Dec. 15: Is it Wednesday

 Is it Wednesday?

Actually, it’s Tuesday.

But I know what my friend, Shawn, was thinking when he gave me this title. Shawn is a professional entertainer, completely self-employed, and his whole world has been thrown into chaos since buggabugga started nine months ago. Previously, his life was a tightly scheduled series of gigs, airplane jaunts, and conferences. Now, everyday blends into the next. It’s got to be disorienting.

Probably we’ve all experienced something called day dysphoria, where we’re so lackadaisical that we don’t even know what day it is. We get up for church and even drive to the building, only to discover that it’s Saturday (which is fine for Seventh Day Adventists.) This happens a lot when you take a sick day on Friday (which I did last week.)

It’s funny but before buggabugga started (and before I became a dad) I had this dream of being able to support myself solely as an entertainer. I’d somehow change my life to allow myself to gig around the world and write during the downtime. Recently, I read a book called The Approach, which is about trying to accomplish this very thing. It was both refreshing and depressing when the author advocated keeping a day job. The reason: PENSION!!!! Plenty of performers tell me that the gigs dry up when you hit your 60s. For some reason, people don’t want to be entertained by senior citizens unless they are in Aerosmith or the Rolling Stones.

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My day job, for the most part, prevents me from suffering from day dysphoria. That’s because I work at a newspaper and there are very specific things that happen on every day. On Mondays we put most of the pages together and cover municipal council meetings. On Tuesdays the rest of the layout takes place. Wednesday is the start of the news cycle. Thursdays I’m out of office doing my rounds. And everyone knows when Friday hits.

If I spent my life in the air, doing shows in Rio one day and Hamburg the next, I’d expect everything to melt into each other. I wouldn’t have a life punctuated by sunrises and sunsets. If I did so much time zone jumping, I might even miss the sun. I’m reminded of David Lee Roth who, around October 9 of 1954, arranged for the plane he was in to fly over the international date line around 11:59:59 so that October 9 instantly became October 11. Roth was 29 at the time and his birthday is October 10. “I planned it that way,” he said. “I never turned 30.”

That is one of my favourite stories and now, once again, Diamond Dave has made an appearance in note-a-day. I guess I should also take this note that Diamond Dave might also be in agreement with the Apostle Paul, who warned believers in the book of Colossians not to allow themselves to be ruined by philosophy. Dave kinda brought it down for the common folk by saying: “And I'd love to talk philosophy but I've gotta take a piss. Man, that philosophy runs right through ya.”

I bet David Lee Roth likes magic. His California Girls video (circa 1985) is magic. He made a generation of adolescent boys wish they were him. Me included.

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Ain’t no such thing as real magic. Closest we have is prayer. I saw a meme the other day about God and the coronavirus. It was framed to look like the pope was on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and the question was about God’s role in buggabugga. Is he (A) Unaware of it. (B) Aware but unable to stop it. (C) Aware but unwilling to stop it? (D) The cause of it.*

The hypercalvinist in me wants to say D because hypercalvinists believe that absolutely everything was preordained by the Lord God of hosts. I’ve said before that I have no idea how to reconcile God’s sovereignty with man’s free will - all I can do is make lame guesses - but I used to be enamoured with the idea of a beautiful tapestry, which represents the way the world would be if people didn’t sin and then every time we sin, we pull a thread out of that tapestry. So maybe the person who was supposed to cure cancer was aborted. Maybe the person who was supposed to blow the whistle on buggabugga got really drunk and killed himself in a car accident. You just never know.

What I do know is that I am grateful that we now have a vaccine. It’s my prayer that God has mercy on us, that we can get back to normal soon, and that my magician friends can start injecting joy into people’s lives again.

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*This is a modern rephrasing of a popular quote by the Hellenistic philosopher Epicurus, who is now in hell according to Dante’s Inferno. I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that the Inferno is also mentioned in another David Lee Roth song. To wit: “We burnt the city down here late last night. Dante's inferno meets the Price is Right. A lot like in the movies and it smelled like victory. I barely made it through with some new shoes and a few CDs.” In that same song, Roth drops this tapestry destroying bombshell: “And if you think that violence never solved a thing, I differ. It solved some crackhead dealer down on 14th street much quicker.”