be a human being who weighs something? All that anxiety about trying not to be a gross, gluttonous fat lady eating a “bad” food in public, and I wound up being the fat lady who was so excited about pizza that she threw herself to the ground and rolled around in it like a dog with a raccoon carcass. Nailed it.
Step Fourteen: Get Hired to Write a Press Release for the Band Spoon, Then Write Something So Weird and Unusable that the Band Spoon Quietly Sends You a Check and Never Speaks to You Again and Hires Someone Normal to Write a Real Press Release
Here is the actual full text that I actually e-mailed to Britt Daniel of the band Spoon:
Some years ago in the past (no one knows how many for sure), a baby was born: his mother’s pride, hearty and fat, with eyes like pearls and fists like very small fingered hams. That baby was named David Coverdale of Whitesnake. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world and many, many years later, an even better and newer baby came out. They called that one Britt Daniel of Spoon. The two would never meet.
The son of an itinerant barber-surgeon (his motto: “Oops!”) and his raven-haired bride who may or may not have been Cher (she definitely wasn’t, say “historians”), Daniel spent his formative years traversing America’s heartland, on leech duty in the back of the amputation/perm wagon. Despite mounting pressure to join the family business—“the Daniel child’s bonesaw work truly is a poem!” swooned Itinerant Barber-Surgeon’s Evening Standard Digest—Daniel heard the siren song of song-singing and fled the narrow confines of his itchy-necked, blood-spattered world.
Little is known of Daniel’s whereabouts and associations in these dark interim years (when consulted for comment, David Coverdale of Whitesnake said, “Get away from me, please”), but he emerged in 1994, saw his shadow, and formed the band Spoon, stronger and taller and more full of handsome indie rock and roll than ever before. After the great big success of 2001’s Girls Can Tell, 2002’s Kill the Moonlight, 2005’s Gimme Fiction, and 2007’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Daniel—along with Jim Eno (inventor of the bee beard), Eric Harvey (feral child success story), and Rob Pope (white male)—birthed Transference: in Daniel’s words, Spoon’s “orangest” and “most for stoners” album yet.
Asked about her son’s new record, Daniel’s mother, who is definitely “not” Cher, quipped: “Too metal!” Reached for comment on whether or not Daniel’s non-Cher mother is really qualified to judge the metalness of things, David Coverdale of Whitesnake said, “Seriously, how did you get this number?”
I am so, so sorry, the band Spoon.
Step Fifteen: Get a Job Blogging for a National Publication with Thousands and Thousands of Commenters Who Will Never Be Satisfied No Matter What You Write
At a certain point you just have to be like [jack-off motion] and do you.
Step Sixteen: Ask Pat Mitchell if She Is Marlo Thomas at a Banquet Honoring Pat Mitchell
Hollyweird Fun Fact: Pat Mitchell does not like this at all.
Step Seventeen: Break a Chair While Sitting on the Stage at a Comedy Show
I went to see my friend Hari work out some new jokes at a small black-box theater in Seattle. The ancient theater seats were too narrow for my modern butt, so I moved to an old wooden chair that had been placed on the side of the stage as overflow seating. A few minutes into Hari’s set, a loud crack echoed through the theater and I felt the chair begin to collapse under me. I jumped into a kind of emergency squat, which I nonchalantly held until the producer rushed out from backstage and replaced my chair with some sort of steel-reinforced military-grade hydraulic jack.
Step Eighteen: Admit that You Lied Earlier About How Old You Were When You Peed Your Pants in Class
Third grade. It was third grade, okay? Are you happy?
This is the only advice I can offer. Each time something like this happens, take a breath and ask yourself, honestly: Am I dead? Did I die? Is the world different? Has my soul splintered into a thousand shards and scattered to the winds? I think you’ll find, in nearly every case, that you are fine. Life rolls on. No one cares. Very few things—apart from death and crime—have real, irreversible stakes, and when something with real stakes happens, humiliation is the least of your worries.
You gather yourself up, and you pick the pepperoni out of your hair, and you say, “I’m sorry, Pat Mitchell, it was very nice to meet you,” and you live, little soldier. You go live.
When Life Gives You Lemons