We’ve always been like this.

That’s progress, I suppose.

After a shower, I told Dr. Wiles that he was out of shampoo.

“Thanks for the reminder,” he replied with a laugh as he rubbed his hairless head, “I knew I was forgetting something. You wanna maybe blow up something or something? I need more smoke around here I guess.”

I planned on making scans of each of the musician’s hands; I thought that would make an interesting grid. I wasn’t sure what I’d do when I came to a vocalist; I thought Claudia would probably let me scan her tongue. I didn’t worry about it too much; I wasn’t looking very far ahead. Although I rarely find planning to be a good investment of time, in this case my failure to prepare for the scanning sessions scuttled the endeavor.

When I showed up backstage, all the musicians were eating fried chicken. Fried chicken! Since when did jazz musicians start eating fried chicken?! As it turned out, I didn’t have worry about getting greasy handprints on my scanner’s spotless glass platen. That’s because the scanner refused to function. I downloaded new software, but the scanner was as dead as something that’s really, really dead. And that was that.

I’m disappointed, but not very. I liked the scan I did of my hand, but five-fingered hands probably wouldn’t be as interesting. And besides, I’ll probably get invited back to another jazz festival here, so I can do my scanning project later. Just like the hundreds of other pieces that are purportedly “in progress.”

“I think the buffet’s been up in the green room for the last hour,” I replied.

“No, the meat,” she insisted. “I need to know where to set up the drums.”

“Oh, I see,” I said. “I think everyone’s supposed to be back in the next fifteen minutes or so.”

I didn’t want to expose my ignorance of the jazz world, so I didn’t ask whether “the meat” referred to all performers or just the drummers.

I was reminded of their despicable presence in the middle of the night, when the sound of the distant neighbors’ banging wind chimes woke me from a pleasant slumber. My first impulse was to destroy the annoying chimes, but that didn’t seem like the right solution. And that’s when the lard muse paid a visit. After I coated the obnoxious chimes in an entire kilogram of lard, I enjoyed a quiet, peaceful sleep.

“You call that a massage?” Lori asked.

“I guess so,” Eric mumbled.

“It didn’t even last two minutes,” Lori complained. “Who taught you how to give crap massages?”

“Uh, no one,” Eric admitted. “I just figured out how to rub a woman’s shoulders until she takes off her shirt.”

“That’s pathetic,” Lori replied.

As Lori walked out of the room, Eric protested that a lot of guys don’t even try to give massages. His lame argument fell on absent ears.

I love useless statistics, the uselesser the better.